File Management

Stuff

As we are constantly traveling, there is a challenge to ensure we have access to all of our files, or digital assets. Movies, pictures, documents, code: they all have to live somewhere. Maria has 256GB of storage and Neil have 128GB, certainly not enough to have everything we own with us locally. This is why we use a combination of cloud storage, our own file server, and backups to manage our digital life.

Disaster Recovery: Backblaze

Disaster Recovery is part of your data backup plan. The idea with disaster recovery is to be able to quickly get back up and running in the event something catastrophic happens to your computer: laptop stolen, laptop destroyed, server catches on fire, etc. The tool we use to mitigate this risk is Backblaze. We run Backblaze on our Mac mini server (which has an up-to-date copy of all of our cloud storage files). This way, all of the data we have is backed up to Backblaze: photos, videos, and documents spread across iCloud, Google Drive, and Amazon Drive. And, Backblaze includes unlimited storage for your backups!

Backblaze is easy to install and configure. It costs a mere $60 per year, and you can add a year of versioned backups as well for only $24. This means that not only do you get disaster recovery (near instant restore after a disaster) you also get older versions of files! Accidentally delete that important slideshow presentation? Restore the last version by logging in to the Backblaze web interface and downloading it. Overwrote the original version of the photo you were just editing by mistake, and now it looks awful? Login and restore the version from yesterday, and all is well with the world.

We can't recommend Backblaze enough for the peace of mind and security it provides. And, for the month of January 2021, you can get a FREE MONTH of Backblaze to try it out and if you decide to pay for it you get an ADDITIONAL TWO FREE MONTHS! That's 15 months of disaster recovery for only $60, or add on a full year of versioning and you pay just $84.

Coming soon:

Cloud Storage: iCloud

Cloud Storage: Google Drive

Cloud Storage: Amazon Drive

Local Backups: Time Machine