How to Back Up Odoo to Google Drive, OneDrive, or S3

Storing Odoo backups on the same server — or even on a second disk in the same rack — is better than nothing, but only barely. A server fire, a datacenter power failure, or a ransomware attack that encrypts everything on the machine will take both your Odoo instance and your backups at the same time.

Cloud storage solves the offsite requirement cheaply. A 5 GB Odoo backup stored on Google Drive costs effectively nothing. The same backup retained for 90 days with 30 daily copies is still under $2/month on S3 Glacier.

Any cloud storage provider supported by rclone can be used as an Odoo backup destination. rclone is an open-source command-line tool that speaks the API of nearly every major cloud provider and can transfer files over a dozen different protocols.

The most commonly used destinations:

Google Drive — Free up to 15 GB across all Google services. Ideal for small Odoo instances with daily backups under 1 GB. Authentication is via OAuth; rclone handles the token exchange. The main limitation is that Drive throttles uploads over 750 GB/day.

Microsoft OneDrive — 5 GB free, with Microsoft 365 plans offering 1 TB per user. Good fit for organizations already in the Microsoft ecosystem. OAuth authentication via rclone.

Amazon S3 — No free tier for storage (only 12 months free tier during initial signup). At $0.023/GB/month for S3 Standard and $0.004/GB/month for S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 is cost-effective at scale. S3 supports lifecycle rules to automatically move older backups to cheaper storage tiers.

Backblaze B2 — $0.006/GB/month, with 10 GB free. S3-compatible API, so existing S3-aware tooling works. No egress fees when downloading to Cloudflare Workers. The best price-per-GB option for most small deployments.

Dropbox — 2 GB free. Widely known but storage is expensive compared to S3 and Backblaze. Fine for small databases.

SFTP — For organizations with strict data residency requirements. Connect to any server you control (NAS, another VPS, a dedicated backup server). Slower than cloud APIs for large files but keeps data entirely within your infrastructure.

rclone is installed on the Odoo server (the same server running the agent) and configured with remote definitions stored in rclone.conf. Each remote is a named entry that specifies the provider, credentials, and any provider-specific options.

When a backup runs:
1. pg_dump creates a compressed .dump file
2. The filestore directory is tarred and compressed
3. rclone copy uploads both files to the configured remote path
4. rclone deletes old files on the remote that exceed the configured retention count

rclone transfers are resumable, checksum-verified, and can use multi-part uploads for large files. If a transfer fails partway through, rclone retries from where it left off rather than starting over.

More backups is not always better — at some point you are paying for storage you will never use in a real incident. A practical retention policy for most Odoo deployments:

• 7 daily — covers the past week; catches most "someone made a mistake yesterday" scenarios
• 4 weekly — keeps one backup per week for the past month
• 12 monthly — keeps one backup per month for the past year

This gives you 23 restore points while keeping storage costs reasonable. On Backblaze B2, 23 daily 2 GB backups = about 46 GB = $0.28/month.

Per-destination retention is important when you use multiple destinations — you might keep 7 days on Google Drive (fast recovery) and 90 days on Backblaze B2 (long-term, cheap).

ServerChest handles the entire rclone setup from a web interface. No command line needed:

1. Go to the server's Destinations tab
2. Click Add Destination and choose your provider (Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, Backblaze, Dropbox, SFTP, or any rclone backend)
3. For OAuth providers (Google, Microsoft, Dropbox): click Authorize and follow the in-browser flow. Paste the token back when prompted.
4. For key-based providers (S3, Backblaze, SFTP): enter credentials in a form — no rclone.conf editing
5. Click Test Connection to verify the destination is reachable and you have write permission before saving
6. Configure retention (daily, weekly, monthly) per destination
7. Enable the destination and it activates on the next backup run

Each backup shows per-destination success/failure in the history table, and you get alerted immediately if any destination fails.