I had a tape backup unit for my personal computer (this was before there was a central IT backup service) that appeared to be working however it never actually wrote anything to tape! This was late 1980’s.Ī server computer for a project I was on was never backed up. Luckily they were always able to do so, but I have encountered three times when backups were not being performed. So every time I was at a new job or had a different IT department I would “lose” a file and ask for them to restore it. I got advice back in the '80’s to always verify backups. Who knows? Watch me lose a drive now in the next month. I’ll probably pick up a smaller local drive and backup Photos and some other crucial data locally using CCC or something similar, but does this make sense. If anyone has recommendations for consumer type set it and forget backup services which are reasonably priced, I may take a second online backup service on also.

So I’m probably going to ditch the time machine drive for everything and go all in on Backblaze. 8 years equates to the cost of a new super sized time machine drive. Then I remembered that Backblaze now offer an option to extend retention of old versions from 30 days to 1 year for a couple of quid a months, i.e. In both of the cases my data drives died, I had to restore from Backblaze (500GB and 2TB restores at the time) but I got all of my data back (I Backblaze).īased on that I wondered about how useful Time Machine actually is to me. On the two occasions that my data drives have died, I couldn’t get to the backups of them on Time Machine as I couldn’t visualise it within Time Machine (the application) to be able to restore the data. Apart from restoring the odd file from time to time, I’ve never done a complete restore from a Time Machine backup for one very simple reason. So I started to think about the Time Machine backup.

I have approx 5TB of data that I back up, but I’m looking to expand further and when looking at 12TB drives to take the next step up for a new Time machine drive and relegate the old 8TB Time Machine drive to archive, I’m looking at more than £200 Twice backups have saved my bacon (and my photos) but I’m building a Plex library and it’s getting pretty massive.

At the moment I have a local time machine backup and Backblaze.

Time machine backblaze