Anyone using a computer has to think about backup solutions.  If you aren’t backing up your work – preferably through an automated system that doesn’t require you to remember to do it – then you’re a fool asking for disaster. 😉
Some time ago, I purchased a 2TB external hard drive to back up my PC at home. After doing some shopping, I chose the Duo Pro Drive from Fabrik and it gave me some peace of mind to know that if my primary hard drive failed, I wouldn’t lose everything.
They also offered an offsite backup option for an additional monthly fee, and though I was tempted, the price tag seemed a little hefty and I chose to pass on the offer, but not having a reliable offsite back-up solution has been nagging at my conscience. My external HD will be great if the hard drive in my PC crashes and burns, but what if my house catches on fire? Or a power surge fries both my PC and my external HD?
This morning I caught up on some blog reading and a link from Cory Ondrejka’s collapsing geography blog caught my eye. He mentioned Backblaze, a service offering unlimited offsite backup for $5 a month.
One of my concerns about using an offsite backup solution is security of my data – not that I have top sekret stuff to protect, really, but I’m sure there’s plenty of personally identifying data and other things I’d not like to have escape into the ether, either. ;)  Backblaze addresses that with a mix of public/private and symmetric key encryption:
Read their full explanation in the blog post here.
I think I’m going to give this service a try and see how it goes. $5 a month seems like a very small price to pay for the kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing you’re covered in the event of a data disaster.
Do you use an offsite backup system? Any other suggestions or tips?
Tags: backblaze, backups, external HD, offsite backup, PC maintenance
As I mentioned on Twitter, Backblaze is a good online backup service. It is one of the easiest and hassle free solutions out there. I recommend it regularly to my clients that need a system that just works. For many of them it is the first time they have ever done a backup and they can’t believe how simple it is.
I use Egnyte and think its a great solution as well. Have you seen their solution?
I looked at Egnyte but it was pricier than Backblaze and had a storage limit. One of the things I liked about Backblaze is that it backs up everything by default instead of me having to pick through and select what to back up. I was always worried I was forgetting to include something important in directory hidden somewhere. Instead, with Backblaze, I have to opt out what I don’t want backed up, and for me that’s much easier way to go about it. 🙂