Backblaze Personal Backup

Unlimited Mac/PC backup for $9/month

4.3(0 reviews)paidFounded 2008United States (San Mateo, California)

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Backblaze Personal Backup offers unlimited computer backup for $9/month. Backs up your Mac or PC continuously in the background. No file size limits, no throttling.

What Backblaze Personal Backup actually is

Backblaze Personal Backup (the product page calls it Computer Backup) is unlimited cloud backup for one Mac or PC and the external drives plugged into it. Backblaze launched version 1.0 on September 16, 2008, after a company founded in April 2007 set out to do exactly one thing: back up everything on a computer, automatically, without asking the user to pick folders. Nearly two decades later the product has not strayed — no sync folder, no collaboration features, no storage buckets. A small native client runs continuously, encrypts files before they leave the machine, and ships them to Backblaze's datacenters. When the worst happens, you restore from the web, from a dedicated restore app, or from an encrypted USB drive mailed to your door.

The pitch on the pricing page is one line — unlimited backup, every file, every size — and in practice that holds. There is no capacity cap, no per-file size limit (a 200 GB VM image or a 50 GB render uploads whole), and connected external drives count toward the same license. That last part is what makes it a photographer's and editor's tool: the working machine plus its RAW archive drives are covered by one subscription. The rules that do exist are reasonable and documented: NAS devices and network-mounted drives are excluded, system files and reinstallable applications are skipped by default (overridable), external drives must be reconnected at least every 30 days to stay in the backup under the default retention window, and a fair-use policy technically exists.

We list it in backup solutions rather than cloud object storage, because the difference matters: this is an active mirror of a computer, not a storage API. (For buckets and APIs, Backblaze sells B2 separately — see our B2 review.)

Pricing: what you really pay

The numbers are refreshingly few. $9 per month, $99 per year ($8.25/month effective, an 8% saving), or $189 for two years ($7.88/month) — one price per computer, unlimited data. Backblaze raised the price to this level in October 2023 (it launched in 2008 at $5/month), and it is the only time in the product's history that the headline moved. There is no retail channel; the vendor's site is the only price. A second computer needs a second license, which is the cost surprise most households hit.

The one upgrade worth understanding is version history. By default, changed and deleted files are retained for 30 days, then cycled off Backblaze's servers. One-Year Extended Version History is free to enable (client 7.0 and later) and stretches retention to 365 days — our standing recommendation is to switch it on in the first session after install, because it is not retroactive. Beyond a year, "Forever" retention is billed at $0.006 per GB per month for versions older than one year. A small number of older reviews quote $2/month add-ons for these tiers; the current vendor documentation says one year is free and Forever is metered per GB, and we go with the vendor.

Restores are free over the internet: individual files from the web console or the iOS/Android apps, web ZIP archives up to 500 GB per request (up to 20 in flight), or the dedicated restore app for full-machine recoveries with no size cap. For multi-terabyte disasters, Backblaze mails an encrypted USB drive of 1–8 TB worldwide and refunds the drive when you return it within 30 days (return shipping is yours, preparation takes a business day or two per terabyte, and refunds are capped at five drives per account per year). A 15-day free trial runs without a credit card; annual and two-year plans carry a 30-day refund window, monthly plans carry none.

Performance & infrastructure

Backblaze runs its own hardware — the open-source Storage Pod design and the Vault architecture that its engineering blog documents publicly — across data centers in Sacramento, Phoenix, Reston (Virginia), Amsterdam, and Toronto, with the account's region decided at signup. Upload performance is driven by your upstream connection and the client's threading; the client is deliberately quiet, throttling itself when you are using the machine. Restores of individual files are quick; full-machine restores are bounded by download bandwidth, which is exactly why the mailed drive exists.

Reliability here is about recoverability rather than uptime. There is no availability SLA for personal accounts — Backblaze's SLA document covers B2 customers and Computer Backup customers on paid Tera/Peta support plans — so a personal subscriber's remedy for extended downtime is, bluntly, none beyond good faith. Against that, the track record is long and public: the company publishes drive failure statistics and restore volumes, has survived the platform growth since 2008, and its corporate parent has been listed on Nasdaq (BLZE) since 2021. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest; a private encryption key (PEK) option is available, with the honest caveat Backblaze itself states — if you hold the key, support cannot help you recover a lost password.

We have not run restore drills against the service, so we will not claim measured recovery times. What we can say is that the restore paths are documented precisely — zip caps, drive sizes, refund windows, processing times — which is more than most consumer backup products publish.

Where it falls short

One computer per license is the structural limitation. A household with a laptop, a desktop, and a spouse's machine pays three times; at $99/year each, a family crosses the price of a small NAS with its own backup scheme quickly. NAS and network drives are excluded entirely — those bytes go to B2 at $6.95/TB/month instead, which is a reasonable migration path but a different product.

The 30-day default version window is short for the threat it is usually sold against. Ransomware that sits dormant for two months before triggering will have overwritten your history unless you enabled the one-year extension in advance. The fix is free but opt-in, and opt-in defaults are where backup products fail people.

Then the trade-offs of "unlimited": a fair-use policy exists, external drives must be reconnected regularly or their data is cycled off, and by default some file types (ISOs, virtual machine disks) are skipped until you change settings. Monthly billing has no refund. Support is ticket-based; there is no phone line for personal plans. And because it is a mirror of current state rather than an archive, it is the wrong tool for deliberate long-term retention unless you pay for Forever.

The history matters for trust here. Backblaze published its Storage Pod hardware designs rather than patenting them, posts quarterly hard drive failure statistics on its blog, and has kept the unlimited promise through the $5 era, the $9 era, and several generations of storage hardware. That record is the real reason we recommend it over flashier backup brands: when a company shows its costs for eighteen years, you can judge the pricing with some confidence.

Who should pick this

We pick Personal Backup for individuals and home workers with one main machine and lots of data: photographers and videographers with external archive drives, developers with large local repos and images, anyone whose irreplaceable data lives on a laptop. At $99/year for effectively unlimited capacity, nothing in the market beats it on price for that shape of problem — including the big storage clouds, where 10 TB would cost multiples per month.

We would not pick it for servers, NAS appliances, Linux boxes, or multi-machine estates (look at B2 with your own tooling, or an agent-based business product), and not for compliance-driven retention with legal holds. And if you want your backup to double as a browsable file library or sync service, this is not that; rclone plus B2 is.

For the full machine-image, bare-metal-recovery use case, this is file-level backup — pairing it with a local snapshot tool is still our recommendation.

Key takeaways

Unlimited backup for one Mac/PC plus connected external drives: $9/month, $99/year, or $189 for two years; no file type or size caps.
Version history: 30 days by default, one year free to enable (do it on day one — it is not retroactive), Forever at $0.006/GB/month for versions older than a year.
Restores: web zips up to 500 GB, unlimited restore app, or a mailed encrypted USB drive (1–8 TB) refunded on return within 30 days.
No NAS, network drives, or server support; one license per computer; external drives must reconnect within 30 days.
No availability SLA for personal accounts (only B2 and paid-tier Computer Backup plans are covered).
Cheapest honest way to protect a single data-heavy machine; wrong product for servers or multi-machine fleets.

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Pros

Truly unlimited backup per computer — no capacity cap, no file size limit
Connected external drives included under the same license
One-year version history is free to enable; Forever retention metered at $0.006/GB/month
Restore by mailed encrypted USB drive (1–8 TB), refunded when returned within 30 days
Simple, stable pricing ($9/month or $99/year) with a 15-day no-card trial