Backing Up Your Work…Ugh, Maybe Later

I have a computer filled with documents, photos and music that I’d be crushed if I lost. I also spent a reasonable $140 on an external hard drive a while ago to back up my files and prevent just that. Yet there it still sits on my desk, collecting dust and silently mocking me every time I look at it. So what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I back up my work?

I’ll be honest; I’m just too lazy to take the time to do it. I’d rather browse YouTube. But before you judge me, take a look at yourselves. Every year millions of people lose their valuable files because they don’t take the time to back up their work, which can be especially detrimental to the basic functioning of a small business. In fact, 37 percent of small businesses cite “back up and/or data loss” as their most common IT issue, according to a 2007 poll by the National Federation of Independent Business.

But according to a TechCrunch post earlier this week, a new startup called Backblaze is looking to help us procrastinators by transforming the rather annoying task of backing up data into an effortless “three-click” process. Three clicks still sound like two too many for me, but let’s see how it works.

Backblaze is certainly not the first company to consider the pains of backing up work. Apple’s Time Machine lets users plug an external hard drive into their computers and then forget about them, which is awesome, but it is still exposed to external forces (like your house blowing up or someone smashing your computer and external hard drive with a baseball bat).

Backblaze, however, allows you to store your data on the Internet. Once you get on the site, all you have to do is click “Backup Now.” Sounds easy enough to me. The problem with Backblaze, however, is that it can take somewhere around two weeks to upload all of the files, according to TechCrunch. All I have to say is wow! In that amount of time my grandmother could do the same thing manually and still have time to hit the bingo hall.

My point with all of this is not to sway you toward one system or another (there are actually many different options by the way); it is to show you that there are options out there other than painstakingly selecting files and manually uploading them to your external hard drive. Backing up your work sucks. I can attest to that. But it’s important, and now you (and I) have no excuse. So find a method that you can live with and stick to it.