"Do they have a blog"?
Really? I'm sorry but when it comes to backups I rather have them working on the product instead of having a marketing machine up and running.
The service features and GUI experience fall short, and yes I am widely just referring to the 30 day file retention. In practice, this basically means you need yet another plan to make up for that. Once you find that other plan, it should make Backblaze unnecessary if it works in a reasonable way.
This is typically a product you just want to work and are not busy with reading the company's blog as long as things are working fine.
You set the settings and can forget about it.
That said, your whole post seems somewhat biased.
I am not saying it's evil or that your wrong, but that your deductions are illogical.
I'm a bit partial though, as that fits us quite well in what we are doing at our place.
* Do they allow you to recover deleted files? -No (I have used this a few times, it saved some of the digitized family photos which I blew away with an rsync --delete flag)
* Do they offer secondary products that relate to their primary offering? Ok, I can read that as they are stretching too thin not focusing on backups enough. Will they announce they are dropping out of consumer backups and moving on to B2 as their main product?
* Is their software well-built/designed, or is it annoying and bloated? - Currently is doesn't run at all on my systems.
" we decrypt your data on our secure restore servers and we then zip it and send "
That seems shady to me
I usually keep my photo library on external HDD and archive every few months from my laptop. I'd be anxious about not remembering to plug back in to keep the files backed up to the cloud.
If Backblaze sorted this out and extended the time to a year then I'd happily sign up again.
So, this news makes me very sad, but there's no way I'm returning to Backblaze...
I would encourage you to try the Backblaze client again. We JUST released the 5.0 client (last week) and we continue to make little fixes that improve the customer experience. The client team's MAIN GOAL has always been that the client run in "Continuously" mode and NOT annoy the customer.
For example, even up until a year ago we didn't realize how reading certain datastructures from disk that we need to backup were hurting performance in non-SSD based computers. As developers we tend to run with SSDs now, so it went undetected for a while. So we're in the process of making that more and more invisible for customers still on on spinning drives in their laptops. The way we do make this invisible is actually slowing down the reading of those data structures so that it doesn't interrupt what you are doing.
> and yet it STILL insisted on starting from zero and backing up everything again
If you do an "Inherit Backup State" you will not re-upload everything. However, Backblaze has to read EVERY file off of local disk and compare the checksums (SHA1) and if the files have moved it must deduplicate and record the new location, so this can appear like a massive load on your computer for a few hours. I would encourage you to open the Network control panel and notice no files are actually pushed.
Until you address this, I can't reason investing time, processor performance, or the tiny monthly payment.
Complete backup plans are taken seriously by myself and other HN users and when one tries to put one together and include Backblaze, it just doesn't add up.
Maybe you could make a blog post that addresses your recommendations head on. I remain open!
Trust me, that message has come through loud and clear! :-) We are going to do some analysis to see if we can afford it, but we'll need at least a week or two to figure that out.
It should be a /more privileged/ instruction to delete / replace / modify already stored files. This could prevent a backup service on a compromised system from removing remote backups. (Assuming the administrative information was kept secure using other means.)
Ideally I'd like to be able to manually assign privileges to sub-accounts.
* Modify: resume uploads older than 24 hours
* Modify: remove/delete
* Modify: change storage (filestream/parameters/metadata etc).
* Append: create new buckets
* Append: add a new file to a bucket
* Append: add a new /version/ of a file in a bucket.
* Append: add metadata
* Read: all list operations
* Read: all download operations
A simplified customer UI might bundle those operations together, but some advanced way of providing finely grained privileges should be created.
Edit: Fixing formatting.
A way of improving the storage size might be to allow the user to white-list (with some defaults) folders more likely to have 'third party' files (E.G. C:\\Windows, C:\\Program*, /usr/) either excluded if they're on a list of common files or de-duplicated with a public list of common files (and check-sums). It would be useful to add-on programs and scripts if that list were public, and if a way of cloning those files in to a discounted pool were possible by 'uploading' them again (to ensure the customer actually /has/ that file and thus presumably the right to restore it).
Speaking of which -- possibly simple feature request -- when a files' entropy suddenly goes high from low, alert the user and keep the files longer.
I tried this, and it failed. I went back and forth with support for some time, and at the end they effectively shrugged. I may have encountered some weird bug, I dunno, but it was definitely uploading everything again, and support acknowledged as much.
- 2014 FIFA World Cup - Brasil
- 2015-16 Penguins Stanley Cup
- 2016-17 Penguins Stanley Cup
- 2015-16 Los Angeles Lakers (Kobe's Final Season)
Every so often I go in and check that a game from each of these is playable at the start and end of a half, period, or quarter.
The TV shows and movies I have on Blu-Ray/DVD I don't even check. This is more "I'm too lazy to re-rip, but if I have to, I will" backups.
Ebooks are really the only media that I have to remember to backup, and that library is so small (and relatively static) that I just drag it to a USB stick every couple of months.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Ba...
For Linux, Backblaze offers "B2 Object Storage". You can choose all sorts of Linux 3rd party clients! The billing is different -> half of 1 penny per GByte per month. This is cheaper for less than a Terabyte, and can be a bit more expensive for more than a Terabyte.
Check the "integrations" page for pictures of a penguin: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
Among others, CloudBerry, Duplicity, GoodSync, and HashBackup are all options that can store files on Backblaze's reliable storage in our datacenter.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667478-Under...
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html (Scroll down to "B2 Cost Calculator")
If you type in the size of your hard drive, that will be the "predictable bill" you will get each day.
Also -- how do I know my 3rd party B2 backup system isn't going to cause me extra charges from using API's inefficiently?
Uploads are completely free. I think what you will find is the bulk of your charges will simply be "storage" (at half a penny per GByte per month), the API charges aren't intended to nickle and dime you. We are simply trying to discourage abuse of our API servers.
Creating a Backblaze B2 account is totally free, and if you stay under 10 GBytes it is totally free (and we will cap you to that until you give us a credit card). Seriously, try it out! There is a handy "Reports" page after you log in (look for the word "Reports" along the left. It will tell you EXACTLY what API calls have occurred and how many times.
If you need more than 10 GBytes and are still worried about cost, as part of your experiment look for "Caps & Alerts" along the left after you sign into your B2 account. You can setup daily "Caps" (like for $1/day) so that you absolutely won't exceed your budget until you are comfortable with the B2 service!
What I would miss, however, is the central management and reporting and alerts that crashplan gives me (e.g., host X hasn't been backed up in N days!)
That of course is all dependent on the client, which all seem standalone.
or let us pay what the Mac and Windows users do for whatever frontend we want. switching everyone over to the B2 protocol is one thing, but making us pay more for the privilege of doing the same backups your Windows/Mac users do is another.
Just to be clear, it should be LESS expensive to use B2 in most cases. If you need less than 10 GBytes it is totally free in B2, but it is $5/month using the Backblaze Online Backup client. If you have 500 GBytes to backup, that is only $2.50/month using B2, but $5/month using the Backblaze Online Backup client. You break even at 1 TByte. And it costs you money if you have 2 TBytes to store.
Backblaze is not charging a premium for the B2 service. Let me put it this way: if somebody ELSE was willing to offer Backblaze storage at B2 prices we never would have built our own storage for the online Backup client. I'm not kidding. The only reason we had to build the storage layer is that to this day, Amazon S3 gouges customers at 4x what it actually costs them to provide the service. And don't even get me started at Amazon S3 downloads cost.
Backblaze Online Backup charges $5/month, and of that maybe $0.50 is profit (50 cents) living on the AVERAGES (make money on some customers, lose money on others). If it was based on Amazon S3 we would be losing $15.00/month by charging $5/month.
now, because i believe in the ideals of free and open source software and use the operating system that is an instrument of those ideals, i am not worth it, despite knowing that given a passage, the open source community would build you a Hyperloop.
How about releasing a backblaze protocol spec or the client source code? That way us Linux fans can roll our own.
That is all described here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/
Now the Mac & Windows Backblaze backup client uses those protocols, but for full disclosure ALSO still uses one or two additional old legacy protocols. But our intention is to move entirely over to using the new B2 protocols, and if it is not possible we plan to extend the B2 protocols to make it possible.
One example is that the Macintosh Backblaze backup client has available the ability to push up to 1,000 individual small files in a single protocol request. (The individual setup and tear down of HTTPS for 1 or 2 or 3 byte files hurts performance.) So we'll be adding that to the "official" B2 protocols.
As I know, Backblaze doesn't allow me to backup mounted folders from NAS. This is only reason I don't use Backblaze.
Backblaze is A LOT LESS LIKELY to exit out of providing consumer online backup anytime soon as it is our primary business.
I don't fully understand what just occurred with CrashPlan, but they had two separate "clients" - one for consumers and one for businesses. As far as I can tell, CrashPlan is discontinuing one of their two clients but doubling down on the "business client". I don't understand how they got into that situation, but Backblaze only has one backup client so we can't really abandon the one true client we have. :-)
Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised something like $150 million which comes with "pressure to grow fast or die". Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.
In a final note: I have ALWAYS liked CrashPlan and I am sad to see them go. Realistically they were never a "competitor" to Backblaze. Our biggest competitor was customer apathy and customers not realizing that online backup was a good option. The more money companies like Carbonite and CrashPlan poured into advertising INCREASED Backblaze sales merely by raising awareness of online backup. CrashPlan (and Carbonite) have been absolutely wonderful to Backblaze because we didn't have the gigantic amounts of money to advertise that they had and they essentially advertise on our behalf (for free). We also know some of the CrashPlan people and I believe they are good people who want the best for their customers.
This whole CrashPlan Home episode deepens my skepticism about services that claim to offer an unlimited amount of a physical resource (atoms on a hard drive, in this case) for a fixed price. Code42 has mentioned certain reasons for exiting the home user market, but I wonder if an unmentioned reason is the cost of providing service to an excessive number of users who consume more hard drive space than is profitable. As a current Crash Plan Home customer, I might be one of those users, given my 2.2 TB data set. It's felt like a steal for me, but in the future, I'll likely seek an option where I can get a good deal, a good, fair price instead of a steal (which in the end results in pain and hassle and ends up costing more than what I bargained for).
Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer from the backup on your servers after 30 days? Though I think you guys are cool, this policy is a deal breaker for me, as far as a Crash Plan Home alternative is concerned. At this point, I'd rather pay a reasonable price for the disk space I use rather than have an "unlimited" plan where I have to constantly look over my shoulder at my files, to make sure important files haven't been inadvertently deleted within the past month. If the cost is too much for me, I'd rather be the one that makes the decision as to which files to exclude from my online backup, rather than have the backup service do it for me.
P.S. and Disclaimer: I developed a backup companion utility (Bitrot Detector) that happens to be more relevant and useful to users of a service like Backblaze which performs file mirroring than one like CrashPlan Home which performs file versioning. However, I'd prefer it if every backup service did versioning rather than mirroring, as version-preservation is what allows you to set-and-forget a backup, rather than to set-and-constantly-worry. Though of course I want more customers for my product, I'd rather have relatively fewer if it meant I lived in a world where every backup service did versioning and fewer people experienced data loss and the resulting grief.
The original reason was to prevent customers who owned a single 1 TByte hard drive from filling it with content, backing it up to Backblaze, writing down the date, then emptying the hard drive and filling it with DIFFERENT content, backing up to Backblaze, writing down the date, repeat 50 times.
The idea was this: if the data is not important enough for you to keep a local copy, Backblaze is not going to keep it either. You aren't allowed to go down to just "one copy in Backblaze".
We chose the 30 days as something we thought of as "reasonable". For example, we expected that within 30 days you would realize your laptop was stolen so you could request a full restore. That sort of thing.
However, and now we're all furiously debating the 30 days based on the enormous amount of feedback we are getting today. We will do an analysis and if we can afford it, we will be increasing that number.
No problem, I'll just restore from backup. I have CrashPlan online backups, and local backups with Obnam, so I'll just recover it from one of them.
Every snapshot in CrashPlan and Obnam had the truncated file, going all the way back to the first snapshots. I thought I had lost my GPG key forever.
Then I remembered that I had some old CD-R/RW backups from years ago. I started going through them. Some of the discs were unreadable. Finally I found one that was readable and had the untruncated private key file.
Lesson learned: always keep your old backups. You never know which files on your system have suffered from bitrot or accidental truncation or accidental deletion--until you try to access them. It's very likely that some of them will have been destroyed more than 30 days ago.
Now keeping old backups doesn't mean keeping every snapshot, ever. CrashPlan takes 15-minute snapshots by default, so obviously I don't need every one of those going back years. But I definitely want to keep at least one snapshot for every year I've used the system, at least one for each of the last 12 months, etc.
The mentions here of poor restore options doesn't sound all that positive either, but due to the former I'm not even considering going as far as trying you guys out.
The way things are looking I'm probably going to stay with Crashplan, migrating to their business plan. I'm not a data hoarder (backup set is ~400GB), but I haven't found anything else which has the same feature set for a reasonable price.
The use case you mention seems to be very exotic, but who knows, maybe it's not as rare as I would expect. To me, expunging deleted files because of this rare, somewhat-malicious case seems like it would cause undesirable collateral damage among your service's typical users.
- Keep at least first (non-zero sized) version of file, at least one version per month (if modified), at least one version per 15 minutes for last week, last version of file.
- Ability to back up files in certain directories very frequently (ie 15 minutes intervals).
- Ability to search for and restore individual files in client, ie without sending my password to someone else.
For this I find the $10/mo Crashplan now charges to be reasonable (my current backup set is ~400GB). I would be prepared to pay more if I required more storage, though within reason.
(I can better understand the policy now as well -- keep people from using as primary offline storage.)
Over a period of time one of the drives failed; slowly. It would lock up sometimes; and I would restart it. Months later I realized it was losing files when it did this. And when I tried to restore those files from BackBlaze I discovered that they had been purged; and that this was considered normal behavior.
BackBlaze had lulled me into a false sense of security regarding my data by claiming to back up my files but actually mirroring a hardware failure on my local system.
I had an unhappy email exchange with BackBlaze tech support, and also Brian, and came to realize how flawed the system was.
I switched to CrashPlan at that point.
I will not consider using a product that lacks proper file versioning; and a much longer lifetime for deleted files.
What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool and b) you can't restore files from more than 30 days.
I am so confused by your question? With Backblaze, you can get 100% of you data back in two ways: 1) you can get a free external USB hard drive sent to you with all your data on it, or 2) You can prepare a free ZIP file with all your data and download it. We provide a restartable native bzdownloader to help you download the recovered files.
> What good is a backup tool....
Isn't the goal to get all your data back? Backblaze does that. Maybe I'm mis-understanding your question?
> you can't restore files from more than 30 days.
With Backblaze, you can recover files for more than 30 days. You can ALWAYS get "the most recent version" even after 9 years. What you cannot do is get all the "intermediate versions" (like if you change a text document, we retain all versions for 30 days, then we only keep the most recent version forever). I do agree that would be a better product (retain infinite versions of every file). Unfortunately we would need to charge more for that, and many customers only want the most recent copy of all their documents.
I understand if Backblaze is not a good solution for you. I just want to be absolutely clear what we provide and what we do not provide.
It'll also be nice if you could provide an option to get alerts if a certain subset of files change. I have folders on my NAS (I know Backblaze doesn't back up servers) which are basically files from my old desktops that I'll sort through some day in the future, and which are highly unlikely to change, maybe ever.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/extended-version-histo...
If this is how the 30 day policy works, it is slightly more appealing than what I thought. However, it's still not enough peace-of-mind for me. This means that recent files are vulnerable to corruption during their first month of existence (through accidental overwriting, and some kinds of viruses and ransomware). The "most recent version" that is backed up may end up being a corrupted, useless version.
I agree that retaining infinite versions of every file would be cost-prohibitive. However, you may be able to find a healthy compromise. Maybe you could retain a ton of versions of small files and fewer versions of large files. Maybe you could provide users with a space allowance for versioning and allow them to decide which versions of which files to delete (if they reach the allowance limit) or to pay more to increase the allowance.
To summarize: You need versioning in order to be an awesome backup service (and an awesome backup service is the only thing I'll happily settle for!)
Keeping old snapshots (e.g. one or two per year) is an absolute must.
No. We consider a file deletion as "the final version of the file you wish to retain". In that case you can get the deleted version for 30 days, then it is gone forever.
* Can it backup linux machines?
You can see a list of integrations here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
* Are they one of the market leaders?
* Do they have a company blog? Are they passionate about their product? (Backblaze's technical articles are always a treat; barely a word from Crashplan.)
* Do they regularly interact with their users, e.g. on HN? (I often see Backblaze commenting on relevant articles.)
* Is their website user-focused, or is it aimed at the enterprise? (Crashplan's website is a confusing mess.)
* Do they offer secondary products that relate to their primary offering? (B2 leverages Backblaze's fine-tuned backup architecture.)
* Is their software well-built/designed, or is it annoying and bloated? (Crashplan's client forces you to wait for reindexing every time you check a new folder! The tree view is also very annoying, and Backblaze's whitelist just makes a whole lot more sense.)
A shame for Crashplan users, but I hope this change ensures BB's longevity for many more years!