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Tag Archives: technology
3 months free Backblaze again
Well, well. Backblaze are offering 3 months free if you sign up before December 31st, again. I first heard of this offer in 2013 when I published a post about in March that year.
Backblaze is a cloud backup company that have a neat app that runs on your computer and backs up everything on it to encrypted storage. If you have external drives, as long as they’re plugged into your machine, Backblaze will happily keep all of it safe.
You get your normal free month to test it and figure out if it will work for you. If you sign up, you get 2 months more for FREE! And, best of all (for me), I get 3 months free too for referring you. Yay!
Do I recommend Backblaze for backing up your PC or Mac? Why yes, I do. I’ve been paying them since 2013. I have over 3TB of photos backed up there and with 30 days of revisions I can go back and restore anything I find missing or corrupted. You can increase that 30 days to 1 year, but I’m fine with 30 days.
How much is it? I went with the 2-year subscription. It’s $130 for 2 years, which works out at less than $6 a month. A bargain, if I ever saw it.
Anyway, sign up to Backblaze through this link, and you’ll get an extra 2 months free added to your subscription if you pay them money. You don’t need to pay them money immediately. You still get a free trial of a month to test it out.
I know, I know, you’re not going to do it. You’re not worried about your computer dying, are you? I would be a nervous wreck if I didn’t have backups of my photos, videos, and other documents. One little accident, an old computer dying, or ransomware, and it’s all gone. I’d lie awake at night worrying about my work if that was me. But that’s just me. 🙂
3 months free Backblaze cloud backup!
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.