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Photo by Cookie Le Pomme on Unsplash
How do you back up computers?
I changed my perspective last month and wish I had done it sooner. In this article I will tell you why I made the switch.
For years, I used hard drives at home and then backed up those drives to other remote servers at family members' homes. There are many problems with this.
Maybe you understand.
Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash
so much data
First, our backup size continues to grow as we take more photos, videos, and create more documents. While some can back up to the cloud, you can back up anywhere (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox… you get the idea).
A few years ago I decided to allow iCloud to back up all the photos, videos, and other data on our phone, but I prefer to keep all the data on my computer somewhere else (because iCloud is expensive) and its limit is 2. per account! ) I have to increase the size of my hard drive every few years to keep everything in one place. And it's not just a drive, I like to keep a backup!
Back in the day you could store everything on a 500GB drive...those days are long gone. Part of this is because digital camera sensors are getting bigger (and their files take up more space), and we're creating bigger files as our kids use more and more media at home, at school, and on social media. for fun.
Of course, now there are five of us (2 parents, 3 children in the family) doing something that takes up space! We have six active computers at home (soon to be seven when the youngest goes to high school), and the oldest is currently making short films as part of his studies. In total, we have about 16 TB of files on our computer!
The hard drive is failing
Another problem with hard drives is that every few years one of them fails. Therefore, I buy not only new ones, because they are insufficient, but also to replace damaged ones. So, everything went wrong. I'm not very tech savvy so setting up a backup system took a long time and I fiddled with hard drives to make sure they were big enough and then tried to organize backups to back them up and give them to my family. .. Aaaah!
For several years, I stayed up at night wondering if our photos would be okay if we had a fire and were shown the record breaking record.
The excitement was real!
Photographed by Vincent Botha on Unsplash
cloud solutions
For a while I thought cloud backup might be the solution and started looking for alternatives. This week I gritted my teeth and decided to backup my computer to the cloud to see how long it would take and how difficult it would be.
I chose Backblaze as my test service. Every review I've read says they're easy to use, have a free trial, and best of all, they're cheap (only $7 a month with unlimited traffic)! I look good!
You can see what they offer here: https://problo.gr/Backblaze
Disclaimer: This is an affiliate link, which means I earn a commission when you make a free purchase from my link, but I'm already a paying customer. The signup fee is only 70 cents, so I don't expect to make a fortune out of it.
I will tell you how I found this process.
It was so easy!
backup process
You literally install a program on your computer, allow the program access to your files, and before you know it, you're already backing up your files. If you want, you can tell it not to back up parts of your computer, but as I mentioned earlier, there's no limit to how much you can back up: $7 per computer, even if on this device there are many things.
The backup was pretty quick to load. It will depend on your internet speed, but ours is not very fast and my first computer (1.5TB) booted in 24 hours. It only slows down when you're using the computer for other purposes, and I didn't notice any slowdown. Since then I have noticed that it is constantly updated as needed.
To get the files when you need them, you can do it in several ways. Log into Backblaze and you'll see all the files and folders displayed on your hard drive. If you only need one file, you can download it, or if you need more, you can download small and medium folders as a zip file. If you want everything, they can send you everything as a hard drive (worst case scenario).
I'm not going to back up all of our computers on Backblaze ($7 per computer is reasonable, but it adds up). I think I'm going to back up both of my computers - they have a lot of important data and stuff (all our family photos and my work stuff). I will probably continue to back up my wife's and young children's computers to local hard drives, but I will probably back up my old computer to Backblaze because there is a lot of data on their computer as well.
I will eventually move everything to the cloud when the hard drive fails. Let's see!
Photo by Alexander Sin on Unsplash
try it yourself
If you can't sleep over your files (or know you should back them up but don't), try Backblaze.
They have a 15-day free trial for testing.
Darren Rowe
PS: I haven't had a single night in the last few weeks where I've been awake worrying about my files!
The post Discover a new way to protect yourself from the nightmare of data loss appeared first on ProBlogger.