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11 Responses to "Backblaze"

1. | Reply Elmak
   Posted 06 Jul 2009 at 11:22am #
   

   I've used it for a few months now- I find the service to be rather exceptional. There are a minor few discrepancies: your Applications folder cannot be backed up and DVD mail-order ($99, one DVD worth) restores are ridiculously overpriced. The other mail-order backup option is less-so, but still pricy: $189 for 500gb external drive Fed-Ex overnight (you get to keep the drive though).

   Beyond those little issues I have with it Backblaze works superbly. Backs up my external drive when its' plugged in so I have near a terabyte of stuff on their backup servers for $5/month. I'm not sure I'd like it as much if my upload speed wasn't so great; FiOS is a nice package down here in the 'burgh.

2. | Reply Kevin Hillabolt
   Posted 06 Jul 2009 at 11:23am #
   

   I've been a subscriber for awhile (since beta). The plug-in works really well and doesn't seem to cause any problems.

   In all honesty, I really haven't had to recover anything, so I can't speak to how well the service actually works. 😉

   I do like how the offer shipping you a hard drive with your data on it, should you ever have a catastrophe; with a cost of course. The thought of downloading 300+ GB of data seemed a little unpractical...

3. | Reply Joe Eversole
   Posted 06 Jul 2009 at 11:28am #
   

   I've been playing with the free 2GB storage on Mozy and it seems great with one gigantic flaw: The only way to exclude entries from the default backup sets (ie: virtual machines) is to enter a complex Spotlight query. By complex, I mean you have to get out the developer guides to write the query. Their support document links to the Spotlight Query Programming Guide and the Spotlight Metadata Attributes Reference documents for programmers on developer.apple.com. It's completely useless for 98% of the world.

   They need to do real work on that. Otherwise it works great. 😛

4. | Reply Elmak
   Posted 06 Jul 2009 at 11:31am #
   

   Oh, I forgot to mention that the download recovery works good. I've used it in lieu of me not using Time Machine; they keep versions of files for 30 days in the past for restores (Though it jumps to week intervals after the first couple days back).

   Downloading speeds were consistently good, I had tested a larger restore of some video files that added up to a few GB. Everything is zipped up on their end and the downloading transfer rate kicked in around 2.5-3mb/s.

5. | Reply Jamie Phelps
   Posted 06 Jul 2009 at 1:57pm #
   

   I'll second what Elmak has said and add that once you get the initial backup done, incrementals seem to be pretty fast. I would advise that you consider it disaster recovery as far as significant chunks of data go. I wanted to download a huge backup, but some part of the connection (browser, server, whatever) wouldn't allow me to download more than 4GB of data. I asked if they had a link I could use to download with cURL and they pointed me to the hard disk delivery bit.

   My backup strategy is now to use Dropbox for my ~/Documents type stuff and Backblaze for my media and other files I'm not likely to have to restore often. With Dropbox, I get versioned backups automatically so I store my most critical, most frequently needed files there. When I remember to (Bad geek! Bad!) I hook up to my external hard drive for Time Machine. Backblaze has my back on everything else and if everything really went to hell I could order a hard disk to restore.

   Hope that helps.

6. | Reply Johan Svensson
   Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 2:07am #
   

   Hmm. Looks very interesting. I still don't have an external drive to run Time Machine/SuperDuper backups to, though it's been on the shopping list for a long time - just need to find some money to throw that way first. (Not easy being an unemployed internet bum.)

   I do use Dropbox, but with both Mac and Windows machines it gets annoying to set up which folders I want backed up there without messing with symlinks in OS X and junctions in Windows. Gets really messy really fast.

   I'm trying Backblaze now, but 34k/s upload speed on my 10 megabit connection doesn't seem very promising.

1. Johan Svensson
   Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 2:09am #
   

   Never mind that, jumped up to decent speeds when I restarted the backup process.

2. Bill
   Posted 23 Jul 2009 at 11:31pm #
   

   Did you just start and stop the back up? I am in the initial back up but seems to be doing about 1.5 gigs per day.

7. | Reply Backblaze Review
   Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 12:37pm #
   

   We reviewed Backblaze at OnlineBackupsReview.com and found it to be a great product. The only flaw is that they're a new company, but as the days go on, that becomes less and less of an issue.

   Ideally you could do your restores via your Internet connection, but if you don't want to wait, I guess the DVD or external drive is an option.

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   Posted 31 Aug 2009 at 8:51pm #
   

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9. | Reply John Broadbent
   Posted 23 Jan 2011 at 11:07pm #
   

   I too am leery of leaving my sensitive information as well as my crucial backups in the hands of a relatively new and untested company. I will admit however that at $99 for a year the price for unlimited backups is definitely right. Do they do a free trial?