Today’s Question: Is it possible to back up external hard drives with the Backblaze service you have recommended? If so, how?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can back up an external hard drive to online storage using Backblaze (https://timgrey.me/cloudbackup) by simply enabling the drive in Settings.
More Detail: You can use Backblaze to back up both internal and external hard drives, simply by selecting the drives you want to back up in the Preferences dialog for Backblaze.
To get started first make sure the external hard drives you want to back up are connected to the computer. You can then click the Backblaze icon on the taskbar on Windows or the menu bar on Macintosh and choose Backblaze Preferences from the popup menu. In the Preferences dialog click the Settings button, and then go to the Settings tab within the dialog that appears.
In the “Select Hard Drives to Backup” section toward the bottom of the Settings tab, turn on the checkbox for the hard drives you want to back up with Backblaze. Then click the OK button to apply the change. It may take considerable time for the initial backup to finish depending on your internet speed and how much data is on the drive, but the selected hard drives will then be included in your normal online backup with Backblaze.
Note that I strongly recommend upgrading to the one-year version history option, rather than the default option of thirty days. Without this upgrade, if you leave an external hard drive disconnected for more than thirty days Backblaze will assume you no longer have the hard drive and will delete the backup data associated with that drive.
You can learn more about backing up your photos and other important data to online storage with Backblaze here:
https://timgrey.me/cloudbackup
