Backblaze, my preferred cloud backup service for a few years now, is today making it a bit easier and cheaper to restore all of your data if your computer should ever crash or get lost / stolen. The company has always let subscribers ($5 per month) pay $189 to receive an external hard drive with a full copy of their backup. But maybe you don't need yet another external drive that'll just end up sitting around collecting dust. So now Backblaze is giving customers another option: send it back within 30 days for a full refund.

You've got to cover shipping costs for the drive's return trip, unfortunately, but this still makes for a pretty convenient way of getting your stuff back in a jam. Of course, this being a cloud service, Backblaze always gives you the ability to download your files directly from the company's website at no charge, but that can be a bit slow and frustrating depending on your broadband connection. Having a drive shipped to your door avoids Comcast yelling at you for downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. And if you actually want to keep the drive — to use for a local backup, perhaps (which you should always have) — you can just eat the $189 charge and hang onto it.

Backblaze claims this service is unique among its competition, with Crashplan recently having phased out the option for "Home" subscribers to restore via mailed hard drive. Backblaze has backed up over 200 petabytes of customer data through its unique storage pod system, and says it's made over 10 billion data restorations. Having used it for some time now, I can vouch that it's pretty great. Once the initial backup is finished, you'll barely ever notice that it's open, quietly keeping your files safe in the background.