Backblaze is part of a great backup solution

In my opinion there are three types of file on your computer

• Files you want easy access to and don’t want to lose
• Files you don’t want to lose but rarely need
• Files you never need but your computer does

For files you want easy access to and don’t want to lose I would recommend Dropbox, it serves the purpose of having your files locally in an easy to find place and backing them up.

For files you never need but your computer does I would recommend Time Machine (in the case of Macs) this is a full system backup that is controlled by the Mac OS.

But that leaves files that you don’t necessarily want to lose but you don’t really want to have to dig around a full system backup to get back should you lose them.

Backblaze

This is where Backblaze comes in.

To give you the blurb from their website;

Designed to be easy to use, there is no need to pick folders and files. All your data gets backed up securely. Your computer is going to love it.

You pay $5 a month and install a small program that you can configure telling it what you don’t want backed up (for example, I didn’t want my Dropbox folder backed up, it seemed excessive) and off it goes.

That is literally it – it chugs away in the background, careful not to use up too much bandwidth and backs up your machine continually. I have a backup running as I write this, likely for some images I downloaded about 20 minutes ago.

I have had to use it in anger

Unfortunately I recently had to buy a new Macbook Pro, my last one gave up the ghost just a few weeks ago.

At the time I wasn’t concerned with Time Machine backups (I should have been) but I did have both Backblaze and Dropbox so I was easily able to grab the files I needed super quick.

(side note: if it wasn't for my friend Nick recommending Backblaze a few weeks previous I would have been in trouble!)

Backblaze even has the option to ship out your data on a hard drive if that is easier for you, I believe this is a paid offering but if you have gigabytes upon gigabytes of data it would make a lot of sense.

To sum up

I am sure there are other solutions out there and I must confess I haven’t done any rigorous testing between different backup solutions but I don’t feel I need to – I have found Backblaze and it is awesome!

If you don’t back up your computer remotely you really should, it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong.

Disclaimer – I have used my affiliate code, but in fairness if you use it you get a free month!