How it works
Four pictures: where your setup lives, what daily use looks like, how it reaches you away from home, and the safety net running behind it every night. Every box on this page is an account or a machine registered in your name.
Where your setup lives
Every setup is the same services with the same safety net. The only choice is where the machine lives, and it comes down to one question: how big is your photo library?
In the cloud
A small server rented in your name at a cloud provider. Nothing to plug in at home, nothing to dust.
The right fit when your photo library is modest — up to about 200 GB, the size of Apple's mid-tier iCloud plan.
In your home
A small, quiet computer on a shelf at your place, with a big drive. A machine you already have (we test it first) or one we source at cost — yours either way.
The right fit for photo libraries measured in terabytes: one good drive at home costs less than a year of renting the same space.
Outgrow the cloud setup later? Moving home is a supported, tested move — the same procedure we drill for recovering a lost server.
Daily use
Your phone and laptop talk directly to a small machine that is yours — a cloud server rented in your name, or the box on your shelf. Photos back up from your phone automatically, documents sync, and contacts and calendars use open standards — the same apps you already have, pointed at machines you control. Email at your domain is handled by a dedicated mail provider, not by the server, so mail keeps working no matter what.
Away from home: the relay
A lifetime of family photos does not fit a rented cloud server at a fair price — but it fits comfortably on one good drive in your own house. The home setup is the same picture as above with the machine on your shelf, plus one new piece: a relay. The relay is a tiny cloud machine, rented in your name, that gives your box a public address. Your box calls out to the relay and holds an encrypted tunnel open, so photo backup, files, and calendars keep working on your phone anywhere — and nothing about your router, modem, or internet plan has to change. Everything is sealed before it leaves your phone or your box; the relay passes it along without being able to read any of it.
The relay is the only rented machine in the home setup — a few dollars a month, in your name — and it holds no data. If it is ever lost, it is replaced in an afternoon and nothing is missed. Cloud setups don't need one: the server already has a public address.
The safety net, every night
Around 2 a.m., your machine — cloud server or home box, same routine — saves a complete dated copy of everything and keeps the last seven. Only after that succeeds, the night's changes are encrypted on your machine and sent to storage in your own Backblaze account. The key the server holds can add to that history but can never erase it — so even someone who breaks into the server cannot destroy your backups. A watchdog expects a check-in every night; one silent night and an email goes out.
If the server is ever lost entirely, the offsite copy plus your password manager contain everything needed to rebuild it on a new machine — by us, or by any competent tech you choose. That is the point.
Questions about any box on this page?
Ask — walking through how your setup works is part of the setup.