I've used BB for years on multiple machines and have been more than satisfied, in fact I recommend it to everyone. I'm not affiliated with them at all, just a happy customer. Confused as to why someone would find their service disappointing but to each their own.

Would you recommend it to someone running Linux? As far as I can tell, you have to use their proprietary backup software, which only runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Yev from Backblaze -> Currently we don't have a Linux interface, but when we launch Backblaze B2 you'll be able to use APIs/CLIs to push your Linux data to us.

it takes months to get everything backed up, and now the just the file lists or whatever is taking up 8GB+ on my disk (i use a smaller SSD as the primary drive so space is precious). I contacted support and their only solution is to create a new account and go through many more months of backing everything up again.

Does someone from BB want to jump in here and explain why this guys "file list" could be 8GB and how re-starting the sync will fix it? Sounds like something went awry.

This is what nathan from support told me when i contacted them:

"As part of our backup process, Backblaze will run a checksum against each file before uploading it. This requires the entire bzfileids.dat file to be loaded into RAM. After a long time, or if you have an extraordinarily large number of files, the bzfileids.dat file can grow large causing the Backblaze directory to appear bloated, and use more RAM (potentially slowing down your system). In your case your bzfileids are extremely large, likely because you have a lot of files and an older backup."

here's my backblaze folder: http://imgur.com/ohqUERr (i have my temporary data drive set to a secondary drive)

> it takes months to get everything backed up

What kind of internet connection are you on? I recently reinstalled my mac from scratch (El Capitan upgrade went haywire) and had to redo my backblaze backup. I uploaded the 500 GB to Backblaze in under 24 hours.

That means that you consistently had ~6MB/sec, or 50Mb/sec of upload bandwidth. That might be possible if you're on a really good 100Mb connection (or 1Gb connection), but that's not common in most of the world yet.

Also, could it be that the "re-upload" was able to detect your older copy of the files and reuse them? I can rsync terabytes in minutes over slow connections when the other side already has the files ...

Details? I don't work for BB, but have worked in the backup industry for some time in my past, and always curious.

Not the OP, have used BB for 5 years (and still using, the service is totally fine):

Initial sync is a nighmare. The upload is on the slow side. Biggest gripe so far is that I just cannot tell the client that some files are more important than the others. I would love my pdf invoices and changed KDBX files to be synced before uploading the uncompressed blu ray of Guardians of the galaxy. On the other hand there are people that produce a lot of critically important raw video which will probably have the opposite preferences.

I can understand why they have not implemented priority interface. It is hard to get it right.

What's the point of backing up a bluray rip? Either you have the source material, in which case its almost always going to be faster to rerip than restore from backup, or you downloaded it once already (for, ahem, free) so why not download it again and not pay the cost of storing that data?

Also, I would hope no one doing mastering is uploading their raws, in real time, to a service like backblaze. On-site thunderbolt / NAS solutions are almost exclusively used in RAW backups in studios. With offsite copies stored at regular intervals via good old sneaker-net.

I just needed to think of something big. Anyway there is big stuff that is not that important - lets say couple of gigabytes of logs but nice to have.

BB folder and file type structure makes it relatively hard to back up just some files of given type. And some stuff like tars and zips could be arbitrary in size and importance.

We definitely focus on ease-of-backup vs. choices-for-backup. One of the initial things we found we the "pick and choose files & folders to backup" approach is what kept most people from setting up a backup at all because they were confused by the process.

Having said that, we offer the ability to exclude folders and filetypes if you have certain things you want to backup later.

(Not disagreeing with anything you're saying...just fyi.)

Gleb from Backblaze

I know from a product design and engineering standpoint why you have made the service that way. Every user have unique best backup strategy- it is a nightmare to accommodate all. Just proving the simple second best strategy to all is a good decision. And as I said I know what have I purchased and I am fine with the service. I stopped juggling directories and file types after couple of reinstalls though - those settings are not transferred on backup transfer and setting them all again is too much PITA.

Backups transfers are also a minor pain point - the error horse (on freshly installed BB on windows) and when, how and why it disappears and allows you to do the backup is still a mystery.

I guess that the BB cloud storage will solve some of the customization problems though - if you are power enough user you could write a custom strategy on top of the API.

As curiosity which os and file system are you running Gleb?

Are you asking about him personally, or on the Pods?

> What's the point of backing up a bluray rip?

What's the point of backing up anything?

> Either you have the source material, in which case its almost always going to be faster to rerip than restore from backup

Sure, it will be faster, because it will be a local operation, because you probably keep the original near the same place you keep the main rip. That also means that the original source and the in-use rip are vulnerable to being destroyed together in a site-affecting event (fire, flood, robbery, etc.), which makes having a remote backup valuable.

FWIW, I'm in the UK and initial backup was great and fast (on a 1Gbps upload connection, I was getting maybe 10-15MBps upload consistently, which isn't bad considering it's across the Atlantic!). The biggest thing for this has been the multithreading that BB have introduced recently - setting 10 upload threads makes the backup super-snappy.

WRT priority backup - I ended up just excluding the "big folders" manually (reducing backup size by 90%) then including them when the initial backup of the important files was complete. Also, the client backs up small files first, then moves onto bigger files, which is a nice touch - generally I'd tend to care more about losing a large number of files than a few huge files.

Not affiliated with the company, just love their product!...

In my experience the Backblaze client uploads smaller files before bigger ones, in effect prioritising your documents over large video files or archives.

takes forever, and now the file list takes 8GB+ of space - support says the only way to fix the problem is to create a new account and go through the months of backing everything up again

If your upload takes months, I'm not sure that _any_ online backup is right for you. I did a fresh install recently, and I've got 84 GB backed up. It took me a couple of days, and that's on a cheap ADSL line in The Netherlands.

In your case, I guess it would be much better to look at other solutions. For example if you have a Mac, get an extra Time Machine drive and put it at your employer's place. Every week, bring your laptop there and back it up.