When you find out that some of your home videos have never been backed up in the first place, it might be too late. I do question some of these defaults, though, especially the file size limit. The best backup system gets out of your way and just does its job. I generally like Backblaze’s lack of configurability. The four Backblaze processes that are running on my system while I’m writing this consume about 500 MB of memory (as reported by Activity Monitor), and that’s with a backup size of almost 2 TB (comprising 1.2 million files).īackblaze’s default list of excluded directories and file extensions. Everything feels way faster than with CrashPlan’s client app. I never noticed it taxing the system in any way. The backup daemon works very unobtrusively. The client is very Apple-like, purposely designed to get out of your way and give you as few options as possible. The Backblaze Mac client installs its GUI component as a panel in System Preferences. I’m on a 50/10 Mbit/s connection and I regularly see the Backblaze client utilizing the full upload bandwidth, with an average of about 4–5 Mbit/s in practice (= approximately 2 GB per hour). Upload speeds to Backblaze have generally been much better for me than with CrashPlan from my location (Berlin). (And hopefully the NSA can’t break the encryption, either.) Backblaze claims they cannot decrypt the data in their data centers if you do this.

The Backblaze client allows you to specify your own private passphrase that is used to encrypt all your data before it leaves your computer. Like CrashPlan, Backblaze offers unlimited storage for the fantastic price of $5 per month and computer.

Now that I have been using Backblaze for the past nine months, I believe I can make a fair evaluation of the service.

Backblaze is the second online backup service ( after CrashPlan) I have tried for a significant amount of time.

Backblaze crashplan