I am obsessed with backing up my data. I have five kids, and thousands of photos, and many videos of them, so losing my data is not an option. I’m sure you may be in a similar situation, and may have your own backup solution, or have been thinking about creating a way to backup your files.
At the beginning of last year I wrote a post that mentioned how my online backup supplier, Mozy, was changing their pricing structure that made it too expensive for me to continue using their service. They had a good service, but their pricing made it touch to stay with them. I had a plan with Mozy that expired in June of this year, and up to that time I have looked for a replacement online backup service provider. Earlier this year I found a new service called Backblaze that has once again made it affordable to backup my files online.
Online Backup Options
When it comes to backing up data, I may have more files to backup than the average person. Currently I have the following data that I need to backup:
| Files | Size |
|---|---|
| Photos | 354,624 MB (354.6 GB) |
| Videos | 80,649 MB (80.6 GB) |
| Documents | 696 MB (0.696 GB) |
| Other | 36,991 MB (36.9 GB) |
| Total | 472,845 MB (472.8 GB) |
I looked at some of the popular options that are available. Two that you may hear most about are DropBox and Carbonite. Both are great services, but they won’t work for me because of a few reasons.
DropBox was simply too expensive to store the amount of data that I have to backup. There is a Pro100 package, which starts at 100 GB of storage, with up to 32 GB of extra storage for referring new customers. That won’t even backup half my data, and I would be paying $19.99/month. Their team plan start at 1 TB, which is more that I need, but the price of $795/year is not affordable for me.
Carbonite was probably the most promising to me, but unfortunately, there were a few items that just didn’t work. The first is that in order to backup the files from an external hard drive, which is where all my data resides, I would need to buy at least the HomePlus plan. This would cost $99/year ($8.25/month), which is a good price. The problem is that the HomePlus plan doesn’t backup video files, so my videos wouldn’t be backed up.
Their HomePremier plan backups up external hard drives and video files, but now I would be looking at $149/yr ($12.41/month). This still wasn’t a bad price, but was more than twice as much as I was paying before.
I continued to search for a new online backup provider, and I had over a year to look for one. I eventually came across one that met my requirements and had a great price – Backblaze.
Backblaze – Online Backup at an Affordable Price
The first thing that attracted me to Backblaze was that they offer unlimited storage space. This is key as most sites that offer backup have a limit on the amount of storage space, and will usually charge a nice premium if you need more storage. Backblaze allows me to backup all my data for one price.
The price is very affordable. For a 2 year contract it will cost me only $3.96/month. For a one year contract it is $4.17/month and for those that like to pay monthly and not be locked into a contract, it is an even $5/month. Considering how much data I would need to backup, I chose the two year plan as it would take me several months just to backup my data.
How are they able to charge such a low amount for their service? Simple. They have developed a system that allows for data storage at a low cost. They are completely open when it comes to their backup system, and even provide information on how you can build your own – provided you have the funds to do so.
So far I have had good experiences with using Backblaze. To date I have backed up 472 GB of data at a rate of 11 GB/day. That is pretty much the most I can backup with my ISP, and so far I haven’t been throttled by Backblaze for the amount of data that I have backed up.
One area that I have been concerned with is that of security. I don’t like to share the files that I backup, so I like to make sure that my files are secured, and that I am the only one with access to my files. When my files are scheduled for backup, they are encrypted on my local system and then the files are transferred to Backblaze over an SSL connection. At no point are the files decrypted so they can be read. Having this encryption and SSL connection was a huge requirement for me with regards to an online backup solution.
In terms or restoring my data, I manage to perform a test on the restoration process, and it manage to restore my missing files without any issue. A backup service is only as good as their ability to restore the files.
As I continue to use the service, I’ll be writing more posts in the future about how I use the service to backup my data, and possible how you can use it as well. If you are looking to backup all your files, then I highly recommend you sign up with Backblaze.