BackBlaze Review - The Only Unlimited Backup For Real?

BackBlaze
Website : http://www.backblaze.com
Plan Reviewed : Unlimited
Pricing : $5/mo
Overall : Recommended!
Features :
Support :
Pricing :
Reliability :
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Is BackBlaze The Personal Backup Service You Need?

Online backup services are like personal insurance plans.

Both of them are terrible investments as far as ROI goes, and people realize why these services are around only when something bad has happened to them…or their personal data.

If you’ve seen the horrors brought by losing your valuable data, there are many online solutions to choose from.

From this bunch however, a certain backup service called BackBlaze ‘blazed’ through the competition.

And as you’ll see in this review, BackBlaze’s popularity reached new heights for very good reasons.

 

BackBlaze Pricing And Plans

This company doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to pricing their services.

At $5/month (or $50/year $95/2 years), BackBlaze is very budget friendly.

For less than a hundred bucks, you can keep just about every file you have safe and sound for 2 years while other online backup services cost 2 to 3 times as much.

And that’s it as far as plans go!

There are no complicated tiers or membership levels – making it easier to find the cost range you’re comfortable with.

Yes, there are options when you need them. But they’re very easy to understand.
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Did you know it's only $5/mo for unlimited online backup?

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Good Initial Upload Speed

Right off the bat, BackBlaze tells you that the initial backup can take as long as 7 days to complete.

This isn’t surprising at all – it’s the norm as far as personal backup services go.

So I ran my initial backup – 300GB of images, PDFs, ebooks, MP3s, and videos – and expected to complete the whole shebang in a week.

Well, BackBlaze came back with a pleasant surprise: My 300GB-initial backup took only 3 days to complete.

Boy it’s fast!

While I know that backup speed has a lot to do with my current bandwidth, BackBlaze isn’t the first backup solution I’ve sampled.

Having tried numerous identical services, BackBlaze left them in the dust speed-wise.

Once the initial backup is completed, your files over the cloud are updated on a continuous, incremental basis. It only changes those files in your backup that are changed or modified on your PC.
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Most of the slow backup are due to our internet connection.

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Restoration Options

When emergency strikes and you need to perform restorations, you can opt to restore a single file; a folder; or all of your backed-up files at once through a downloadable zip file.

BackBlaze’s system prepares it and will send you an email notification once the files are good to go.

On the other hand, your backup’s total size might be bigger than you want it to be…and restoration through a downloadable zip file might take too long.

In such cases, you may want to receive a USB thumb drive or USB hard drive with everything in it, and BackBlaze allows you to do just that.

For an additional fee, the guys at BackBlaze will send you the flash or hard drive through FedEx.
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Check Out BackBlaze Awesome Features

Did you know BackBlaze can send you a hard copy of your backup for an additional fee?

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Is BackBlaze A Safe & Secure Cloud Backup?

You may not be a company who has a lot of confidential documents and files to safeguard from prying eyes.

However, with the level of security that BackBlaze provides, it’s as if you are one.

Once your data is compressed, it’s encrypted using AES military-grade encryption.

From there, your data is moved to the cloud using secure SSL connection. You can even create your own private encryption key if you so desire.

As far as file types go, you can backup just about any format or type except application and operating system files.

You can check out their website to see the full list of file formats that are not supported with the service.

Moving forward, you do have several options for scheduling your backup:

  1. You can schedule the service to run at times that are most convenient for you (ex.: once a day).
  2. Alternatively, you can choose the continuous option especially if your files are updated numerous times throughout the day.

As for the backup speed, you can settle for “Automatic Throttle.”

Yes, you can change the speed settings manually but this is mostly reserved for advanced users.

It’s so much easier to let BackBlaze do all the legwork in the speed-throttling department as their “FSCAN Engine” ensures that your PC works at the ideal speed while the data transfers are maintained at the fastest rate possible.
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Check Out BackBlaze Security Features

Did you know that BackBlaze datacenter grow 1000x since they started?

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What’s Bad For BackBlaze?

While BackBlaze has all the earmarks of a reliable personal backup solution, it’s not all rainbows and roses.

For starters, it doesn’t have any file sharing capabilities or features, which you see in other backup and file syncing services like and Dropbox.

Keep in mind too that BackBlaze isn’t capable of backing-up operating system and application files – making full and bare-metal restores impossible.

Moreover, at the time of this writing, they only provide online support, which might alarm some users.

So far however, BackBlaze’s online support has been very responsive in my experience.

And last but not the least, file versioning is quite limited – the service only keeps a file’s versions for the last 30 days.

 

Conclusion: Is BackBlaze The Well-Rounded Backup Options?


Weighing both its pros and the cons, BackBlaze’s backup service has my stamp of approval and I can confidently recommend this to anyone who needs an affordable but reliable backup service for their personal files.

There are a lot of things I loved about the service.

For one thing, they’re one of the few companies out there who doesn’t bombard their free trial users with daily emails and popups – harassing you to sign up as a paid customer.

But more importantly, the service itself is right on the money at so many levels:

  • Its user-interface is as straightforward as it could get
  • Their price is easy on the pocket while their plans are simple to understand
  • Unlimited storage space…FOR REAL
  • The hardware and software infrastructure they use is top-notch and secure
  • You have multiple restoration options and you can order hardware copies of your backup
  • And those are just to name a few!

Unless you’re looking for an enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery service, BackBlaze’s backup service is feature-packed and reliable enough to keep your PC’s data safe, sound, and easily recoverable.

It’s an excellent pick especially for users who want a ‘set it and forget it’ backup solution that they can easily turn to in case of emergencies.

But don’t take my word for it. BackBlaze offers a 15-day trial period…of the full service if I may add.

Take it for a test drive and let me know what you think.
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Did you know that BackBlaze offer Prorated refund policy?

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