Unless you have a background in IT the chances are that the only time you have ever considered backups of your information was just after you found out you had lost something precious ? Perhaps it was a bunch of irretrievable photos lost when your hard drive suddenly and inexplicably died ? Or maybe it was your lifetimes collection of music or movies, carefully downloaded and collated onto that 4TB external hard drive connected to your desktop computer that you hadn’t noticed had been accidentally deleted ?

Whichever it was, when the day arrives and you suffer that unrecoverable data loss the chances are you will be asking yourself why you hadn’t taken the time to backup to another disk.

My preferred and recommended backup solution is an online service called Backblaze. Backblaze is cheap ( as little as $5 a month ), reliable and easy to setup and better yet, once configured you can forget it is there and relax in the knowledge that should the worst happen your data is safe and easily retrieved.

Unlike most Internet file storage solutions ( Dropbox, OneDrive etc ) the cost for Backblaze is the same whether you are backing up 100MB or 20TB ! The only difference will be the amount of time it takes to complete the initial backup, something that is getting easier as home broadband speeds steadily increase. This initial “seeding” of your backup may take some weeks to complete but it happens in the background and is carefully controlled by the Backblaze software to not interfere with your Internet access too much. Once the first backup is complete the software then only has to update the backup when anything changes to your local data, again a process that happens in the background without manual intervention.

Backblaze will backup any of your hard drives, not just the internal drive in your PC or Mac. Just plugin your external USB drives, configure the application settings and wait for the data to be secured. One thing to note here though is that if you do this Backblaze needs to “see” that drive at least once every 30 days or it will assume the data does not need to be retained and will delete it.

Obviously paying for backup services is not sexy, it doesn’t really give you anything other than piece of mind, but it is something that everyone who has any amount of data in digital form should consider putting in place.

If you would like to try out Backblaze you can sign up for a months free trial by clicking on this link.

This post is not sponsored by Backblaze it is purely my personal choice of backup service and something that I recommend to friends and relatives when the subject arises. Please try it out, you may thank me one day !