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UNLIMITED Cloud Backup! - Backup Your M1 Mac with Backblaze

10:08 video

One of the most dreadful feelings is realizing you accidentally deleted photos you care about, a big project’s files or financial documents. Years ago I accidentally wiped an external drive with a lot of things I needed, and my heart sank. Third-party tools might recover data, but you’re better off making sure you have good backups. The cloud backup service I use and recommend is Backblaze. It’s not a sponsor of this video, but there’s a link in the description for a 15-day free trial, and I may earn a small commission.

Backup strategy: 3-2-1

The easiest way to back up a Mac is an external hard drive with built-in Time Machine, and with several Macs you can back all of them up to a NAS, like I showed in a previous video. The best strategy is the 3-2-1 method: three copies of your data, two of them local on different media (your photos on your computer and in a Time Machine backup on an external drive) and one copy off-site. You could keep a second Time Machine drive somewhere else, but then you have to remember to bring it home, update it and move it off-site again; in practice people are lazy, and a disaster can hit with a very old backup. Sync services like iCloud Drive or Google Drive aren’t a backup either: delete a file in one place, and it may be deleted from the cloud drive too.

Why Backblaze

It backs up all your files continuously in the background. It’s a full-computer cloud backup that, at the time of the video, started at $6 a month for unlimited backups, so even an 8 TB internal drive is backed up for $6 a month. Unlike some other companies, it also backs up external drives. It keeps unlimited revisions for 30 days, upgradeable to a one-year or forever retention period.

Setting it up

  1. From the link, click Try it for Free, create an account with an email and password, and download the installer.
  2. Open the disk image and double-click the Backblaze installer, then click Install Now (a couple of minutes).
  3. Grant full disk access when prompted so Backblaze can back up everything: open the Settings pane, unlock it (I used Touch ID), and if Backblaze isn’t listed, drag the app in and check it. Return to the installer and close it.

The 15-day trial starts and backs up the whole computer by default, in the background. The first backup will take a while, depending on how many files you have, your ISP’s upload speed and whether your computer is on.

Settings

  • Settings: the computer name, how often to be notified if the computer hasn’t backed up in X days, and which additional drives (your external drives) to back up.
  • Performance: throttling for upload speed or processing power. Most people don’t need changes, but if backups interfere with other internet use in your home, uncheck the automatic box and configure faster backups or a faster network. It shows an approximate gigabytes per day, so you can estimate: with 100 GB of files at 2 GB per day, it takes about 50 days.
  • Schedule: continuous by default (recommended), or once per day at a time, or manual.
  • Exclusions: folders you don’t want backed up (use the plus button), and the file types excluded by default (like disk images and ISOs), which you can remove if you want them backed up.
  • Security: by default, Backblaze protects the key to your files with your account password. You can create your own private encryption key, taking that out of Backblaze’s hands, but you’ll need it to restore, and if you lose it, you lose access to your backups.
  • Reports: the types of files on your computer, files scheduled for backup and any issues.

Restoring

A backup is no good if you can’t restore, so I tested it. You can download a restore for free from the Backblaze website, or, for a large amount of data or speed, order a physical drive for a fee. Sign in on the web, choose the free option and a date (if you deleted or modified a file, pick the last known good date), and select files. I picked a Roboto font from my Downloads folder; it prepared the restore (which could take minutes to hours depending on size), and a notification said it was ready. It was only 2 MB, so I downloaded it, and it gave me a folder with the full directory path of the file I wanted.

You can open the Backblaze window from the menu bar item (Backblaze Preferences) or System Preferences, which shows the current status: files selected for backup, size, the schedule, files remaining and the file currently being transferred.

I’m an advocate for backups, however you do them. If you want to try Backblaze, there’s a link in the description, and see my video on backing up a Mac to a Synology NAS.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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