It backs up and restores securely as marketed
February 20, 2020

It backs up and restores securely as marketed

Ellwood Howard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Backblaze

Backblaze is my primary backup and recovery. As the owner and sole preparer of a tax business, I need a reliable backup system. Backblaze automatically performs a nightly backup that is encrypted and stored off-site. I needed it this year, and I was able to recover my client data securely. It filled that gap and worked.
  • First, it backs up data period. They do what they say.
  • Second, the backup is automatic, which is convenient, and it's secure. Critical when you deal with other people's finances. The backups are also off-site, protecting it from fire and other disasters.
  • Backblaze, once installed, resides in the app tray on the lower right of windows. It's just a small menu that takes you to your website to perform recovery operations. You also have to install their little download and unzipping app after you select files to restore. I would like to see a single backup and restore interface that runs locally and handles all those details in the background.
  • If you have to reinstall your computer, they additionally setup and charge you for a new license, even though you have an account, you can't simply log in and reconnect to it. I didn't find this out until I saw the charge on my credit card. Now that I have the data I need downloaded, I have to call them and have the original license canceled for a pro-rated (partial) credit. I was told this is how system administrators preferred to minimize downtime. As a small business owner, I found it irritating.
  • Price- Less than $100/yr for me, I am a one-person operation.
  • It saved my data. My hard drive is fully encrypted with AES-256/twofish/serpent encryption. It would take an estimated 1000 years to hack it. I had to wipe the drive because I lost the encryption password making it impossible to access client data from the previous year. Fortunately, he was backed up on the back, please, and I was able to retrieve that data.
Backblaze has excellent reviews, and I felt me and my client's data was secure. BitLocker had a recent security issue I read about, and you have to have Windows 10 for business to use it. Norton is an excellent and reliable product, but the experiences I have had with Norton backup and Norton Security is it gets into the guts of your operating system. For a larger company, I can see that being a good thing as you can lock down a computer. Larger companies also have IT techs and system administrators who specialize in those systems. I am a small one-person business. It complicates my business and my life when software takes over a part of my system. Does something that is interrupting me or preventing me from doing something because it thinks it's providing a high level of business security for a large business environment. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I hope it does. As it turns out, Backblaze, for the price, was the simpler product that provided me backup and restoration with the encrypted security that I needed.
They answered any questions I had accurately and politely. I prefer to call a phone number and get a human on the phone, but they prefer email and chat. I understand they have business profits to consider, so it makes sense.

Do you think Backblaze Business Backup delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Backblaze Business Backup's feature set?

Yes

Did Backblaze Business Backup live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Backblaze Business Backup go as expected?

No

Would you buy Backblaze Business Backup again?

Yes

Essentially Backblaze is a secure off-site data backup and restoration software. It does that job, and it does that job well. That's the scenario it was designed to be used in, and it does it exceptionally well. I find that it is likely best suited for medium to large businesses that have several users for a networked computer system with multiple computers on a server. If you are a small business like myself where it's me myself and I, it's a little cumbersome to recover data and is perhaps less appropriate. What greatly attracted me to it was its price, which, for me, was $99 for an entire year. With that, I can put up with a little bit of cumbersome.