499: Backups and Updates

Lars · September 23, 2019, 5:57pm

The biggest merit of Iomega was to infuse backup paranoia into thousands of users.

Lampornis · October 1, 2019, 2:52pm

Okay, this episode convinced me that my backup plan was inadequate. So, I am in the process of getting that squared away. I’ve signed up for BackBlaze which has worked fine except that I am running the Catalina beta which BackBlaze does not yet support. Backing up my laptop just fine but will not yet backup my external hard drives (from what I can gather Catalina changes how they interact with externals). As soon as I acquire some additional drives I will start cloning things as well. Backing up all my photos via Amazon’s Prime Photos (Amazon Drive) since I get unlimited photo storage. Not the most elegant solution, but no cost beyond my Prime membership. Photos also on an external drive and iCloud. Getting there.

bowline · October 1, 2019, 9:49pm

“The new operating system from Apple, Mac OS 10.15 Catalina (named after a California island), is releasing any day now and we’ll be ready for it when it does. We’ve had a beta build released for over a month to help us test and make sure that we’re working properly with the new operating system (OS), and we’re seeing positive results from the field!”

Lampornis · October 2, 2019, 1:18am

Thanks. This makes it look as if they are ready to support Catalina. I did install the latest version with no luck, but they suggest that Catalina will require approval of a number of permissions so it is likely I have missed one or more. I have sent a request to support to see if they can help.

Lampornis · October 3, 2019, 4:37am

Problem with BackBlaze and the Catalina beta solved. Here is what I got from BackBlaze support that worked:

Thank you for reaching out. Catalina is not officially supported yet, however you can try the following steps that have worked to get customers backing up normally on Catalina OS.

First, get beta installer from files.backblaze.com and run it over your current installation. Do not uninstall first. Then, please do these steps:

Open System Preferences
Select Security & Privacy
Select the Privacy Tab
Unlock the preference pane by clicking on the lock icon in the lower-left corner
Select Full Disk Access from the left-hand column
Click on the + button
Select the System Preferences application found under /Applications
Reboot your computer.
Select the volume(s) for backup as usual

Ricky · October 3, 2019, 7:57pm

I am STILL in a quagmire of “how-to” with the new IOS/iPad OS. I absolutely totally agree that cloud sync is NOT a backup, and has never been, (I have been preaching that for years. Mostly to deaf ears). It is simply way to off load data from a device to the cloud, to save space on the device, (yea, I know, and to allow other devices to access that data), BUT, what happens on the device, happens in the cloud, ie, deletion and overwrites. (And I started doing backups way back when we were using the hottest thing out there…cassette tapes).

For me, I am 100% IOS now days. The read/write to a external hard drive is very exciting, except, in “my case”, I have one 500GB NTFS drive with a ton of important data on it, and I can not access it, unless I go buy a Windows based machine, (THAT’S nuts). Then I have three 1TB external drives that I can read, but yet have figured out how to backup my iCloud data to. And last, but not least, I have another 1TB external hard drive that I formatted it when it was brand new, on my now dead MacBook Pro, and I cannot access it. I don’t remember which Apple file system that I used to format it to, and to my knowledge, there is no way to reformat it using iPad OS. Oh yea. And I bought all the adapters, cables and larger power supply, so that I could access these drives. Apple, you are close, but ya need to complete the bridge. We already have a bridge to nowhere up in Alaska, thanks to a politician.

jec0047 · October 4, 2019, 2:31am

I would like to add BackBlaze to my backup strategy but I have read in other threads that the BackBlaze client is unreliable.

bowline · October 4, 2019, 12:43pm

Not true, at least for the vast majority of users. Since there’s a free trial you can learn for yourself.

One of its main advantages over Crashplan’s consumer product (now discontinued) is that Backblaze installs as a System Preference while Crashplan was a(n occasionally wonky) Java app. Crashplan promised to update the app to a background app like the one used for the business plan, but never did.

cornchip · October 4, 2019, 2:57pm

I’ve also found Backblaze to be quite stable. My only issue was they took longer to ship a drive to me than I wanted, but they rightly pointed out I asked them to retrieve ~3 million files as opposed to the average few hundred thousand.

Lampornis · October 10, 2019, 2:24pm

I signed up for Backblaze right after this episode aired and the best compliment I can give is that it does its thing and I’ve never had to think about it. Did hit a small glitch with backing up external drives, an issue related to the fact that I was running Catalina beta, but support helped me resolve the issue quickly even though they were not supporting Catalina at the time. Really pleased with how it is working.

jackimac · June 25, 2020, 4:44am

Yep - everything happily saved in 1password