- One of the most dreadful feelings is when you realize
you accidentally deleted a whole bunch of photos
you actually care about,
or all the files from a big project you're working on,
or even financial documents that you need to reference.
I've been in that situation before and since then,
I've been pretty anal about making sure I have good backups
and the cloud backup service that I use
and recommend is Backblaze.
Hey, I'm Jerry, and yeah, years ago I was in a situation
where I was cleaning up old files and I accidentally wiped
an external drive that had a lot of things I needed.
Once I realized it, my heart sank
and I thought I was going to throw up.
There might be third-party tools that you can use to try
and recover the data,
but you're better off just making sure
you have a good backup or backups.
The easiest way that I know of to backup a Mac
is by connecting an external hard drive
and using the built-in Time Machine.
And if you have multiple Macs,
you can even back them all up to a NAS,
to keep them all in the same place like I showed
in a previous video not too long ago.
The best backup strategy is the three, two, one method.
That's three copies of your data,
and two of which that are local, but on different media.
For example, your photos are on your computer
but then you also have them backed up via Time Machine
to an external drive.
And then you also want one copy
of your data off-site somewhere.
There are a number of ways you can get
that one off-site copy via other means,
manual means like having another Time Machine backup
that you store somewhere else,
but then you need to remember to bring
that drive home every now and then,
and connect it to your Mac
and get another good backup and then move it off-site again.
In practice, people are lazy,
and don't do that on a regular basis leading to
a possible issue with very old backups
if a disaster strikes.
If you rely on sync services like iCloud Drive,
Google Drive, or some others, that's not really a backup.
And if you delete a file in one place,
it may also be deleted on the cloud drive.
So the easiest way to get an offsite backup is
with something like Backblaze,
which backs up all of your files continuously
in the background without you needing to do anything.
Backblaze is a full cloud backup solution
for your whole computer.
It starts at just $6 a month for unlimited backups.
So if your computer has
an eight terabyte internal storage drive,
you can back up the whole computer for just $6 per month.
And unlike some other backup companies,
Backblaze also lets you backup external drives as well.
So if you have an external hard drive with old photos
and music, Backblaze can back that up also.
Backblaze will even keep unlimited revisions
of all of your files for 30 days.
And you can upgrade that to a one-year
or forever retention period, if you want to.
Now, I just wanna say that Backblaze
is not a sponsor for this video,
but I do have a link below if you're interested
in a 15 day free trial.
And if you like it, I may earn a small commission.
So with all of that said, let me just show you
how easy it is to get started with Backblaze.
All right, so when you click that link in the description
it's going to take you to the Backblaze page
where you can click the button to Try it for Free.
And what's gonna happen is it's gonna ask you for
an email address and password
that you create for your account,
and then it will download the file.
So let me go ahead and enter my email address
and password, and will click Sign Up Now.
All right, so it's going to go ahead
and download the installer for Backblaze,
it will open up the image file,
and we'll just-double click the Backblaze Installer.
Gonna open it, just follow the prompts,
and here we'll click Install Now.
This installation process should just take
a couple of minutes,
but you're probably going to have to accept
a couple of permissions.
So right here Backblaze is saying that
we want to give Backblaze full disk permissions,
and you want to go ahead and do that obviously
so that Backblaze can back up everything on your computer.
So I'll click this button,
it's going to open up the Applications folder
and the Settings here,
we wanna unlock it.
You use my Touch ID.
If Backblaze is not in here by default,
you can actually just go ahead
and drag the application in here
and then give it permission.
So check it to enable full disk access for Backblaze.
Then we can go back to the Installer, hit Close.
All right, so now we have our 15 day free trial started.
It's going to start backing up
our entire computer by default,
completely in the background
without you having to do anything.
So that's how easy it is to download, sign up
and get started with Backblaze.
So that's how easy it is to download,
sign up, and get started with Backblaze.
But your first initial backup will probably take
a while depending on a couple of things like,
how many files you have to upload,
your upload speed of your ISP, and of course,
whether or not your computer is on or not.
And like I said, by default, it's going to back up
your entire computer but there are a number of options
that you can change,
so let's take a look at those.
So if we click on Settings here,
we can see the first couple of settings we have,
What's the name of this computer?
How often do you wanna be notified
if the computer does not back up for X amount of days,
and down here, is where you can select additional drives
to back up.
So if you have those external drives
that we were talking about,
you can check it here to be able to allow backups
of those external drives.
On the Performance tab, here you can set Throttling
for the upload speed,
or for the processing power of your computer.
For most people you shouldn't have to make any changes
on this page,
the upload speed will be dependent upon
the upload of your ISP, but if you are having issues
with other internet connections inside your house,
you may want to actually manually set that.
And to do that, you would just uncheck this box
and configure Faster Backups or Faster Network.
And depending on your configuration,
it will show you the approximate amount
of gigabytes per day that it can upload,
which should give you a good idea of how long
it's going to take to backup your computer.
If you have a hundred gigabytes of file,
and you can do two gigabytes per day,
it's gonna take you about 50 days.
By default, Backblaze will backup continuously,
so anytime it detects changed files
it will go ahead and back up new copies of those.
But you can also set it to manually,
do it Once Per Day at a specific Time,
or completely remove the schedule
and just when I manually back up.
But we'll go ahead and leave it on Continuous
'cause that's definitely the recommended way to do it
so you don't even have to think about it.
Under Exclusions here, you can choose specific folders,
so if you have specific folders
that you just do not want backed up,
this is where you would add it.
To add a folder that you don't wanna back up,
you just hit the Plus button,
you find your folder,
let's say, I don't wanna back up my Desktop, I choose that,
and now down here, my Desktop folder will not be backed up.
And then by default, here's all the different types of files
that will not be backed up, but you can remove them.
If you have a bunch of disk image files
that you do actually wanna back up or ISOs,
you can actually remove those
so that Backblaze will back up those files.
Over here on Security,
this is where you can set your own encryption key.
By default, Backblaze will protect your key to your files
with your password for your account,
but if you want to take that control completely
out of Backblaze's hands and hold onto that key on your own,
you can do that here by checking the box down here,
and then you can just create
your own private encryption key.
Now this is going to be needed when you restore files.
And if you ever lose that key,
you'll lose access to those backup files.
So make sure that you know what you're doing
if you're going to be creating your own private key.
And over on the Reports tab,
you can see the different types of files on your computer,
the Files Scheduled for Backups,
so here's everything that's waiting
to be backed up currently and any Issues
that the program has had issues with.
Now like I said, the initial backup
is probably going to take a while
for you depending on a number of things,
but what good is a backup if you can't restore.
So let's test out a restore.
So to do a restore, there's a couple options,
you can download it for free from Backblaze's website
which that's what we're going to do.
Or you can order a physical drive if you need the restore
of a large amount of files, or you need it quicker,
you can actually get a physical drive sent to you for a fee.
So we'll Sign in to the web, and here you can see
we have the Free option selected,
and down here is where you can select a Date.
So if you know you deleted a file or modified a file,
and you need to restore a previous version,
you would select the Date
from the last known good version here,
and then select Go.
And then you would get a list of files from that time.
But we're just going to select something that we have
from today.
And we'll just go to, let's say,
and let's just select my Downloads folder,
it looks like we have a Roboto font in there.
That's fine, that's a good test file
so we'll go Continue with Restore,
and now the restore is preparing.
Now, depending on the size of the files
that could take a little while, a couple of minutes,
a couple hours to actually get a notification
that your file is ready to download.
But once your file is ready,
you should be able to find it in here,
and we can see that the file is available for download,
and it's only two megabytes, so it's pretty small.
We'll click Download,
and the file is downloaded to our Downloads folder.
And here we can see, we'll just open that up.
So it gave us a folder in the Downloads folder,
with the full directory of that file that we wanted.
And you can see, and there's all of the Roboto files there
that we just downloaded from our Backblaze backup.
And one last thing that I wanna show you
is how to open up that Backblaze window.
You can of course go up here to the little Menu bar item
and go to Backblaze Preferences,
that will open up the window.
You can also just go to System Preferences,
and then click Backblaze in here,
and that's where you will find it.
Also it's in this window
that you're gonna find the current status,
you see how many files are Selected for Backup
and what the size is, your Backup Schedule,
how many are Remaining,
and what file it is currently Transferring over.
And that's some useful information for each time
you open up the Preference pane.
So that's pretty much it for this Backblaze overview,
and I hope you found it helpful.
I really am an advocate for backups, however you do them,
but if you wanna try out Backblaze for free,
check out the link in the description below.
If you wanna see how you can back up your Mac locally
to a Synology NAS, check out this video right over here.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it,
hit Subscribe if you want,
and I'll see you next time.
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