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
Your setup lives on 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.
One good drive at home holds a lifetime of family photos for less than a year of renting the same space in the cloud.
Daily use
Your phone and laptop talk directly to a small machine that is yours: 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
Your box lives at home, so it needs one more piece to reach your phone when you are out: 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 your 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.
The safety net, every night
Around 2 a.m., your home box 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.