Argh, I just handed over $95 for 2 years worth of Backblaze cloud backup and now they’re offering 3 months free if you sign up through this link before March 31st! It’s to celebrate World Backup Day, something I’m all in favour of since backups saved the day in 2008 when an external drive died on me.
BTW, both those Backblaze links are affiliate links but I’m a happy customer and I’m currently backing up over 700GB of data to the cloud. 681GB of that is 13 years worth of photos! My upstream bandwidth is horrendous but I still managed to upload 50GB over the last 20 days. At this rate it’ll be a few months before everything is uploaded but the backup hasn’t really impacted on my day-to-day work. Websites and videos still download and display promptly which surprised me. Uploading anything from here usually makes everything else crawl. I told the backup client I wanted faster backups too!
It’s not all sunshine and roses though. The client has an exclusion list of directories so it’s easy to exclude directories you don’t want backed up. Sensibly, it doesn’t backup “Program Files” or other system directories by default. However, I’d rather have an include list because on this machine I really only care about my photos, some documents and my Thunderbird mail directory and I know where they live. It’s a small quibble and probably one I’ll soon forgive when my machine goes belly up and I’m desperately looking for a secure cert or the settings for some obscure program!
Curious about where your data lives when it’s in the cloud? That’s a Backblaze Pod there, and it has a raw capacity of 135TB but this post goes into a lot of detail about it and how it’s made. This slightly tongue in cheek post then explains why you don’t want to do this at home!
Further on the subject of backups, you should really listen to this episode of The Naked Scientists podcast. This interview with Leo Enticknap, University of Leeds deals with backups but also file formats that scares me. I hope the Canon CR2 raw format is durable enough that it can be read in a few decades, or I may consider converting those files to DNG (which is probably just as likely to be unreadable in the far future TBH).
Try Backblaze, they have a 15 day free trial (or if you’re reading this before March 31st, use this link to get 3 months free) where you can upload data and perform restores to see how well it works. It’s a reasonable price for peace of mind and convenience. My photo archive currently resides in 3 drives on 2 separate computers (using rsync, Samba, Synkron and cronjobs to sync daily) and that won’t change but having an offsite backup like this gives me some confidence in case some local disaster should happen!
So, sorry for the affiliate links but Backblaze is a great service and I hope I’ve made you at least consider duplicating your important files somewhere before it’s too late.
Great price and compares favourably with a lot of other solutions. Do you know how long a restore will take; the Backblaze website talks about “requesting a restore” which suggests it is hours rather than minutes?
If you need to restore your full 700Gbytes (that’s a lot of photographs btw!) does that come back as one enormous zip file?
I tried restoring a couple of small files. After clicking the checkboxes on the right files and submitting the form it told me they were preparing the restore. A few minutes later I got an email saying “The files you selected for restore are ready” including a link to download them. They were in a zip file so I presume larger restores will produce larger zip files.
If I’m restoring lots of files I’ll do them in bursts. The cloud backup is more of an insurance that I hope I’ll never have to use. It’s not online storage and they make that clear in their docs. For example, if you backup an external drive connected to your PC and remove the drive, backblaze will presume you deleted the files and will delete their backups of those files after 30 days. I saw some complaints about this on forums but it’s backup, not storage they do.
This Article was mentioned on odd.blog