Can't see the advantage of this but hey-ho that's life is it not. I'm on a trip to places that have iffy phone service let alone a data connection (Ardnamurchan, Scotland). I took a lot of photos yesterday with my DSLR on a trip to Fingals Cave. That's around 12GB of storage. The same will apply today when we go to the island of Coll to look for Corncrakes. Back that up over the internet? Are you mad? I'd be here all day and night at local data speeds. I have backed up to two ruggedised 2TB HDD's for years. They SD cards that I use on these trips don't get overwritten until I get home so I had four copies of the data. That is safe enough for me. Apart from the photos, my MBP is backed up using Time Machine to one of the two HDD's. That seems to cover all the bases unless someone knows different.
The world is not one always connected utopia just yet. Sod's law will state that the file you just deleted is on the online backup and you have no internet connection so until there is, you are stuffed!
There is NOT on panacea for the problem of data backup. We will all develop our own styles and solutions.
I've been using BB for many years, having unlimited capacity for $50 is a no-brainer. It's not my only backup; you should never rely on just one backup medium/location. I store everything I do not want to lose in Dropbox, I also have my ripped CD library and camera RAW files duplicated onto a Drobo. There's also secondary copies on the Time Capsule and some other external drives. To all of you just relying on external drives for backup, it's fine until the drive fails, gets dropped, lost or stolen or your house burns down. $50 is a very small insurance premium!
Don't forget that for many Mac apps, even if you have no backup solution at all, not even Time Machine, you can still access old versions of your documents through the "Revert To...Browse All Versions" menu item in the File menu. This won't help you if a whole volume dies but it can help to get back old versions of individual files.
I would go without a backup before I would ever use Backblaze. I tried them several years ago. When I had some trouble, their "techs" were not helpful at all, and claimed that their product didn't really need support. I ditched this crapware, and started using CrashPlan Pro Enterprise. CrashPlan backs up both of my Macs. On my iMac, I have it setup to backup to the cloud and to an external backup drive. I also use Time Machine with my MacBook Pro as well as CrashPlan. My Time Machine drive is encrypted, so if it gets stolen, I know that my data is protected.
I think, using iWork or Office, I can save documents directly on iCloud, thereby ensuring they are stored off-site automatically.
iTunes Match ensures that my entire music library is backup up on the Cloud.
Pixelmator saves files directly onto iCloud as well.
The only problem I have is with photos. I don't want to turn on iCloud Photos, simply because if I accidently deleted it on one of my devices, it would delete it off the cloud.
I have a 2TB limit on iCloud, so I will manually upload my photos as files onto iCloud, ensuring that it is backed up.
Movies are a non-issue as well, since, if I haven't bought it on iTunes, I probably have the physical disc, which I can always extract again.
Yes, I absolutely agree that backing up is essential. I'm just surprised by how easy iCloud has actually made it.
The following is a long-winded explanation of my approach to backing up a very large multi-TB dataset. At the outset, I'll say that it is abundantly clear to me that there is no one tool or service that solves my backup needs, and those of other users with either very large data sets or large daily changes. I'll be the first to admit that I'm an outlier when it comes to quantity of data I need to backup. But, here's my method (on a MacOS system), in case it helps anyone else, or exposes a flaw in my thinking. I use the following three tools/services to backup to two separately-enclosed local drives and one offsite drive, with "little" manual intervention:
-- Time Machine, for backing up half of my content, about 5TBs, to multiple local drives
-- ChronoSync, to backup the other half of my content, to multiple local drives
-- Backblaze, to do "half-hearted" off-site backups (to the cloud) for the entire dataset.
-- I occasionally rotate the TM and ChronoSync drives to my personal offsite location (the bank).
Why is Time Machine not good enough for the whole dataset? Simple. Very large (> 10TB) affordable drives do not exist (except for Drobo but, see below). TM could work if it would let me backup Part 1 of my set to Drive 1, and Part 2 of my set to Drive 2, etc. But no, TM won't do that.
Why is ChronoSync not good enough for my backups? The ChronoSync UI for exploring the backed-up data is just not up to par with Time Machine. Highly subjective opinion, yes, I know.
Why is Backblaze not good enough for my backups? It is really ANNOYING to me that Backblaze cannot be configured to exclude the internal drive (i.e., Macintosh HD). Furthermore, Backblaze only addresses the off-site part of my backup requirements. It won't make local backups. Also, Backblaze and any other cloud backup service for that matter would occasionally push me over the 1TB per-month limit that Comcast imposes. I have to manually monitor by Comcast usage and throttle back Backblaze when necessary. As a result of throttling back, Backblaze just never completes the job. I have to pray that it "randomly" chooses to backup most of my important data. Another thing: I wouldn't even need Backblaze if I could commit to REGULARLY taking my TM- and ChronoSync-created drives and swapping them out with the drives at my offsite location (safety deposit box). But I'm human, so my mantra is "If it's not automatically backed up, it's not backed up."
Note about Drobo: I started with a nice Drobo setup over 10 yrs ago. I used Drobo specifically to backup my large dataset, not to hold the original data. I loved the feature that when you run out of backup space on your Drobo drive set, you "just" remove the smallest capacity drive in the array, and replace it with a larger drive. So, along the way, my needs grew from 2TB to 20TB, necessitating incremental purchases of larger drives to use in the Drobo. And I invested in a 2nd and 3rd Drobo to keep up with newer interface speeds. And I was ok with that. However, in recent years, my Drobo units started intermittently exhibiting mysteriously disconnections (unmounting) problems. No amount of rebooting the Mac or power-cycling the Drobo was effective. I wash my hands of Drobo. It's obvious that many many people use Drobos with satisfaction. Which makes it all the more frustrating for me.
Comments
I'm on a trip to places that have iffy phone service let alone a data connection (Ardnamurchan, Scotland). I took a lot of photos yesterday with my DSLR on a trip to Fingals Cave. That's around 12GB of storage. The same will apply today when we go to the island of Coll to look for Corncrakes. Back that up over the internet? Are you mad? I'd be here all day and night at local data speeds.
I have backed up to two ruggedised 2TB HDD's for years. They SD cards that I use on these trips don't get overwritten until I get home so I had four copies of the data. That is safe enough for me.
Apart from the photos, my MBP is backed up using Time Machine to one of the two HDD's.
That seems to cover all the bases unless someone knows different.
The world is not one always connected utopia just yet. Sod's law will state that the file you just deleted is on the online backup and you have no internet connection so until there is, you are stuffed!
There is NOT on panacea for the problem of data backup. We will all develop our own styles and solutions.
It's not my only backup; you should never rely on just one backup medium/location.
I store everything I do not want to lose in Dropbox, I also have my ripped CD library and camera RAW files duplicated onto a Drobo.
There's also secondary copies on the Time Capsule and some other external drives.
To all of you just relying on external drives for backup, it's fine until the drive fails, gets dropped, lost or stolen or your house burns down.
$50 is a very small insurance premium!
I also have a time machine setup on an external drive in case I need to restore the entired Mac
Anyone else notice that online security got worse after all the push to put everything in the cloud?
I think, using iWork or Office, I can save documents directly on iCloud, thereby ensuring they are stored off-site automatically.
iTunes Match ensures that my entire music library is backup up on the Cloud.
Pixelmator saves files directly onto iCloud as well.
The only problem I have is with photos. I don't want to turn on iCloud Photos, simply because if I accidently deleted it on one of my devices, it would delete it off the cloud.
I have a 2TB limit on iCloud, so I will manually upload my photos as files onto iCloud, ensuring that it is backed up.
Movies are a non-issue as well, since, if I haven't bought it on iTunes, I probably have the physical disc, which I can always extract again.
Yes, I absolutely agree that backing up is essential. I'm just surprised by how easy iCloud has actually made it.
Why is Time Machine not good enough for the whole dataset? Simple. Very large (> 10TB) affordable drives do not exist (except for Drobo but, see below). TM could work if it would let me backup Part 1 of my set to Drive 1, and Part 2 of my set to Drive 2, etc. But no, TM won't do that.
Why is ChronoSync not good enough for my backups? The ChronoSync UI for exploring the backed-up data is just not up to par with Time Machine. Highly subjective opinion, yes, I know.
Why is Backblaze not good enough for my backups? It is really ANNOYING to me that Backblaze cannot be configured to exclude the internal drive (i.e., Macintosh HD). Furthermore, Backblaze only addresses the off-site part of my backup requirements. It won't make local backups. Also, Backblaze and any other cloud backup service for that matter would occasionally push me over the 1TB per-month limit that Comcast imposes. I have to manually monitor by Comcast usage and throttle back Backblaze when necessary. As a result of throttling back, Backblaze just never completes the job. I have to pray that it "randomly" chooses to backup most of my important data. Another thing: I wouldn't even need Backblaze if I could commit to REGULARLY taking my TM- and ChronoSync-created drives and swapping them out with the drives at my offsite location (safety deposit box). But I'm human, so my mantra is "If it's not automatically backed up, it's not backed up."
Note about Drobo: I started with a nice Drobo setup over 10 yrs ago. I used Drobo specifically to backup my large dataset, not to hold the original data. I loved the feature that when you run out of backup space on your Drobo drive set, you "just" remove the smallest capacity drive in the array, and replace it with a larger drive. So, along the way, my needs grew from 2TB to 20TB, necessitating incremental purchases of larger drives to use in the Drobo. And I invested in a 2nd and 3rd Drobo to keep up with newer interface speeds. And I was ok with that. However, in recent years, my Drobo units started intermittently exhibiting mysteriously disconnections (unmounting) problems. No amount of rebooting the Mac or power-cycling the Drobo was effective. I wash my hands of Drobo. It's obvious that many many people use Drobos with satisfaction. Which makes it all the more frustrating for me.