Category: Tech

Backblaze – unlimited online backup and its problems

Who doesn’t love free backup? But nothing in this life is free. If a backup service with unlimited or large space is free, you have to wonder how do you pay for it? Ads, privacy?

The next best thing is cheap backup.

Backblaze is a backup service that allows you to backup your entire computer with all the drives connected to it for 6 US $ (besides that, you will have to pay the VAT corresponding to your country).

If you sign up for this service, pay attention where you set your upload server. If you’re from Europe and you set your upload server to US, it will take a very long time.

Here is my PROs list:

  • It’s cheap
  • Unlimited storage
  • It’s easy to use (mostly)
  • You can filter out different types of file you don’t want to backup

All of this sounds good, but are there any problems in using Backblaze? Here we go:

  • In Romania we have good speeds for internet and if you leave the upload settings as recommended, it will finish uploading in 100 years. You have to tweak the upload threads by trial and error (because I haven’t seen a good explanation on how those work exactly) until you reach a decent speed for upload.
  • Not sure why, but if you don’t update your backup at least every 6 months, the backup files will be erased. This is a big NO-NO in my head. As long as I’m paying for the service, why won’t you keep my files more than 6 months?
  • You can’t easily select what files to upload and what not. You have to add to a specific list in Settings, what you don’t want to upload.
  • You can’t select the priority of files you want to upload. From what I noticed, smaller files go first and larger files go last. That’s fine per general, but what if I need something to be backed up first?

Nevertheless, I’ve been using this service for three years now, and I’m recommending it to people, but if a service would come without those problems, I would easily switch.

Why do people buy brand phones?

I like gadgets. A lot.

I consider phones to be gadgets, not just phones, because they are. I don’t like any one company over the other and I like to try new things.

I don’t like to spend money on gadgets. They lose value fast and I always find something more useful to spend my money on.

I never went over the 250 euro/phone limit and this post is about phones in that price range.

Last year I bought the Huawei P9 Lite 2017 and it was around 150 euros. Something similar from Samsung was around 250 euros. But people still buy more Samsung phones.

Why?

Why would I pay 66% more on something that has the same specs or worse, but has a more renowned brand name?

Let me tell you what happened to me.

I bought a second hand LG Nexus 5X. Spec wise, the Huawei has the winning spot for the RAM and CPU and it means that it should go more smoothly through apps … right?

Wrong.

Huawei doesn’t do two things right:

  1. It doesn’t clean the extra data remaining from updating or uninstalling an app. I tried this with a clean reset install/login in apps  and saw some serious space differences.
  2. It doesn’t manage the RAM properly. After a week of using it, my phone would become sluggish and would behave like a Windows ME on a Pentium 1.

I didn’t saw these two issue reproducing on the Nexus or Samsung devices.

My next phone will be a Xiaomi. Let’s see if, in the same price range, it will do a better job.