Backblaze Saved the day

This is going to be a bit of a long read. I hope I do not confuse you too much along the way.

Let me start by saying I pride myself in having a good backup system for my photos & videos in place. Having an IT background, I realize the importance of having multiple backups in multiple locations. I had all of that in place, luckily, because last week I had a major screw-up.

I keep all of my current photos on an external SSD that connects directly to my MAC. I was using a large desktop hard drive from G-Drive to store all of my archived photos.

I have been using a small NAS (network-attached storage) that I was backing up all of my data locally. I use a program for my Mac called Carbon Copy Cloner to perform these backups. CCC allows you to create “tasks” that create copies of whatever data you select to a drive that you select in the task’s settings. You can also set this up to occur as often as you like. So I had my laptop and most current photos set to backup to the NAS every night. I then set my photo archive to backup weekly since those files rarely change. I then use Backblaze to back all files up to the cloud. Backing up to another location is important in the event of a disaster. Plus, Backblaze is about $6/month so the price alone is worth my sanity.

Here’s an example of the Carbon Copy Cloner screen and how I set it up:

About a week ago, I decided I would move away from the NAS, as I wasn’t using much of its features and I would go with a locally attached storage option from OWC. I decided to go with their ThunderBay device. This connects directly to my computer and sends nothing across the network. The advantage of this is speed. It is much, much faster than the NAS. The disadvantage is I would not be able to access that data remotely. This disadvantage wasn’t a big deal to me as I had never really needed remote access anyway. For stuff that I may need remote access to, I throw up on Google Drive.

About that same time, I also decided that I would replace the G-Drive with another product from OWC called the Express 4M2. The Express 4M2 is a device that also connects directly to the computer but it has 4 NVME slots. NVME drives are SSD drives that are much faster than your traditional spinning drives, like the one in the G-Drive unit. I was going to move everything from the G-Drive to this new 4M2 unit eventually. I had to order drives and wait for them to show up first.

I tell you all of that to set the stage…

When I initially set up the Thunderbay unit I went into Adobe Lightroom and moved all of my archived photos from the G-Drive to the new Thunderbay device. This Thunderbay device was much faster than the G-Drive, so I thought I would move everything there until the drives showed up for the 4M2. This took a very long time, but it eventually finished. Fast Forward a few days later and a problem arose with the Thunderbay unit. In communicating with OWC support, they asked if I could reformat the unit. I thought, sure all of my archived files were on the old G-Drive anyway, so no big deal. So, I continued with the troubleshooting steps, and we eventually discovered there was a hardware problem with the device, and they were going to rectify that.

When the new Thunderbay device showed up a few days later, I went to copy all of the archived photos from the G-Drive to the Thunderbay and I realized….that I was an idiot. For some reason, I thought I had COPIED the files from the G-Drive to the ThunderBay, but I had MOVED them instead. The files were not on the G-Drive and now I had erased them from the ThunderBay a few days prior for troubleshooting.

I pondered for a bit thinking I had lost almost 20 years’ worth of images. Then I checked the Backblaze website.

I’ll try to explain simply how Backblaze works. Every so often the client on your computer checks the files against your vault in the cloud. If you have added new files it adds them to the cloud. If you have erased files, then it erases them from the cloud, too. It is a carbon copy of your files for the day. When I went to initially check Backblaze I saw no archived images since I removed them from the drives that were being backed up, they also got removed from the list of files for Backblaze to backup. However, Backblaze keeps a history of your backups for 30 days. I was able to go back a week or so and find all of the images I thought I had lost. What a relief!

Here’s an example of the Backblaze screen:

This was going to be a lot of data. Backblaze has an option to recover your data to a USB hard drive and ship the drive to you for $189. Ok, no problem, 20 years’ worth of work is worth $189! So that’s the option I went with. Then I thought I might be able to download the files also since I have a very fast fiber internet connection. So, I started downloading. This took a lot of time as you are limited in size to the amount of data you can download from the Backblaze site at a time. I went through, year by year downloading until I was able to recover everything. This took about 4 days of downloading, extracting, and moving files to their new location on the 4M2, which was ready to go at this point, and reconnecting them in Adobe Lightroom. One of the cool things I was reading on the Backblaze site is that if you choose the USB hard drive option, you can return the drive after you copy your data off of it and they will refund you minus the shipping costs. It’s hard to beat that!

So, I am now fully restored to the new system. I still store my current projects on the external SSD drive. Now my archived photos & videos are on the OWC Express 4M2 and everything is backed up to the OWC Thunderbay device. Then all of this is backed up to the cloud via Backblaze.

Now, let’s hope I don’t get any new ideas. :)