If you are looking for a free month's use of Backblaze for your photo backup (or any file), check the link at the bottom of this page.
You read horror stories online but always think they can never happen to you. “I am more careful than this”, and “surely the victims must have made some silly mistake I never make”.
More specifically, there is no way I can suddenly lose gigabytes of photos.
Well…
This actually happened to me, and I thought it could never happen.
I always lean on the safe side: I back up all my photos at any given time. More than once. I even bring a photo backup drive from London to my house in Florence every time I travel back. And when I go on holiday, I always save my photos to a wireless external drive and my laptop.
I'm sure other photographers take even more precautions, but I thought this was fairly reasonable. And safer than what the majority of people I know are doing.
But…
Sh*t happens.
So, one day, I opened Lightroom to review a bunch of photos (I do that before doing a photo backup to avoid wasting space with rejected shots). And it was taking quite a long while to start. Eventually, I couldn't wait any longer, so I forced it to quit. But when I reopened it, all the photos were gone. They were not physically in my hard drive anymore. I had transferred them to my computer 2-3 days before, so they were not in the SD card either.
I was frankly in disbelief. An entire folder of photos had vanished just like that.
There are ways to recover deleted files, like a command-line tool I used in the past called PhotoRec. But I have concerns about it because it hasn't been updated since 2015. Also, PhotoRec renames the files and mixes them in different folders (and it recovers ALL files ever deleted from the drive, not just the photos you want).
So, I would only use PhotoRec as a desperate last resort.
Luckily, I do have another backup solution in place: Backblaze.
Now, I don't work for Backblaze, and this post is not sponsored in any way. The software just happened to have saved me, recovering my photos from this disaster, and I'm genuinely thankful.
I'm using the software daily, and I'll have an affiliate link to an offer later, but this post is simply a genuine big THANK YOU to the developers.
What is Backblaze?
Backblaze is a cloud-based backup solution that works continuously in the background to save your files. I use it mainly as a photo backup system, but it can handle any file. It is a subscription service, and my Personal Unlimited plan is only $6/month. Which I think is nothing compared to losing all your files.
It's a bit like insurance: you don't believe it's worth the expense until you really need it. And I needed it (like my camera insurance, but that's another story).
Like any modern application, it supports 2-Factor Authentication, so only you can access your files in the cloud.
If you cannot download the files you want to recover, they will send you a hard drive (for free if you return the drive within 30 days).
Thanks to affiliate links like the one I have posted below, you might also get months for free.
Again, it's not just a photo backup system.
As I said, luckily, I had the Backblaze subscription in place. All I had to do was log in to my account and navigate to a previous state of my drive—one created before the crash.
All my photos were there, saved in the Backblaze cloud. I clicked the button to download them, and they all returned to my hard drive :) The speed varies according to bandwidth and preferences, but all files were restored in the end. Phew!
Be Careful
Now, Backblaze doesn't do miracles: if you lose your photos while transferring from your card to a folder monitored by the app, Backblaze has not yet had time to upload them to the cloud. So they will be lost. Hence, copy the photos first; don't move them straight away.
The time it takes for a full backup depends on your upload bandwidth. But once your files are uploaded, you are completely safe.
Do you think this might be as helpful to you as it was to me? Keep reading…
My offer
Here's my affiliate link for a free month of Backblaze: https://secure.backblaze.com/r/013ktp
With this link, you can register and try the software for free for a month. If you don't like it or it doesn't help you, you uninstall it, and that's it. But if you like it and decide to subscribe, then I get a month free too.
There's no catch, and I don't get rich only by having you click a link :) But if you appreciate this, you can thank me with a free month of usage. Cheers.
And have a photo backup plan. Of any kind. I can testify it's worth it.
