Backblaze’s annual poll asking how often people back up their data shows small improvements across the board. But the percentage of people who either don’t back up at all or back up once a year or less is still far too high.

Curious about how Time Machine snapshots can supposedly prevent the space occupied by deleted files from being recovered right away, Adam Engst ran some tests and came away more confused than when he started.

macOS 11 Big Sur has thrown a cryptographically signed monkey wrench into the inner workings of backup apps that make bootable duplicates. There are now workarounds, and Apple promises to fix the necessary underlying tool, but Adam Engst suggests that we need to rethink the role bootable duplicates play in a modern backup strategy.

When you buy a new Mac and migrate your old Mac’s files to it during setup, Setup Assistant moves over numerous settings and configurations. But don’t assume you’ll just be able to pick up exactly where you left off, since there are quite a few apps and services that require additional post-migration attention.

Perturbed that the online backup service Backblaze retains old versions of files and deleted files for only 30 days? You can now pay extra to maintain such files in your online backup for either 1 year or forever.

Backblaze has published a description of what it’s like to be a hard drive in the company’s data center, writing it from the perspective of a hard drive called Zach. Wonderfully silly, for sure, but it’s an engaging approach complete with interesting technical bits.

It’s unusual for customers to get insight into why companies raise prices and how those price hikes work out, but online backup service Backblaze is being highly transparent about the reasoning behind and results of its February price increase.

macOS has a long-standing bug that causes screen savers to fail to show edited or rotated images from Photos—only the original versions. Ventura still suffers from this problem, and although Adam Engst shares some workarounds, you’re not going to like them.

This week, Adam asks for help tracking down an email formatting bug in TidBITS issues, points those worried about ransomware to RansomWhere and Retrospect 18, and looks at more utilities that perform OCR on text in images.

Happy April Fools Day! We have no jokes or pranks this year, but here’s a look back through our April Fools efforts in past years that proved prescient.

As cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive move from deprecated kernel extensions to Apple’s File Provider extension, Mac users face interface and workflow changes.

After learning more about the nitty-gritty of consumer-level cloud storage services for an article, Adam Engst is introduced to LucidLink, which promises high-performance cloud storage using a completely different model.