Saved by Backblaze

Though perhaps not in the usual way.

Despite today being the first day of a month of unpaid leave as part of transitioning to a new career, I got a text from my boss. When I’d sent him a document earlier in the week I’d sent the old version, before all of my edits.

I’m a six hour drive away from home already, but I brought plenty of gear, so this should be no problem, right? Firing up the laptop I fairly quickly realized that rather than iCloud or OneDrive, the working version of this document had been in my Downloads folder on my Mac Studio, which doesn’t get synced to the cloud anywhere. While I’d left my Mac mini home server on in case I needed remote access to anything, I’d turned the Mac Studio off before I left. I started thinking about how long it would take to recreate the work that I’d done when I remembered Backblaze.

Sure enough, I was able to log in to the website, enter my encryption key, and download a copy of the document from their backup of my Downloads folder. Sent it off, easy peasy.

16 Likes

I’ve done this to download files to another computer as part of a recovery test but haven’t needed it in real life yet. I consider it another benefit of a cloud backup.

3 Likes

On a more traditional recovery front, I can attest to Backblaze’s send a recovery drive process. I recently came back from a trip to discover that my Drobo 5D (direct attached) was dead; not a failed drive but totally dead. It took a few days for the restore drive to be ready but they shipped it overnight and I was back up on a replacement USB drive within a week. The data is back in sync so I erased the drive and just need to ship it back for credit.

1 Like