Category: Data Backup

All posts in this category provide information on data backup, including services and helpful advice on protecting your files.

Cloud Storage Providers in Race to Make Their Products PRISM-proof

Although its finer details were only uncovered earlier this year, anxiety over a surveillance program initiated by the National Security Agency (NSA) has grown significantly among companies who rely on having a significant online presence. PRISM, which was a key arm of an anti-terror operation run by former President George W. Bush back in 2007, was designed to collect data covertly.

Initially, organisations suspected to have links to terrorist organisations were among those targeted by PRISM, although its scope rather controversially spread to companies large and small. Those with files stored online were most likely to fear for the safety and security of their documents, as they could have been seen by NSA employees, leaving them to wonder what steps to take next.

(more…)

December 3, 2013
How to Backup Your Files for Years to Come

It is amazing how fast life can go by sometimes. I was recently looking at some of my digital photos and realized that I have over 28,000 digital photos saved since 2002. That was the year I bought my first digital camera. Back then I didn’t realize how many I would actually accumulate, but after starting a family since that time, the number of photos has grown exponentially.

Photos aren’t something that I can recreate, which means that if I lose one, it is lost forever. If you are like me and have kids, losing photos is probably something you hope will never happen – because you can’t retake the picture. As I was going through my photos I am always glad that I have a good backup process in place that allows me to enjoy the same photos 11 years after they were taken. Having a backup process is the reason that I know I can view these photos 11 years into the future and beyond.

(more…)

October 22, 2013
How to Simplify Your Backup Process

If you used computers for any length of time, chances are that you have experienced a computer crash. If you were lucky, you were only faced with the hassle of attempting to get your computer up and running. However, in far too many cases, computer crashes result in partial or total data loss.

Backing up your essential files and programs has always been wise, but in past decades the process was cumbersome, slow and expensive. These days, there is little excuse not to back up your computer files. In many cases the backup process runs in the background, allowing you to continue to use your computer while protecting your data against loss. Depending on your needs and your budget, you also have several data backup options.

(more…)

August 26, 2013
Top 4 Cloud Storage Providers

Anyone who is willing to protect their files, as well as, data from any type of computer hardware or software crash really needs to sign up with a cloud storage provider. This is mainly because of the fact that with a small amount of files, one can get an absolute backup of each and every file they want.

In the following post you will get to know about the top 4 cloud storage providers for you to go with:

(more…)

June 20, 2013
2 Essential Tips To Keep Your Data Safe and Secure
As we all know, computers and computer hardware aren’t built to last. We are constantly replacing computers every five or so years, or replacing hard drives on a regular basis. Hard drives are notorious for going bad, and when that happens, you could potentially lose all your files. We all have files that we can’t lose, whether those files are photos, videos, or business/school-related files, we need to keep such files safe and secure.

The good news is that, if you haven’t already thought about protecting your files, it isn’t really difficult to protect your important files. This post outlines two tips that you should employ to safely, and easily, backup your important data files so you won’t lose them, as well as protect those files from unauthorized users.

1. Backing Up Data Offsite

One aspect of data backup that many people don’t give much thought about is where are they storing their data. Most people would probably copy their files to an external hard drive that is located next to their computer. While this is effective at restoring data that may have been lost on an internal hard drive, it shouldn’t be the only place to backup data.

Let’s think about this for a second. What would happen if the location that stores both the computer and the external hard drive was struck by a disaster – fire, hurricane, tornado, etc? Such events put the data on both the computer and the external hard drive at risk of being lost.

In order to prevent such a problem, it is always best to store at least one copy of all your files at another location – offsite. The good news is that storing your files offsite doesn’t have to be complicated.

For me, I use two methods of storing my files offsite. The first is by backing up my files using Backblaze, which is a cloud service, so my files are backed up – securely, of course – online. I use Backblaze because they offer unlimited storage for a small monthly fee, and I don’t have issues with capping.

Please note:

I am affiliated with BackBlaze, but I only recommend them because I am currently using their service and trust them for my data backups.

A second option that I use is by copying my data to a small, external hard drive, and then physically store that hard drive at another location. Every so often I would bring the hard drive home and update the files on the drive and return it to the offsite location.

If I were to ever lose all my files, I would restore the data with the small, external hard drive first, and any files that weren’t backed up would be restored from Backblaze. Optionally, I can restore all my files using Backblaze as they can provide a hard drive or USB flash drive of all my files, for a price.

2. Data Encryption

While backing up my data to external hard drives is a good option, there is a problem with it – it isn’t secure. While most of us may not think about securing our data to prevent others from reading the files, if you store personal information (think taxes), you may want to look at encrypting your data.

Encrypting an external hard drive isn’t expensive, and isn’t too difficult. There is a great free, open-source, solution called TrueCrypt that you can download and use to secure the data on any external hard drive.

For those that aren’t familiar with using TrueCrypt on an external hard drive, you can find tutorials on encrypting your hard drive online by simply doing a search. I found a great tutorial for encrypting my external hard drive that made it very easy to protect my files.

There are a few things that you will need to keep in mind when using TrueCrypt:
- Depending on how much data you are encrypting, it could take some time to encrypt your files. It took about 30 hours to encrypt 400 GB of data on my external hard drive. If the process is interrupted, it could make your data unreadable. TrueCrypt does allow you to pause the encryption process, if needed.
- When you connect your encrypted drive to your computer, you won’t see any data on your drive – this is normal. You will need to use TrueCrypt to mount the drive to the correct letter and then enter a password to decrypt the information on the drive.
To elaborate on the second point, the drive letters caused me a bit of an issue. When I backup my data through Backblaze, the software looks for drive “I” to backup the data. When I encrypted the drive, and then connected the drive to the computer, Windows automatically connected the drive to “I”. The problem was, Windows couldn’t see the data on drive I because it is encrypted.

The solution was to remap the external hard drive to another letter – “R”, in my case – and then mount the encrypted drive in TrueCrypt to drive “I”. I now see two drives in Windows – “R” from Windows, and “I” from TrueCrypt.

For those that are wondering, Backblaze works without any issues with my encrypted external hard drive because it can read/write drive “I” without any problems.

As for my files I store with Backblaze? Those are encrypted on my system before they are uploaded to their servers, where they remain encrypted, so I have no worries there.

Above are two essential tips for keeping your data files safe and secure. If you think about all the files that you have currently stored on your hard drive, and what it would take to replace those files, you may want to seriously take a look at backing up those files.
April 17, 2013
So Which Online Backup is Best?

As you can see in the backup section of the site, online backup providers have a lot of features (and prices) to compare, and with new providers popping up every minute, the task becomes difficult. Unlimited space is a great selling point for these companies, and Backblaze is very popular on Technically Easy.

It is worth getting a bit of information about these providers, for example what are the features that truly matter to an average user?

(more…)

January 23, 2013

11 Reasons Why I Use Backblaze to Backup My Data Online

I have been backing up my data online for several years now and haven’t had any issues with doing so. I don’t mind backing up my data to the cloud, for a few reasons with the most important being that my data is offsite. The fact that I can restore my data at anytime is also a huge benefit.

About six months ago I switched my data backups to Backblaze from Mozy. I didn’t have any issues with Mozy, but their pricing structure changed some time ago and it became too costly for me to keep my data with them, so I went elsewhere. After doing some research I settled on Backblaze. Since that time I have completed backing up over 500 GB of data to their servers and have had no issues with doing so.

Now that I have finally completed my initial data backup, I decided to put together a list of the 11 reasons (10 is too common) I like Backblaze for backing up my files.

1. Affordable Price

Being able to afford to backup my data was an important requirement when I was looking for an online cloud backup provider. Backblaze is very affordable for anyone regardless of how much data you need to backup. As with many cloud solutions, they offer three different pricing levels:

$3.96 a month for 2 years ($95 total).
$4.17 a month for 1 year ($50 total).
$5 auto-bill each month.

2. Unlimited Data Storage

Anyone that has heard of this term is skeptical if it really true. Many of us that have done business online realize that there is really no “unlimited” anywhere. Well, when it comes to online storage, many companies will list “unlimited” but may cap the bandwidth speeds at a certain amount of data stored. With Backblaze that simply isn’t true. I have almost 370 GB of data backed up with them, and not once did my upload speed get capped – my ISP bandwidth usage records can prove that. Every time I backed up I used the full upload speeds of my ISP (about 11 GB/day) regardless of how much I had backed up.

3. External Hard Drive Support

While this may not seem like a big deal, it is to me. All the data that I want to backup online is stored on an external hard drive. The other option I was looking at – Carbonite – required me to pay for a more expensive package in order to backup from my external hard drive. Backblaze allows you to backup data from external hard drives connected through a USB or Firewire. Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives are not backed up.

Here is a list of what is and isn’t backed up:

Backed Up	NOT Backed Up
USB Drives	Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives
Firewire drives	TimeMachine drives
Thunderbolt	BootCamp partitions
Internal Drives	Virtual Machines
Drive partitions	Mounted Volumes

4. Files are Encrypted

Besides being affordable another big requirement for me was security. I wanted to ensure that when I backup my data that I am the only one that has access to my files. When it comes to encryption, most online cloud solutions provide this ability. All my data is encrypted when it is stored on the Backblaze servers so I know that my data is safe. While the default is for Backblaze to use their own highly-guarded password, if you choose, you can use your own password instead, which will make your data that much safer.

5. No File Size Limitations

While not a huge requirement, I know some people may have very large files that need to be backed up. The largest files that I have are home HD videos that can be several gigabytes in size. Backblaze allows you to exclude large files, if you choose, or change it to “No Limits”, which essentially allows you to backup any file regardless of size.

6. Multiple Restore Options

A backup is only as good as its ability to restore your data. In this case Backblaze provides three methods of restoring your data:

Web Download (free): You can download your files from a Web browser. A zip file will be generated that will contain all the files you wish to restore. Once the zip file is ready, you will receive an e-mail once your files are ready to be restored.
USB Flash Drive ($99): If you have several gigabytes of files that would take a long time to download, or your ISP caps your bandwidth, you can have your files shipped to you on a USB flash drive. The maximum amount of data for this method is 128GB.
USB Hard Drive ($189): For those with a lot of data, you can have your files shipped to you on a USB hard drive. The hard drive will be large enough to contain all your data. The maximum amount of data for this method is 3TB.

In my case, I also store my data on a 2.5″ external hard drive that I also store offsite, so if I were to restore all my data I would restore from the 2.5″ external hard drive and anything that is missing I would restore from Backblaze.

7. File Archiving

Backblaze is designed to help keep your files protected and will even keep multiple versions of a file for up to 30 days. This can be helpful if you accidentally deleted a file a few weeks ago and need to restore that file. With Backblaze you will be able to perform such an action. After 30 days, however, your file will be removed from your backup.

8. Automatic Throttling

While I mentioned that Backblaze can use the full speed of your Internet connection, there may be times that you want it to reduce the speed in order to allow other applications to access the Internet, such as Skype or online games. In this case, Backblaze will automatically throttle its bandwidth usage to allow other applications to access the Internet. If you wish, you can also manually throttle Backblaze to limit the speed it uses to upload your files.

9. Locate You Computer

This is an interesting feature of Backblaze. While I am on a desktop, I know that many people are using a laptop, and this feature will benefit you. If you have every misplaced, lost or had your laptop stolen, this feature of Backblaze can help you locate your computer. By logging into your account, the Backblaze application will report the last time the computer was online, and the last IP address of your computer. You can also use their mapping tool to map the location of your computer, that will hopefully help locate it. This feature is included without any additional cost.

10. Small Company

Backblaze isn’t a large, face-less corporation that I have seen online. Many online cloud solutions are run by a large organization that cares about their bottom-line. Backblaze is a smaller organization that doesn’t hide behind a logo, but are open to how they run their business, and how they manage their costs of data storage. I believe that are also making a profit, which is great because that will ensure they continue to provide their solution for years to come.

11. Keeps Their Costs Down

Since Backblaze isn’t a large organization, and they offer unlimited storage space for a low cost, they need to find ways to keep their costs down. Once method is that they design their own storage system to efficiently store all their client’s data. You can even read about how they create their storage system on their blog/website, where they also provide information on how you can create your own system just like theirs.

So there you have 11 reasons why I chose Backblaze to backup my data. If you are looking for a good online cloud backup solution I highly recommend you try out Backblaze. There is a free trial of Backblaze that you can take advantage of to see if Backblaze suits your needs.

December 17, 2012

How to Automatically Upload Photos to Dropbox from Your iPhone

There are many features that we love about Dropbox. Its simple synchronization, permission to encrypt your files using a third-party service, ability to view older versions of your files, and so on, make it desirable over other cloud storage service providers. Dropbox has recently updated their app for iPhone to version 1.5.5 to enable us to make the best of both worlds.

It had a great welcome since you can automatically upload your files to Dropbox using your iDevice. Android device owners can no longer boast of their phone’s ability to synchronize with Dropbox since iPhone can also be used now to upload photos directly. All you need to do is download the Dropbox app and start synchronizing.

(more…)

November 6, 2012