Backblaze 2.0

Three-year-old Backblaze offers one of the simpler online backup approaches you'll see, with unlimited storage costing as little as $3.96 per month per computer. It starts protecting your data as soon as you install it, choosing files and folders to back up for you and running constantly in the background. The latest version aims to improve upload speed while still letting you throttle its connection usage if you need that for other activities. The service is focused on hands-off computer backup and restore, which is fine, but you don't get any of the perks offered by the competitors like SOS Online Backup ($79.95/year, 4.5 stars), Carbonite ($59/year, 3 stars), or Mozy (65.89/year, 3 stars) such as secure file sharing, mobile app access, or complementary (and complimentary) local backup software. One plus it does add not found in the competition?an Apple-like "Locate my computer" service.

Signup and Setup
Backblaze's pricing turns out to be pretty consistent with the rest of the industry, though getting unlimited online storage for a single PC for just $47.52 is pretty darned good when you compare it with Carbonite's $59 for the same. But there's a catch?that price is just for 2 year contracts; if you want to pay month-to-month, it's $5 per computer, which changes the cost of a year's protection for 3 computers to a pricey $180. Protecting the same number of computers costs $79.95 in our Editors' Choice SOS Online Backup with a 50GB cap or $99.99 with a 100GB cap. A free 15-day trial gives you a taste of the service's full functionality.

After a quick 3MB download, you create or enter account credentials to get started installing Backblaze. There are 11 language choices, including the major Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Once installed and linked to an online account, Backblaze combs through your drive to determine what needs to be backed up and starts automatically protecting you.

Interface
Like all online backup software, Backblaze adds an icon to your system tray that can open the software's Control Panel, access help, check for updates, transfer backup state for moving to a new PC, and launch the restore website. Unlike most, it doesn't animate to show its state, which could be a plus or a minus depending on whether you find that distracting. The Control Panel is quite simple, with just three buttons?Backup Now, Restore Options, and Settings. The last is divided into eight tabs. The Restore interface is completely Web-based?any buttons in the Control Panel or tray icon that talk about Restoring open your browser to Backblaze's login page.

Unlike many other online backup services, Backblaze offers no Explorer OS integration. This means you can go to a file in a folder, right click, and choose "back this up now." You'll just have to wait for the automatic algorithm used by Backblaze to find the new or changed file and back it up when it gets around to it. So if you need to get specific files backed up immediately, you're better off with a competitor like SOS Online Backup.

Choosing What to Back up and When
Backblaze takes a far different approach to letting you choose which files to back up: It doesn't. Rather, it automatically backs up everything it deems worthy. This means all images, documents?everything but operating system, applications, and temporary files. Since the service is all-you-can-eat, or rather, all-you-can-back up, this strategy makes some sense, though I'm a proponent of a little more control. You may not want to tie up a weaker Internet connection with so much traffic, and there may be files you don't care about copying online.

The only control Backblaze does offer over what you back up is to exclude folders. You do this on the Preference dialog's Exclusions tab by hitting Add Folder. But I don't see why not make it simpler and just present the user with a folder and file tree and let him or her see what's been selected for backup and give them the choice to include or exclude whatever they see fit. By default, .ISO disc image files (which can be huge) and files over 4GB are excluded, but you can even include these.

The service will back up files on connected USB storage, but these must be connected at the time of install or added through Settings later. Only problem was, the USB drive I plugged in didn't show up in Backblaze's settings, even after Windows Explorer acknowledge the drive was attached. Network and NAS drives won't be backed up at all.

?Backblaze also takes an original approach to scheduling. By default, it just runs continually, looking for new or changed files in non-excluded folders and processing and uploading them at its own pace. The Schedule tab in the settings dialog offers but three options: this default Continuously, once per day, and Only When I Click Backup Now. You can control performance on another tab, either choosing autothrottling in which the software determines how much of your Internet bandwidth to take up, or use a slider to move from faster network to faster backups.

The approach Backblaze uses doesn't lend itself to upload speed testing, but I gave it a shot anyway. For testing, I chose the fastest backup setting to see how fast Backblaze could upload my 100MB test batch of mixed files. It took it about two minutes to see that the files were added, and then another 3 minutes to process and upload them. The total of just under five minutes for the test was not so far off from the leader SOS Online Backup's performance. For a less scientific measure of upload performance, I selected 8.2GB of files to back up, and Backblaze handled this easily in 6.5 hours, which comparable to upload speeds offered by other services. I did use a superfast corporate connection for both tests, which minimized the effect of bandwidth on the results and maximizes that of the software's processing and the service's server speeds. I can't say if the latest version actually cuts upload times as claimed, not having tested the previous version, but its performance was good.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/mok0UH5kx1E/0,2817,2395755,00.asp

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