New Year, New Backup Strategy

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This is just a friendly nudge to remind all you fellow photo nerds out there that inexpensive, excellent online backup is available right here via Backblaze. This is the perfect time to overhaul your backup strategy and a remote backup has to be a part of it.

You can read more about my initial experience starting with Backblaze here. I’m also happy to report that after swapping out the puny SSD that came stock in my MacBook Pro for a 1TB drive from OWC1, I was able to retarget my new boot drive via “Transfer Back-up State…” in the application menu bar. I was worried that moving contents from an external drive would result in having to redo the lion’s share of my backup, but Backblaze was intelligent enough to know I had merged the files from my old external drive onto the new larger boot drive!

My opinion on Backblaze hasn’t changed. They’re great, and if you have a lot of photos you cherish, whether they’re professional, sentimental, or otherwise, you owe it to yourself to have a remote backup you can count on.

  1. This drive has caused some strange behaviour with my MacBook so I’m hesitant to recommend it whole-heartedly for now. I had to reset my NVRAM (aka PRAM), and SMC, which isn’t out of the ordinary. However just yesterday, my MacBook showed 30-something% battery, then turned off.

    Attempting to power it on showed the “I’m out of battery icon,” so I plugged it in, powered it on, then after many seconds was presented with a blinking folder icon. Perfect. That meant my computer couldn’t find an OS to boot from. Whilst that folder was blinking, I plugged my previous boot drive in via the “Envoy” (fancy name for the external enclosure that came with the drive), and the Mac immediately saw the OS on that drive and happily booted up. That was pretty impressive. I continued booting, ran Disk Utility on my new internal SSD which mounted without issue and showed no errors, selected it as my start-up drive, and booted to it without issue.

    Things seem to be running smoothly now, but I can’t say I’m not worried the same thing will happen again, and now I have to carry my backup external drive with me to work, which is something I hoped to avoid by having a larger boot volume. Ah well. How’s that for a footnote? ;-) ↩