When I was getting my Music Production degree from Berklee College of Music online, I encountered the adage:
If something digital doesn’t exist in 3 PLACES, it DOESN’T EXIST.
I’ve never experienced as many painful technical difficulties as I have since I since I started working on the Beginner to Boss course.
In the last 2 years I’ve had no less than 3 iMac computers and 4 external hard drives fail. 
The first few failures were incredibly horrific, painful, I would even say traumatic experiences for me. Granted, I had had hard drives fail before over the years so I had “learned my lesson.” Mac has a program called Time Machine which automatically backs up everything. So I had a Time Machine backup, but then… The drive WITH the Time Machine also failed! WOW! (“Now I see why they said if it doesn’t exist in at least three places…”)
When I was going through these woes, a tech-y friend of mine told me about Backblaze.com. For like $70/year, unlimited storage offsite backup. I was like, “sign me up!” So I signed up and they have absolutely saved my butt twice over the last 6 months.
I’ve had 2 external hard drives fail (with 3TB of data on them) and when they’ve failed:
- I paid upfront $197
- Backblaze shipped me a drive with all my data
- Couple weeks later sent drive back to Backblaze
- They refunded me my $197.
So the whole situation is resolved in a matter of days, and the only out of pocket expense for me was shipping the hard drive back to Backblaze which was under $10.
I now recommend this service to everyone I talk to when this subject comes up.
If you want to sign up, you can use this link, and you and I will each get a free month of service from the referral.
Backup strategies and data management are not the sexiest subjects to geek out about, but so sadly it doesn’t become a subject important to most of us until after we’ve suffered some significant loss.
