Backblaze Personal
Perhaps the simplest cloud backup solution we’ve seen, Backblaze does one thing and does it well
SCORE
PRICE $6 per month from backblaze.com
Backblaze took top honours in this year’s PC Pro Technology Excellence Awards ( see issue 314, p28) with a 91% rating for ease of use – and cloud backup doesn’t get much easier. There are only three buttons, and you need not touch any of them: it comes configured to scan your system for personal files, no matter where they are on your system, and automatically upload them to Backblaze’s servers. Continual updates occur whenever you make a change or create a new document. For most people, that’s ample protection with zero configuration.
Of course, if you want to get your hands dirty, there are a few things you can customise. Specific file types, locations and drives can be included and excluded – you’re even able to back up external drives – and you can optionally switch from continuous backups to daily or on-demand. And if you don’t trust the automatic encryption, you can also set your own encryption key.
For the most part, though, you shouldn’t need to interact with Backblaze until it’s time to restore a backed-up item. Even then, the client stays in the background because your uploaded files are browsed and downloaded from the publisher’s website. Here you can also rescue lost or overwritten files from the past 30 days, and if one of your computers is stolen, you can bring up a map showing where it was when the Backblaze software last touched ba base.
On that note, be aware that your you subscription only entitles you to back b up a single PC or Mac. That’s a necessary restriction: each account accoun comes with unlimited storage to ensure that even the biggest files get g protected. And remember that if you y work with big video files or the lik like, they will inevitably take a while to reach Backblaze’s servers. Our 2GB folder took 49mins 35secs to upload. That’s a step up from NovaBackup’s 74-minute wait, but it’s still a drag if you want to back up your day’s work before leaving the office.
The he final thing to be clear about is that Backblaze is very much a single-purpose le-purpose tool: it doesn’t handle local backups at all, nor can it create an image mage of your hard disk for disaster-recovery ster-recovery purposes. That means ns it’s only one component in a backup up strategy, rather than a complete plete solution – but as cloud components ponents go, it’s terrifically convenient venient and effective.