Backblaze S-1 IPO

Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by helloworld11 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @01:53AM (#28915251)

I tried Backblaze but couldn't get over its insistence on first backing up my entire primary hard drive instead of allowing me to simply choose directly my most important files in my external drives, or from wherever I prefer. Seems arbitrarily forceful to me, though the pricing and security options are good. Also, the interface of deselecting things to not back up via exclusions, instead of simply being able to specifically select what you WANT to back up is absurd, it complicates things unnecessarily if out of dozens of folders, you only want to select a few essentials for cloud storage.

As far as pricing goes, $5 per month for 100GB seems steep. SpiderOak offers 400GB for less than that and so does Nordlocker (though Nord has its own problems). On the other hand, iDrive has been offering a whopping 5 terabytes for a whole year for just $3.98 in a deal I saw just a few days ago.

Overall, zero knowledge backup is the best route, Backblaze plays at that, on the other hand I wouldn't touch any backup offering by Google with a 10 meter cattle prod. Grotesque that they reserve the right to snoop right through your files unless you first encrypt them externally via third party apps.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by UI_at_80x24 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @10:17AM (#28918330)

This is not accurate.

You are not forced to backup your entire hard-drive. There is a 3rd party program called: rclone

That program let's you choose which files/directories get copied over to BackBlaze. We have 150+TB (+10TB/week) stored at BackBlaze and I use rclone exclusively to upload our content for backup.

Note, it's a CLI program that works on Linux/BSD. I'm not aware of any other platforms that it works on.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by prirun on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @11:41AM (#28919365)

I think the parent post is about the PC Backblaze backup service, not B2. The PC backup service does backup everything, and part of the reason for that is to make it extremely easy to setup. If they allowed selection of what to backup, it would be another user interface, more documentation, and then if the user deselected something important, they'd be mad if they had a problem and something wasn't backed up. Since it doesn't affect the flat-rate price, it's easier just to back up everything.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by helloworld11 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @12:31PM (#28920060)

Noted, but Backblaze's insistence on "simplicity" by obligating a full main drive backup so that users can't later complain that something was missed is silly. Why not just offer this as a default but also offer the choice of creating your own completely custom backup selections, you know, on the assumption that some users of the service might actually know what they want and how to select it.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by tehbeard on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @06:21PM (#28924503)

If you want to get hired by them, propose it, get it approved, implement and test this 2nd code path, and maintain it for foreseeable futures, go right ahead.

Idk about on first run, but I'm pretty sure you can pick and choose which drives it scans, including boot drive, and set up excludes as needed (handy to avoid backing up .git or node_modules)

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by mkr-hn on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @11:51AM (#28919504)

You can exclude folders. I use it for a few things where there's no point in backing it up.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by helloworld11 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @12:27PM (#28920009)

As far as I know, Backblaze lets you exclude folders from accessory drives and so forth, but not from the main PC drive itself. Also, the selection by exclusion itself is deeply annoying, because, as I said above, if out of many folders you only want to back up a few, selecting just those would be much easier and more intuitive than deselecting a whole pile of them to only leave a few. This was a deal breaker for me.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by mkr-hn on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @12:31PM (#28920065)

I definitely have folders excluded on the main drive.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by UI_at_80x24 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @03:42PM (#28922711)

Ahh thanks, I hadn't thought about that. I can't edit my post.

I was thinking about B2.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by helloworld11 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @12:29PM (#28920038)

Furthermore, in response to the comment above, my reference was to using Backblaze alone and with Windows, as many people without any technical knowledge of computers at all might use it. Having to add in the use of Linux or rclone would mean a very different use case from the usual.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by Moral_ on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @09:02AM (#28917602)

This is the exact reason why I didn't use backblaze, that and their linux support. I didn't want my entire PC backed up, and wanted to hand select a few hefty folders.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by UI_at_80x24 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @10:19AM (#28918351)

You can specify what gets backed up by using rclone.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by jpalomaki on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @09:41AM (#28917977)

This is core part of their business model. They can provide unlimited backup capacity, because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer. So this effectively limits your storage space.

Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by UI_at_80x24 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @10:18AM (#28918337)

>because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer.

This is not accurate, please see my response to helloworld11

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Re:Backblaze S-1 IPO by ethbr0 on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @08:44AM (#28917465)

Has Backblaze ever published their EOL costs?

At some point, I'd imagine it's an optimization problem between (cost of failure) vs (liquidation value) vs (revenue per GB), where running them all the way into the dirt doesn't make sense. Or maybe it does?

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