Yeah, their software was really buggy so I ended up changing to crashplan. I've been using them for years without any regrets.

Heh. I switched my wife from crashplan to backblaze about 18 month ago because I was tired of the crashplan client being buggy. Backblaze has just worked.

I don't like CrashPlan very much, but my backups are way faster to them than they ever were to Backblaze. My home connection has 200mbit upload, so I don't think the bottleneck is on my side.

Funny, Backblaze backs up faster than my Apple Time Capsule. I'm on a 1 GBps home connection. I guess it all depends on your peering.

I suspect that latency has something to do with it. Crashplan's servers are a good 100ms closer to me.

100 Mbps here, and backblaze uploads are a good 50-100% faster than crashplan

Brian from Backblaze here.

If you want to use more bandwidth in Backblaze, after you install find the Backblaze Control Panel, open the "Settings..." dialog, go to the "Performance" tab and UNSELECT "Automatic Throttle". Slide the manual slider all the way to the far far right. Then dial up the number of threads to 4 or 6. Seriously, you don't need to go any higher on the threads, after we use 100% of your bandwidth you can't get it to backup any faster. :-)

The CrashPlan client is horrific but at least it runs on Linux unlike Backblaze. I was hoping Backblaze was better, too bad.

This really kills me about Backblaze. I'd love to support them, I'd prefer no other backup vendor. That's why this is so hurtful:

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Ba...

Spoiler alert, the answer is a surprisingly firm no. Not even an optimistic "we're working on it!".

Doesn't even have to be "Linux support", just open an API, we'll do the rest! Use quotas for API users if the concern is around abuse, but please help us Linux folks use your service! Please!

Brian from Backblaze here.

We support Linux now with our command line tool found here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/quick_command_line.html There is no GUI, but the command line tool can "sync" your files with an arbitrary roll back time (the Mac/Windows client are hard coded to 30 days).

For good or bad, syncing to B2 charges "per GByte". If you have less than 1 TByte this will be cheaper than the $5/month for the Mac or Windows client. But if you have more than 1 TByte on Linux, it will cost you about $5/TByte/Month to back it up.

They say they don't have enough workforce for the Linux client to happen now, not that they won't ever do it.

Don't they have a storage API now at $0.005/GB/mo?

Wait, wouldn't that be standard? I've never used online backup, but I would naively assume that Linux would just have a block device or FUSE driver for these things.

How can that not be the case?

I'm not sure, what would a block device have to do with diff'd filesystem backups? And what would FUSE add?

I'm pretty sure the CrashPlan client a .jar, so you just need a jvm, thus broad OS compatibility.

On second thought, block devices are sort of sketchy for this use case - but FUSE still seems like a perfectly natural way to export networked storage.

I'd expect a backup hierarchy to just be a directory of read-only snapshots of my files - I mean, this is how I organize backups locally either way (e.g. /snapshot/YYYY-MM-DD/etc/whatever.conf).

The advantage of using a standard API like filesystems and FUSE is that you can use it easily and from the terminal without needing to deal with bloated GUIs and JVMs that are no doubt hard to install, hard to use and hard to rely on.

A JVM is also a pretty hefty requirement to have on a machine. (I personally avoid installing it all costs, mostly because everything that targets JVM seems to be crud to begin with)

I have yet to use a single backup client that didn't suck (i.e. churn my CPU, get out of my way, etc). That being said, Druva InSync has been OK-ish so far.

I had to stop using crashplan because there is no way to roll back revisions within a file. If a file gets corrupted it'll just back up the corrupted version on top of what was previously a good backup.

? That's not what I see in crashplan. Expand the tree view until you get to the file level, and then expand the files: it shows the times of the backup revisions. You can also specify a target time to restore to at the bottom of the restore tab.

Wanted to pop in here and expound on the topic.

CrashPlan has versioning that is set (by default) to back up changed files in 15 minute increments. If a file is corrupted, CrashPlan will attempt to back up the changes as it is not a corruption detection utility.

However, it's versioning allows for a user to easily restore the uncorrupted file by selecting a date prior to the corruption occurring.

This process is explained in greater detail here:

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/Recov...

The default versioning can be adjusted, so ultimately it's the responsibility of the individual user to confirm the health of their backup and verify the versioning frequency that best fits their needs.

Brian from Backblaze here.

The failure in that picture is that somebody deleted the file found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Backblaze\bzbui_interface.xml

That extremely simple file contains all the strings for the Backblaze GUI in all 11 languages. What your screenshot shows is what happens when that file is missing.

If you run a Backblaze installer over the top of that installation it should repair that by placing the latest version in place as it always does. If you STILL cannot get that file installed, something is going entirely, totally hog-wild wrong with your system. Hundreds of people install every day and that file is always present.

If you were running along and suddenly that file disappeared from your computer, I would stop and prepare a full restore from 15 days ago from Backblaze. This is totally free. When files randomly disappear from the hard drive, one cause might be your hard drive is starting to die.

Since your willing to look at this now, here is the install log: http://pastebin.com/MB6dEiZD

Looking at it, its clear it had some problems. The issue is the installer said it finished successfully.

Well, one has to grant them that they at least did use meaningful labels for their strings. You can figure out how to use the app from that alone.

What are we exactly looking at here? That is somewhat frightening how busted it looks.

Yev from Backblaze here - Looking at those screens that's what happens when the installer doesn't install correctly (obviously), it can happen for a bunch of reasons, usually the easy stuff like anti-virus and all that jazz, but usually clears up if you reboot and retry.

That doesn't look that busted to me, it appears that something prevented localized strings from loading, so we're just seeing the translation tags. It's not surprising that they don't fit in the UI, cause they're kind of long -- probably much larger than the localized strings are.

Brian from Backblaze here, you are absolutely correct. I'll copy and paste my answer from above to here:

The failure in that picture is that somebody deleted the file found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Backblaze\bzbui_interface.xml That extremely simple file contains all the strings for the Backblaze GUI in all 11 languages. What your screenshot shows is what happens when that file is missing.

If you run a Backblaze installer over the top of that installation it should repair that by placing the latest version in place as it always does. If you STILL cannot get that file installed, something is going entirely, totally hog-wild wrong with your system. Hundreds of people install every day and that file is always present.

If you were running along and suddenly that file disappeared from your computer, I would stop and prepare a full restore from 15 days ago from Backblaze. This is totally free. When files randomly disappear from the hard drive, one cause might be your hard drive is starting to die.

The results of my attempt to try them out about a month ago. These are screenshots I sent to their tech support.