- I'm Andru Edwards, and you're watching Gear Live.
The device that came inside of this box
just saved me a bunch of time and a bunch of money,
and ultimately a bunch of frustration.
If you've ever had a hard drive go bad,
and possibly even lost data, you know that's one
of the worst feelings in the world.
In fact, it sucks even to just have your computer restart,
and lose, like, three minutes of work.
It's no fun.
A couple of weeks ago, I was editing some videos,
for the channel, and all of a sudden,
my hard drive started acting up,
to the point where it kept actually rebooting my computer.
I wasn't sure what was going on,
I did some digging, I did some testing,
and realized very quickly that a portion
of the hard drive had developed bad sectors,
and the hard drive was going down quick.
But at the same time, I had over 20 videos
that were in progress, stored on that hard drive,
and I couldn't keep it plugged in and get it working.
Now, luckily, I am a Backblaze member,
and I wanted to tell you about how Backblaze works,
because I don't think a lot of people
consider Cloud backups, and Backblaze is both cheap,
and it works in the background,
so that when you do have something go wrong,
they are there to cover you.
What's going on, tech squad?
Andru Edwards here, Editor-in-Chief of GearLive.com.
If this is your first time here,
this channel's all about tech and gadgets,
and gaming, so if you're into that kinda stuff,
feel free to hit the subscribe button down below,
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Now, just right off the bat,
any time you talk about something on YouTube, people say,
either you are paid by the company you're talking about,
or you're paid by the competitor
of the company you're talking about,
because you can't just have your own opinion.
Either, you can't like what you like,
you can't dislike what you dislike,
someone has to be paying you to say something.
So right off the bat,
Backblaze did not pay me for this video,
they are not a sponsor for this video,
there is actually no sponsor for this video at all.
I've been a paying member, paying with my own money,
of Backblaze for about three years.
Now before I tell you about my tail,
if you wanna give Backblaze a try,
I will leave a link down in the description below.
It is some of the best money I've ever spent,
and it doesn't even cost that much.
So now what's interesting is, I've paid for them,
on a monthly basis, for three years,
but I've never actually had to take advantage
of what they offer.
I've only taken advantage of one half of the offer,
and the offer goes like this:
for five dollars per month per computer,
and I only do it from one computer,
so for five bucks a month, your computer is backed up
to the Cloud, backed up to Backblaze.
Not only is your computer backed up,
but any drives that are plugged into your computer
are backed up as well, so any USB drives,
any thunderbolt drives, et cetera.
And this happens in the background of your computer.
So it's uploading everything,
it's keeping everything stored in Backblaze,
it's keeping it encrypted in Backblaze,
and that's what I've been paying for each month.
But the best part is, is when you need to restore a file,
if you've lost your file, if you've lost a hard drive,
if something got stolen, or, in my case,
if your hard drive just happened to go bad,
you can actually download all
your information from Backblaze.
That's one option, or the second option is,
if it's a lot of data, which, in my case,
it was about 1.8 terabytes, so almost two terabytes.
So it's a little too much to download, even though I have,
I have two gigabit Internet service here,
and even that wouldn't be fast enough
to download all that data.
So instead of downloading 1.8 terabytes of data,
that I was in the middle of using,
in the middle of editing, and it's crucial data that I need,
Backblaze offers another service,
where they will send you, bam, right here,
a hard drive with all the data that you need.
So I'm able to login into Backblaze,
I'm able to see all the data that I've uploaded,
I'm able to see it arranged by drive,
and I can go, and I can pick and choose which files I want,
if I wanna download them,
or if I want them to send it to me on a disc.
So I just selected the entire drive,
and I said, send me a disc ASAP,
and they sent it, and this is it right here.
So in this box is the drive that they sent me,
and it's just a USB three drive right there,
where it says Backblaze on it.
As you can see, just a simple, thin, USB 3.1 hard drive.
On this drive, this drive is basically
a replica of the drive that I lost,
but when they send it to you, it's actually encrypted,
so when you plug it into your computer,
they send you an encryption key,
you need to enter that key in order
to get access to this drive.
Now why is this drive in the box,
if I said that this happened a few weeks ago?
Well, here is the best part.
When you order a drive, this costs 189 dollars,
and they ship it to you overnight,
so I needed the files quickly,
I didn't wanna put work on the back burner,
so I said, hey, put it all on the drive,
I'm not gonna download this, get it to me ASAP.
189 bucks on top of the five dollars per month,
that I had been paying for the past few years.
Now, the coolest part about this is,
if you use the drive, pull all your data off of it,
and erase the drive,
you box it back up and send it back to Backblaze,
they will refund you the entire 189 dollars.
So rather than me needing to pay an extra 190 bucks,
I'm only out the cost of shipping this back to Backblaze,
so let's just say that's 12 dollars.
So for an extra 12 dollars,
I was able to get 1.8 terabytes
of data sent to me on a hard drive,
so I didn't have to spend a month
trying to download all of that,
got my work back up and running,
deleted the drive, packed it back up,
and now this is ready to go back out,
for just about 12 dollars.
I know backup isn't a sexy topic.
It's not something that a lot of people think about,
but it's something that, if you don't have it,
once something goes wrong, you're gonna wish you did.
Now here's a fun fact: the day before my drive crashed,
my friend Armando Ferreira,
you're probably familiar with him, Mondobytes,
he had a hard drive crash,
and he shared that on Instagram,
and I immediately responded to him and said,
hey, do you not have a backup?
We do this work that involves using a bunch of drives,
our files are huge, we're shooting in 4K,
he's probably shooting in 4K Raw,
we need to have our files backed up,
because we never know when a drive is going to go bad,
and he didn't know about Backblaze,
and I told him, hey, listen, I use Backblaze.
I've never actually had to restore using their service.
24 hours later, and Armando will verify this,
the very next day, is when my drive crashed
that I use for editing my videos.
So, there you have it, and again, you never know
when you're gonna need to access your backup.
I think everyone should have backup,
both on premises, and in the Cloud externally.
Again, if you wanna give Backblaze a try,
I will leave a link down in the description below for you.
Again, five dollars a month,
4.99 a month for unlimited backup,
so as much data as you have on your computer,
and as much data as you can fit onto all the external drives
that are plugged into your computer as well.
It doesn't get any better than that,
doesn't get any cheaper than that,
and it doesn't get any safer than that either.
There you have it, guys.
Now I wanna hear from you.
Have you ever had data loss?
Have you ever suffered data loss,
whether through theft, whether through a drive crashing,
whether through just accidentally deleting something?
Let me know in the comments below,
and I'll meet you there for further discussion.
Again, if you wanna give Backblaze a try,
they are not a sponsor of this video,
I am just a big fan of their service,
and you can probably understand why,
because they were able to save me two terabytes of work.
Don't forget you can join the tech squad now.
We've got early videos for you guys.
We've got custom badges, we've got custom emoji,
we've got extra entries into every giveaway we do,
and in Q4, we go a little crazy with the giveaways.
We're actually on giveaway number three right now.
More to come.
But if you wanna join and help support the channel,
link down in the description below as well.
Don't forget, you can always click or tap on my face
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in order to subscribe for free to the channel,
and don't forget to like this video
if you enjoyed this topic.
Until next time, thanks so much
for watching as always, guys.
I'm Andru Edwards, and I'll catch you in the next video.
(exciting music)