We no longer present backblaze, which saves all the data on your PC or Mac in the cloud, 100% encrypted and secure. It’s super practical so you don’t have to worry about choosing what you want to save since the space is unlimited, all for $70/year.
The offer called “Personal Backup” is very cool, because cheap and unlimited, but it has several small “problems”. Already, there’s no client for Linux. But above all, you cannot back up everything that is a “network” disk on Backblaze. So if you have a NAS for example, well you won’t be able to store it with them.
Unless you take their B2 subscription which offers pure storage without client software. And backup tools that can be found everywhere, most often integrating B2, alongside other things like Amazon S3, or Azure Backup.
Except that if you already pay the Backblaze Personal Backup, it’s a bit boring to have to redo everything on B2. Especially since there, we are getting out of the interesting offer since you will have to pay for what you consume.
So how?
- Option 1, you decide to adopt a One Life mentality and let go of any notion of backup.
- Option 2, you decide to checkout because you are loaded with money and have time
- Option 3, you cheat and arrange to back up your network drives to Backblaze with the “Personal Backup” option.
But first, a little reminder of the principle of 3-2-1 backups. The concept is simple: to have effective and serious backups, you must achieve:
3 backups. 2 of these backups are stored on different media (for example, an external disk + a NAS) and the 3rd backup must be kept offsite (so not at your place). It can be on the cloud or at Tata Claude.
The idea is that if a fire breaks out in your home because you heated your house with your furniture because of Bruno Lemaire, well even if your whole family burned down, at least you have a backup of your episodes of Naruto.
Obviously to save time, you can send the first 2 backups (local) from your computer and the last off-site from your NAS.
Then to return to Backblaze in the event of a problem, you can then recover your data either by downloading them directly from their site, or by having a hard drive containing your data delivered to you.
So, now how do you backup ALL of your NAS to Backblaze when network drives are not supported in their client application?
Well it’s simple, you have to cheat a bit and make the tool believe that the network directories you want to send there are local directories. And for that, 2 ways to do it depending on your OS.
If you are on Windows, you will need to use the free software Dokany which allows you to mount various and varied file systems (external disk, network disk, etc.) to integrate them into your current file system so that all your Windows applications can access them transparently. So the Backblaze client will see these files as if they were local and proceed with the backup.
You may of course have other use cases for this tool.
And on macOS, it’s the same concept except it’s not the same tool. And this one is paying, because people who use Apple software obviously have a lot of money.
You will therefore have to offer the software AutoMounter for the low price of $17 to mount your remote drives just about anywhere on your macOS system.
And that’s it, it’s not more complicated than that. And obviously, the backups will be done smoothly, with the Windows or MacOS client. backblaze as part of your Personal Backup plan.
