It continued to report this for the next 10 days, even though I could see the bztransmit process chugging away in the background. At a certain point, halfway through the initial backup period, the pref pane informed me that the backup was complete, even though it wasn’t. It’s elegant, but I did have some problems along the way. Installation and backup management takes place through a preference pane on the Mac. After the initial backup is complete, incrementals happen quickly, with no interaction required. Backblaze noted that the initial backup could take a couple of weeks, but in my case, the initial backup took more than three weeks, even over a fast broadband connection. My starter data set was 300 GBs – a healthy pile of bytes. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, so I went for it.
And you still haven’t got fire/flood/theft insurance. If you go for the one-year commitment, you get the service for $4/month, so let’s say two years for the drive you just bought “cheap” to pay for itself. Let’s say you spend $100 for a 500GB drive. That’s the equivalent of 20 months of Backblaze service. Drive space is dirt cheap these days, so it’s tempting to rely on purchased drives, but let’s do the math. For $5/month, you get hands-off unlimited backup of your entire system to their data center. This problem had been hovering in the back of my mind for quite a while, when a dad at the local park mentioned that he had had success with Backblaze. That worked fine, but was a bit too manual, and I had had occasional problems getting backups to complete to the non-Mac filesystem on the Infrant. Plus, my backup system was based on rsync. One good earthquake and all those images and videos of our child’s early years would be Gone Daddy Gone. It’s worked well, but the big problem it didn’t solve is the fire/flood/theft scenario. Even went as far as drilling holes in the floor and threading CAT-5 under the house so I could keep the Infrant in the closet, where it would make less noise. It’s done its job admirably, and has given us the confidence to back up the whole family without fear of drive failure. Four years ago, long before Time Machine and the wide availability of cloud storage, I purchased a RAID/NAS for home backups.
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