Backup of your data files is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the continuity and integrity of your data. For several years now, I’ve centralized and backed up my files and family data, like photos, on my Synology server, like a packrat. Backup should be automatic to be useful, as from my experience, if it’s not automatic (like Time Machine on Apple), it doesn’t happen.

My backup strategy for backing up the server wasn’t particularly well implemented though, because I simply copied the new files onto external hard drive(s). As the volume of files grew, I had to split backups onto two drives and use one drive for media (music, movies. TV shows, photos) and another drive for user files, complicating doing the backup, which was manual. As long as disaster in the form of fire, theft or weather didn’t strike, this is fine, but that’s a lot of “ifs”. This arrangement bothered me, but I hadn’t done any real work to see what alternatives there were since CloudSync could not back up the server directly to my cloud PC backup provider, Crashplan.

With a recent update to the CloudSync application on Synology, they added Backblaze B2 to the options which already included Amazon. Backblaze was attractive for its pricing of $0.005/gig/day. One month’s storage of my 56k (228 gig) photos ended up costing me the grand total of $1.06. Quite a bargain.

I wanted to start out with some “babysteps” to see how well it worked, how long it took and how much I stored would actually cost over a month’s time. I chose the sub folders on the server containing the family and vacation photos, things I could never replace (which is the point of backup); I didn’t choose all of my photo libraries though, because that would have been 247.4 gig. Setup on Backblaze B2 was simple and I was curious to see how long it would take to uoload, considering that upload speeds are typically a fraction of download speeds. The server has been chugging along with uploads over the last few days and is now up to 132.3 gig  and some 30.4k files. Still not finished though.

I didn’t choose the other file stores of TV shows, movies and music, as they are much more dynamic and occupied a lot more space. Depending on how the process of uploading the photos goes (meaning how much it will cost) I’ll next add home videos. Music, TV Shows and Movies, while they would be difficult to replace, are backed up locally and represent multi-terabytes of data I’m not willing to pay to backup.