World Backup Day

You got a backup, right?

There's an awkward silence and the glass penny drops to the solid floor, shattering.

The number of times I've said that phrase, perhaps less courteously than I should have. Yet, despite having precious photos or sentimental text messages, some people still do not backup their data. It's odd but a computer OS that has a really simple, turnkey, backup process that just needs an external hard drive or a phone with a cloud based backup that costs a paltry 79p, is too much for some folk.

So because it's World Backup Day, I thought it might be responsible to mention my backup strategy.

For my iPhone and iPad, I pay the extra and use iCloud to backup everything. It's a daily backup, as long as they are connected to Wi-Fi and are either on charge or have sufficient battery (over 20%).

The Mac has an external SSD for photos and a larger drive connected and all use Time Machine to make a local copy. Just in case the worst happens, I also use Backblaze.

Backblaze is an excellent online backup service that stores all the Mac data safely and securely. It uses encryption and works quietly in the background. In fact, you hardly notice the tiny preference pane operating in normal use. Of course, it took a while to get everything uploaded, but now it's there, it's just changes that backup. What I really love is that storage is unlimited and the plan renews every two years. I did need to restore something and it was easy to find what I needed and then download.

I wholly recommend Backblaze for backup because backing up is important and, if I'm honest, I've seen too many tears from those didn't.

Backblaze has not sponsored this post, but if you click the link, you get a free trial and I get a free month, some might say, that's a win-win scenario!