Keep your photos safe with Backblaze online backup
Image by blmurch
One of the things that bothers me about digital photography is that it’s so easy to lose your photos. Of course, even with paper photographs a fire or theft can be catastrophic, but it seems to me that it’s much more likely that a hard drive will crash, or a file will be corrupted, losing your precious digital media. I have, in the past suffered from hard drive failures due to electrical shorts, and my own stupidity! So, what do we do about that? Well, we can’t cure the stupidity, so we’ll just have to make it harder for me to lose my files.
I decided to adopt a “belt and braces” approach to ensuring my files are kept safe, keeping copies of my pictures on an external hard drive and also keeping a backup online.
Backblaze is an online backup tool that automatically backs your files up to Backblaze’s servers whenever you have an Internet connection. There’s a great peace of mind to knowing that my files are stored in an altogether different location from my computer. Even better, I can get to them from any Internet-enabled computer. I’m always wary of security when storing my files online, but Backblaze encrypts your files on your computer before sending them to the server. Quite nice to know nothing’s being transmitted in an unsecured format.
$5 per month or $50 per year isn’t a bad price either when you consider that there’s unlimited storage space to accommodate everything you have on that hard disc. Restore options are to download the files you lost via the Web, have Backblaze burn a DVD ($99) or have them send you a USB hard disc with all our files on it ($189). If I’m honest, the only restore option I plan to use is the web download… because it’s included in the original subscription price 
What I like is that Backblaze just kind of sits there constantly backing files up (assuming you use continuous mode). I have literally hundreds of gigabytes of files to backup, as I’m using it for more than just my photos, and I’m impressed that I’m given as much storage space as I need. That much data does take a very long time to upload, but that’s more an issue with my connection speed than anything else. If I had more bandwidth I could unleash Backblaze to do the backups much more quickly. Instead, I throttle it back a little and just leave it in the background while it uploads my files without interfering with whatever else I’m doing in any way.
You might be thinking that this all seems like overkill when I could just go with that external hard drive or, if I were feeling particularly techy, install a RAID array in my computer but Backblaze just seems simpler and, in the event of fire or theft of my computer, safer!
Backblaze is available for Windows and Mac. Try out the free trial and see what you think.
Backblaze links are affiliate links and will generate income for DSLR Newb if you choose to take out a subscription.
If you enjoyed reading this why not buy me a coffee?Comments (3)
hey man, thanks for the tip.
right now i’m backing up all my photos into an external HDD with norton ghost.
i agree with you that 50 per year isnt expensive for what you get. but what about the upload speed? how fast are u getting?
I have my connection turned down so that it doesn’t interfere with other traffic, but I’m getting a constant upload speed of 10kb/s. When I turn it up full I get around 30-40kb/s.
I’m not sure if Backblaze actually support higher upload speeds than that. If you have an amazingly fast connection it might be worth trying out the trial and see how it goes. I’m not angling for commission there, either, as that only happens if you choose to remain with them after the trial.
Edit: I should add that my connection has a slower upload speed than download! I’m not struggling along with a terrible connection
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