Today’s Question: You have talked about a backup system for photos, etc. beyond external hard drives. Well, living in Montana where the wildfires are everywhere this year, I’m now getting nervous. My only backup is an external hard drive sitting right next to my computer. If we lost our house to fire, and my computer/hard drives burned, I’d lose EVERYTHING. What do you recommend for off-site photo storage backup?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I recommend Backblaze (https://timgrey.me/onlinebackup) as an excellent online backup solution that provides you with a great way to build a remote backup into your workflow.
More Detail: One of the key features of a good backup solution is a remote backup. This can take a variety of forms, but an online backup provides a very good way to add a remote backup to your workflow.
You could, of course, backup a primary hard drive to more than one backup drives and keep one of those backup drives at a different location. For example, you could keep your photos drive at the office, and bring one of your backup drives home with you. The idea is that if something happens that causes you to lose your storage at one location, the other location will (hopefully) not be affected.
One convenient approach to having a remote backup of your photos and other important data is to use an online backup. As long as you have a good Internet connection, your online backup will update to reflect new or updated files on your computer relatively quickly.
I’ve used Backblaze for an online backup and find it to be a great solution that is easy to use. In addition to providing you with a remote backup of your data, Backblaze provides unlimited data storage and easy recovery options including online download or the option to have your data shipped to you on a hard drive for an additional fee.
You can learn more about the Backblaze Personal Backup service here: