Re:"It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."
by thaumaturgy on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @01:54AM
(#7093849)
The part that doesn't make sense right now is that Backblaze has been around for several years, and if they had some kind of infrastructural issue with transmitting large amounts of data, I'd expect this not to be the first such case to come across my news feed. (BB has been featured on HN a handful of times -- no reports that I know of so far with retrieving data from them.)
With all due respect to your expertise, in at least 9 out of 10 cases where I've encountered something similar to this, it's been a problem on the client's side of the link -- bad traffic shaping by the ISP, faulty modem, glitchy router or switch -- and those often don't show up in speed tests or media streaming or web browsing.
I have an idea that would satisfy my curiosity, if you're willing: how about renting a VPS on DigitalOcean (who charge in small increments), with enough storage for zipped file size + unzipped archive size, and then see if you can download the archive from Backblaze to the VPS and unzip it on the VPS? See e.g. http://victorwyee.com/shell/getting-backblaze-restores-via-c...
If it works, you can rsync over ssh. If it doesn't work, then I'll buy that Backblaze has got a problem.
> "This is why I used Backblaze's advertised downloader application -- I got the impression that it would provide better stability, checking, etc. to ensure that the zip file did not get corrupted."
I strongly suspect that their downloader just implements http resume in some slightly brain-damaged way.
> "...my point is that I pay them so that I can restore my files conveniently, not so that I can be upsold to a $189 drive."
Ah.
You're paying them $5/month to store your data. That's it. It's a bit of a nit to pick, but it's important: for $5/month, they're not guaranteeing that you can download your data. So providing alternatives to downloading is not an "upsell" (especially at those prices).
With all due respect to your expertise, in at least 9 out of 10 cases where I've encountered something similar to this, it's been a problem on the client's side of the link -- bad traffic shaping by the ISP, faulty modem, glitchy router or switch -- and those often don't show up in speed tests or media streaming or web browsing.
I have an idea that would satisfy my curiosity, if you're willing: how about renting a VPS on DigitalOcean (who charge in small increments), with enough storage for zipped file size + unzipped archive size, and then see if you can download the archive from Backblaze to the VPS and unzip it on the VPS? See e.g. http://victorwyee.com/shell/getting-backblaze-restores-via-c...
If it works, you can rsync over ssh. If it doesn't work, then I'll buy that Backblaze has got a problem.
> "This is why I used Backblaze's advertised downloader application -- I got the impression that it would provide better stability, checking, etc. to ensure that the zip file did not get corrupted."
I strongly suspect that their downloader just implements http resume in some slightly brain-damaged way.
> "...my point is that I pay them so that I can restore my files conveniently, not so that I can be upsold to a $189 drive."
Ah.
You're paying them $5/month to store your data. That's it. It's a bit of a nit to pick, but it's important: for $5/month, they're not guaranteeing that you can download your data. So providing alternatives to downloading is not an "upsell" (especially at those prices).