Sleepless Nights Over Backup Woes
For many years, I’ve used hard drives stored onsite at my house and then backed them up to additional drives kept offsite at a family member’s place. But as our digital footprint has grown, this approach has become a nightmare. [1]
The size of our backups keeps ballooning as we take more photos, videos, and create more documents. While some of this can be backed up to the cloud, I end up with bits of backup data scattered everywhere – iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, you name it. [1] I decided a while back to let iCloud handle the backup for our phones, but I prefer to keep all our computer data in one place, as iCloud can get expensive, and they have a 2TB limit per account. [1]
Keeping everything in one place means I have to keep upgrading to bigger and bigger hard drives every few years. And it’s not just one drive – I like to have a backup of the backup! [1] Back in the day, I could back everything up onto a 500GB drive, but those days are long gone. This is partly because our digital camera sensors keep getting bigger, so the files take up more space. And with five of us in the household, all creating content, we now have around 16TB of files across our six active computers (soon to be seven when our youngest starts high school). [1]
Another issue is that every few years, one of the hard drives fails on me. So I’m not just buying new ones because they’re not big enough, but also to replace the corrupted ones. It’s all become such a mess! [1] As a non-technical person, setting up a proper backup system was taking a lot of time, and I was constantly juggling hard drives to make sure they were big enough and then trying to manage backing up the backups and taking them over to my family’s house. The anxiety was real – I’d wake up in the night worrying that all our precious photos and data would be lost if we had a fire or a crucial drive broke down. [1]
Enter the Cloud Backup Solution
I’d been wondering for a while whether a cloud backup solution might be the answer, so I decided to test out Backblaze. [1] Every review I read said they were simple to use, had a free trial, and best of all, were cheap at just $7 a month with unlimited data. Sounds good to me! [1]
The process was so easy – you literally just install an app on your computer, give it permission to access your files, and before you know it, it’s already backing everything up. You can tell it not to back up certain parts of your computer if you like, but there’s no limit to how much you can back up for that $7 per computer fee, even if your device is packed with data. [1]
The backup upload was pretty quick for us, considering our internet speed isn’t super fast. My first computer, with 1.5TB of data, uploaded in just 24 hours. The app self-throttles if you’re using your computer for other things, so I didn’t really notice any slowdown. [1] Since then, I’ve noticed it updates continuously as needed.
In terms of restoring files, there are a few options. You can log into your Backblaze account and see all your files and folders, just as they appear on your hard drive. If you just need a single file, you can download it. For larger restores, you can download small to medium-sized folders as a zip file, or as a last resort, they can send you everything on a hard drive. [1]
My Backup Approach Going Forward
I’m not going to back up all of our computers to Backblaze, as $7 per computer will add up. Instead, I’m going to focus on backing up my two computers, as they contain all our family photos and my important work files. [1] I’ll most likely keep backing up my wife and younger kids’ computers to local hard drives, but I’ll probably also back up my eldest’s computer to Backblaze, as he has a lot of data on there too. In time, I may bring everything into the cloud as hard drives continue to fail – we’ll see! [1]
If you’re losing sleep over your data backup situation, like I was, I highly recommend giving Backblaze a try. They have a 15-day free trial, so you can test it out and see if it’s a good fit for your needs. [1] For the last few weeks, I haven’t had a single night where I’ve woken up worried about our files – that alone is worth the $7 per month!
