Backblaze Review: The Best Way to Backup Your Data to the Cloud?

As a former IT technician, I’ve seen the perils of hard drive crashes, the devastating effects, and the costly aftermath.

Hard drive recovery is not a simple process and it can cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. I’ve seen people lose years of their work because somewhere between the home and the office, their hard drive decided to give them the finger and call it quits.

When you’re on the road, your laptop gets used, abused, shaken, and dropped. That’s why it’s important to have a good one. Today’s average hard drive is made up of many, tiny moving parts and, the fact is, the more use and abuse these moving parts receive, the more likely it is that your hard drive is going to break, fail, or CRASH.

On top of this, there’s always the possibility that your laptop, camera, hard drives, or memory sticks will get lost or stolen.

The uncertainties of the road rollover onto your possessions and leave the fate of your electronics, and your data, entirely up to chance.

First, Store Large Files on an External Drive

As a traveling photographer, I have hundreds of GB worth of photos, and they simply won’t fit on my laptop’s hard drive. When you run out of space on your hard drive, the best thing you can do is transfer your large files to an external hard drive like the LaCie Rugged Mini, my preferred choice of hard drive when I’m traveling.

Now, whenever I sit down to edit photos, whether I’m in bed, at a coffee shop or riding a plane or train, I just plug in my external drive and I have access to everything.

Always Keep a Second Backup in the Cloud

A second backup is vital. What if your external hard drive crashes? You always want more than one backup, and ideally in two totally different places, stored on different mediums.

Many people use services like Dropbox or Google Drive to manually backup their files, but this is not the most convenient or efficient way to do it. You’re only backing up some important documents, rather than your entire machine, and if you have a lot of photos or movies, you’ll quickly run out of space.

It’s kind of like using a wrench to put in a screw—it’s simply the wrong tool for the job.

To back up your data completely, securely, and efficiently, I recommend Backblaze. It’s been an integral part of my data backup solution for about ten years, and I haven’t since found a service that was easier, better, or cheaper.

Backblaze continuously backs up everything on both your computer and your external hard drive. Using minimal system resources, it runs in the background, continuously backing up your files, ensuring every backup is always current.

As long as you’re connected to the internet, Backblaze uses a secure connection to keep everything on your computer backed-up in the cloud, accessible from anywhere.

You never have to worry about backing up because Backblaze is fully automated. Just set it up once, and then you can forget all about it.

Access Files from Your Mobile Device

Not only does Backblaze keep your files backed up, but they have a mobile app which allows you to access your backups on the go. As long as you’re connected to the internet on your phone, you can access your entire data backup, meaning you have access to every single file on your computer.

Easy Data Recovery

Should something go wrong, you can download your backed-up data for free. Alternatively, Backblaze will mail you a USB stick or hard drive for a nominal fee.

And, because Backblaze is always connected, if your computer gets stolen, there is a mapping option so you can hunt your machine down, and find the actual address where your computer is residing!

At $9 per month, Backblaze is shockingly cheap. This is a very small price to pay for a full backup, not to mention the security of knowing that your data is secure.

Because of Backblaze, I can now travel anywhere in the world knowing that all my photos, documents, movies, music and more are entirely safe.

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