Anyone using Backblaze to backup their files? Opinions?

[Bob_B]

I want to add cloud backup to my backup plan, and have been looking at the various options offered. From my initial assessment, it appears many reviewers consider Backblaze to be one of the better cloud backup choices. Their price seems fair, and their user interface seems simple enough yet gets the job done.

I haven't heard what other users (especially photographers) have to say, so I'm asking: Do you like it? Any faults to be aware of?

Thanks, Bob

[digitaldog]

Been using it for about two years after CrashPlan upp'ed their pricing. No complaints.

[Joe Towner]

Use it, install it for clients, works great. It's just a question if you want more than 30 day retention.

-Joe

[Bob_B]

Thanks to both of you. Backblaze it is.

[francois]

Same here, no real problem…

[jtmiller]

I have the 4 PCs I'm responsible for using BackBlaze and for little more I chose the 1 year retention option for all.

One of the PCs has over 4T bytes of Lightroom libraries among its contents backed up with BackBlaze. That took a month to initialize but works very well now for the increments that occur daily.

jim

[Bob_B]

francois and jtmiller: Thanks for your advice. I just subscribed, and started the backup of my 1.5 TBs of data. Installation was certainly simple. I like that.

[Dinarius]

I like the price and the product.

What I don't like is the regular (too regular!) warning emails informing me that I haven't backed up my drive in 21 days, when I know I've done so far more recently than that.

I received one of those emails this morning, but I had the external HD (which is the one I backup from to Backblaze) running on Friday, three days ago. Now, I don't open the software each time and make it backup, because it's meant to run automatically in the background, correct?

I wrote to them about this a while back and they asked me to forward my log folder from within the software folder, which I did. I can't remember what they had me do then, but they said all should be well now. Well, it isn't.

My account is such that my backup would be deleted if I don't backup at least once every 30 days.

Anyone else have this problem?

Thanks.

D.

[digitaldog]

I don't have that problem on Mac and there should be a preference to control email notifications.

[Dinarius]

Andrew,

Thanks.

Maybe it is some automated preference thing, rather than them not registering my occasional updates at their end.

I only turn on that drive a few times per month, which may also affect things.

That said, I don't recall them asking me to change settings.

D.

[digitaldog]

Maybe it is some automated preference thing, rather than them not registering my occasional updates at their end.

Nope, not for me:

[hubell]

I have been keeping an offsite bootable clone of my Mac hard drive and offsite mirrored copies of my two external hard drives that contains my image files (12 TB), using SuperDuper to create these backups. I do this once every month or so. It's not all that efficient, obviously, but I do like the idea of having a fully bootable clone of my hard drive with the system software and all of my applications on it. My understanding is that Backblaze only backs up data, not the system software or the apps on your computer's HD. It does not  create a bootable clone of your HD. If you rely upon Backblaze for your offsite backup, and your computer and local backup are stolen or destroyed in a fire, how easy is it to get back and running without a bootable clone of your HD? I recall that it was not easy recreating my email inbox with thousands of emails using Time Machine.

[digitaldog]

No, it isn't a bootable backup. So you do want one too ideally. But you can boot from an install (or make a CD), then just use Migration Assistant and you'll mostly be back in business.