Many of you know that I urge everyone to back up their photo library – photos and catalog – and all your other documents to one or more external hard drives and also to a cloud backup service. I have worked with two clients in the past week who were running Backblaze and Carbonite cloud backup services, but when I checked to see what was backed up, their photo libraries weren’t.

These programs are wonderfully simple to use – you install them and they just start running – so it’s not uncommon to just assume that they are backing up what you need them to. However, they generally are not set by default to back up external hard drives or any of your personal files that are stored on your internal drive(s) outside of the User\your name\ folder structure.

The easiest way to see what they are backing up is to log into your online account and view the files that have been backed up.  If important locations are missing, then consult Backblaze, Carbonite or other service help documents or contact them to find out how to include these locations in your backup.

I use and have been happy with Backblaze, as it’s easy to use and costs only $100/year for two computers and unlimited data. I also know people who use Carbonite (though for two computers it’s much more expensive than Backblaze). I’m sure there are other great ones out there as well.  The first backup that you do will take a LONG time .. days, weeks, or even months depending on how much data you have and how slow your internet upload speed is – but after that you have peace of mind that you are protected from fire, theft, flood, and other circumstances in which a backup hard drive stored in the same location as your computer would be at risk.