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.