There's a pronounced difference between flat-out marketing and posting interesting articles that help promote your product. It's clear to me which side of the divide Backblaze lies on. And I think Crashplan's shuttering bears this out: their tech was always a means to an end for them, and their end simply did not include power users.

This is basically the marketing that got Backblaze it's respect.

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.

There's only so much interesting posts to do about "backups". It's a boring product, like "email". So you don't use gmail because the team doesn't do enough enthousiastic posts about it?

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've always been a big fan of BB's blog, and have recommended their approach to friends and clients for their own blogs and sites. Their data, plans, and progress are not only interesting to people who care about the industry, but it's also a window into the kind of people they are. Proud of their accomplishments (their backup servers, which they've open sourced), and their tools (like their server lifts).

Poor thing, it's a blog. It's maintained and updated by the consumer oriented corporate brand. It's marketing.

I am not saying it's evil or that your wrong, but that your deductions are illogical.

Perhaps GP is trying to say, that, in contrast to "just a blog", it's a blog with really good, technical content. This makes IMHO a great difference, since basically anyone can "just write a blog" with buzzwords bingo, but to write a competent, high-quality, relevant, technical blog, is really hard and takes time to do properly. Doing so might mean that they care for their product, that little extra love. That in itself is marketing yes, but also an indicator of pride, which in itself _might_ indicate a well-greased machine with lots of love spent on it.

I'm a bit partial though, as that fits us quite well in what we are doing at our place.

Backblaze's reports on their hard drive failure rates regularly tops Hacker News' front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=backblaze.com