16 ms·

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

• jcreedon 11y ago
  The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We do mention that we only have one datacenter! We're very transparent, we also tell you that it is 17+3 Reed-Solomon error correction across 20 separate machines in 20 separate locations inside that one datacenter. We are already looking for another datacenter, but mostly because we're running out of space in the current one due to our traditional business (online backup) doing so well.
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Something to note: Unless you're storing data in us-east-1, all other regions in AWS are "one datacenter". Yes, they have AZs, but those aren't datacenters, they're just compartmentalized segments of the same datacenter. So! If you can tolerate the loss of a datacenter, store in Blackblaze. If you need geo-redundancy until Backblaze can offer it? Store in us-east-1 (which is geo-redundant between Virginia and Oregon).
    • gamegoblin 11y ago
      Do you have a source that all other regions are "one datacenter"? All I could find on the S3 FAQ says "your objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities." which seems to contradict the "one datacenter" claim. Also, do you have a source that us-east-1 is geo-redundant between Virginia and Oregon? That was not my understanding of how it worked.
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        AWS considers multiple facilities to be separate AZs in the same region. If you want multi region durability (besides us-east-1), you need cross region replication enabled (from the same FAQ you read). "You specify a region when you create your Amazon S3 bucket. Within that region, your objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities. Please refer to Regional Products and Services for details of Amazon S3 service availability by region" Note, "within that region". Separate AZs, same geographic location. "CRR is an Amazon S3 feature that automatically replicates data across AWS regions. With CRR, every object uploaded to an S3 bucket is automatically replicated to a destination bucket in a different AWS region that you choose. You can use CRR to provide lower-latency data access in different geographic regions. CRR can also help if you have a compliance requirement to store copies of data hundreds of miles apart." This post http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistency-in-amazon.html http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistenc... has a quote from Jeff Barr at AWS indicating that us-east-1 is bicoastal, which is also why its eventually consistent, instead of immediately after a write (EDIT: it appears this constraint no longer applies to the US standard region).
        • DinkyG 11y ago
          Multiple facilities != "one datacenter"
          • toomuchtodo 11y ago
            Like I asked below, do you have a citation?
            • DinkyG 11y ago
              "No one data center serves two availability zones" : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/16/aws_data_centre_architecture_amazon_cto_werner_vogels/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/16/aws_data_centre_arch...
              • 11y ago
    • DinkyG 11y ago
      This is incorrect. If you look for news articles about Amazon constructing data centers or buying facilities you'll notice that they have multiple data center facilities in each region.
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Have a citation? My data is directly from AWS docs and speaking with AWS staff.
        • DinkyG 11y ago
          The docs you quoted specifically call out "multiple facilities".
          • deleted 11y ago
            [deleted]
    • brianwski 11y ago
      > If you need geo-redundancy until Backblaze can offer it? Store in us-east-1 Or store it in Amazon AND store another copy in Backblaze. This isn't necessarily an "either/or" question. Having two copies with two different vendors in two separate regions is probably more reliable than having two copies inside the same vendor. For example, if Amazon has a large outage that affects both your regions, you can still access the copy in Backblaze.
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        If you're going to pick two providers, use Backblaze and Google. Google's Nearline Storage is still more reliable (AWS only offers a 98% SLA on a monthly basis for S3 IA storage class) and cheaper (if I recall properly) than AWS' Intermediate Availability offering.
    • BillinghamJ 11y ago
      This is incorrect on almost all points. All AWS AZs are physically separated facilities with redundancy on all their infrastructure, although they're obviously in the same general area. us-east-1 is not geo-redundant. It is entirely on the east-coast, as the name suggests. Although S3 does have geo-redundancy in all regions. You may have been thinking of "US Standard", but it is the same as "us-east-1". http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_r...
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > This is a feature for EU and US-West. US Standard is bi-coastal and doesn’t have read-after-write consistency. Quote from Jeff Barr @ AWS: http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistenc.. http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistenc....
        • mentat 11y ago
          Their documentation is really inconsistent on this...
          • toomuchtodo 11y ago
            I've emailed Jeff to get clarification on it.
            • jeffbarr 11y ago
              You did? I didn't see it...
              • toomuchtodo 11y ago
                From my gmail account :/ I'll resend!
    • tiernano 11y ago
      what about Ireland? Amazon have 7 active Datacenters, 1 being build and 1 in planning...
• budmang 11y ago
  I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2. Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/ Gleb
  • sspiff 11y ago
    Thank you for doing this. I've read some awesome stuff on Backblaze's infrastructure over the years, but never could use the service (a high level backup solution for Windows/Mac isn't so useful for me). This announcement may mean I finally get to test your stuff! (I've been frustrated with the quality and feature creep in open source syncing solutions and procrastinating building my own, bare bones alternative).
    • budmang 11y ago
      Would love to have you do it...and hearing about how it goes!
  • acdha 11y ago
    Do you have any plans to offer some sort of WORM model where you could “seal” a bucket, file, etc. to prevent future changes? This is really nice for protecting against malware, human error or malice, etc. and a regulatory requirement for certain industries.
    • budmang 11y ago
      We're at the very beginning of this journey, and heard from a lot of folks that they wanted access to inexpensive cloud storage. I imagine we'll learn a lot more about needs & use cases from people overtime. I can certainly understand the value of WORM storage and it is something we'll definitely consider adding. Appreciate the suggestion!
  • jafitc 11y ago
    Is it me or there's no mention of durability? Is this only for noncritical, reproducible data as S3 reduced redundancy?
• jrnkntl 11y ago
  cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99: 0 results. Only on https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit more specific.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
    • jorangreef 11y ago
      I have read plenty of posts from Backblaze in the past including the linked post, but I admit I also wanted to see details about the replication factor on the marketing site for B2.
  • budmang 11y ago
    brianwski below shares a good link...but you make a good point jrnkntl that we should talk more about it on the site. We'll plan to add more content around that on the Why B2 page. Thanks!
    • acdha 11y ago
      Please go into detail about how failures are detected and handled – e.g. how often is the archive scrubbed, will bitrot be detected on access, etc. Those details are really important for comparing services.
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Does AWS provide this info for S3? I believe they do not, and only provide a percentage of durability maintained.
• ck2 11y ago
  Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev at Backblaze here -> WHERE ARE YOU FINDING THEM? We want...a couple...
    • ck2 11y ago
      Tigerdirect had them for $170 for a few days.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8 TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the 6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...
    • ck2 11y ago
      Tigerdirect had them for $170 for a few days. Note TDs are air-filled 7200rpm regular drives. Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow.
      • PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow. My understanding of HAMR is that it is probably perfectly fine for Backblaze's backup products, which are (more or less) write-once, read-rarely. Shingled magnetic recording should also be OK for that use case. But clearly not good for cloud storage.
        • ck2 11y ago
          Heat assisted is fine for write once but helium filled drives actually leak over time and fail because their molecules are so small.
• ComputerGuru 11y ago
  In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth. There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled. I don't know how many users they have to tell you how much bandwidth they're actually handling, but can they handle people using B2 as a distribution point for large files for customers? For example, I have a huge S3/CF monthly bill from customers downloading ~400MiB ISO images tens thousands of times a month. Amazon CloudFront is ~$0.085/GB for the first TB, while BackBlaze B2 is an incredible $0.05/GB - but at what performance? Will my technical support representatives be getting angry phone calls about halting download speeds or do they have the capacity for something like this? Hosting the world's data is no tiny task, I hope they're ready for it and I do, truly, wish them all the luck. I've been a BackBlaze customer for a few years now (at least 5 or 6, I imagine) as a tertiary or quaternary backup (haven't had to restore... yet), and B2 looks and sounds promising, but as far as technical details go, this post is nothing. EDIT: In response to the reply below, I believe it's throttled by default in the client, though that can be turned off in the application settings. Also, you've replied to my claims of throttling but have ignored my question regarding backbone capacity and network readiness...
  • brianwski 11y ago
    > as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled Brian from Backblaze here: no it is not throttled (by us). If you only have a 10 Mbit/sec upload capacity you are throttled by your ISP. Also make sure you visit our "Performance" tab in the online backup client and tweak a few settings, like increase the number of threads.
    • benjojo12 11y ago
      I have 100/100 up and down, and I barely push any more than 3MB/s when uploading. and in that time the client is easting all cores alive. I appreciate that it may not be the ISP. but the client does seem to end up being a major bottle neck. I moved to Linux a few months back, and was going to basically cancel my Backblaze sub when I got around to it since you have no interset in making a Linux client. Maybe B2 can act as a solution to this at a price penalty.
• falsestprophet 11y ago
  For context, OVH offers object storage with 3x replication for $.01/GB [1]. [1] https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml
  • ddorian43 11y ago
    And the bandwidth is $.01/GB and you don't pay for transactions.
  • ddorian43 11y ago
    And the bandwidth is $.01/GB and you don't pay for transactions.
  • Matheus28 11y ago
    It is certainly interesting how OVH undercuts the competition by quite a large margin in everything. We use them for dedicated servers, but I wonder why they're not as well known as AWS...
    • ju-st 11y ago
      Yeah, it is very interesting how everyone here loves AWS. And the reasons for it seem to be (1) the "trust" in AWS, (2) the existing knowledge about AWS's API etc. and (3) that it's just not worth the time to evaluate another provider because you could spend your time growing your startup/doing something more profitable. And these are interestingly exactly the same reasons enterprises buy IBM and Oracle. This is actually a big pet peeve of mine :)
      • zwily 11y ago
        Are you saying those reasons are not valid? And why is "trust" in quotes?
        • ju-st 11y ago
          No! The reasons are absolutely valid. It's just interesting to see that the lean and cool startup is very similar to an established enterprise in that regard. The trust is in quotes because I'm not sure what to think about it. Every month I see a post here about some AWS service outage but it looks like nobody is getting nervous because of this. People just wait until it is fixed. On the other hand, I have experienced that people begin to trust companies because the company advertises on TV. But AWS has earned its trust legitimately I think. The whole concept of "confidence/trust in companies" is so important but I know so little about it.
• thoughtpalette 11y ago
  Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets? Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket? Just curious as to why I would migrate from S3 for FE assets to Backblaze.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Yes! RIGHT NOW (during beta) we don't have the top level folder feature yet, the URLs all come from https:://f001.backblaze.com type of URLs. But this is one of my favorite uses (I have a private website I plan to move over) and we'll definitely be adding this feature soon.
    • thoughtpalette 11y ago
      Wicked! Time to start writing all those gulp-backblaze upload scripts!
• Jake232 11y ago
  You should allows period (.) in your signup form email field. I know you can just remove the period and the email will still get delivered to my gmail, but plenty of people likely don't know this.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    You mean a period at the end? Like tmp@zebra.com. ? We'll fix it...
    • Jake232 11y ago
      No. The form wasn't allowing xxx.yyy@gmail.com
      • icelancer 11y ago
        Accepted my xxxx.yyyy@gmail.com just fine, unless they just fixed it.
• xrjn 11y ago
  This is a really cool service, I can already think of a few cool uses for this. I once participated in a project (movie to gif library), and one of the biggest constraints was the cost of cloud storage - hopefully more competition in this space can drive prices down to where they become even more negligible.
• IanCal 11y ago
  Great stuff. What's the setup for file permissions? Can I have multiple people writing to the same bucket? Can I restrict deletion & write rules?
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here. It's pretty simple for now. You can have as many people reading and writing to the same bucket, but they would all need to share the same credentials. Buckets are either "allPublic" or "allPrivate" (and you can flip them back and forth at any time between those two settings). But that's it at this point. We're actively looking for feedback in this area, so as developers ask us for something like Amazon's IAM (AWS Identity and Access Management) we'll be filling that functionality out. Hopefully without adding too much complexity to the simple model we have now.
    • IanCal 11y ago
      That makes sense, release and iterate! Personally I'd like to use some access management, and there's one case that I've not seen solved particularly well (though would appreciate anyone chiming in with things I've missed): Distinct write and create permissions. I'd like to be able to grant someone permission to create files but not allow them to modify or delete them later. I end up generally adding this externally. I think B2 is really close to this, as you've got the file ids for multiple versions, so I can effectively ignore the filenames and use the file ids instead. It'd need a difference between "upload new version" and "delete version" though.
• wcchandler 11y ago
  Awesome. Can't wait to see this added to Déjà Dup as a backup destination.
• jhardcastle 11y ago
  Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.
  • skrause 11y ago
    Arq has a Windows version now and they support many different storages targets: https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ I hope they add B2 support at some point.
  • daemoned 11y ago
    AltaVault sounds like the thing your looking for. http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection-software/altavault/ http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection-software/altava...
    • khc 11y ago
      AltaVault is a backup target, but not a backup product that the OP was likely asking for. But many companies use products like Arq, BackupExec, or NetBackup in combination with AltaVault to achieve what the OP described. Disclaimer: I worked on the predecessor to AltaVault at Riverbed
• jbeda 11y ago
  Took a quick look at the API. For context, I was involved in the early days of Google Cloud Storage. It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API -- at least for common object/bucket create/delete. This will require more code to be written and it will be harder to adapt client libraries. The API documentation is here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/ https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/ Other notes: * The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL followed by doing the actual upload. * They require a SHA1 hash when uploading objects. This is probably overkill over a cheaper CRC. In addition, it means that users have to make 2 passes to upload -- first to compute the hash and then another to upload. This can slow uploads of large objects dramatically. A better method is to allow users to omit the hash and return it in the upload response. Then compare that response with a hash computed while uploading. In the rare case that the object was corrupted in transit, delete/retry. GCS docs here: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#checksum-validation https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#che...
  • brianwski 11y ago
    > It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API .... The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL And... you answered your own question. :-) We reduce our operating costs by not having as many load balancers in the datacenter and pushing off the responsibility to the API. It all comes from our traditional backup product where we wrote all the software on both sides so we could save money this way. With that said, we are actively considering offering an S3 compatible API for a slightly higher cost (basically what it would cost us to deploy the larger load balancing tech).
    • sagivo 11y ago
      S3 compatible API is the only reason preventing us from migrating to your cheaper option right now.
      • 11y ago
• degenerate 11y ago
  Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most useful announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead "we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z" -- nice job.
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> I cannot describe how pleased I am to read this comment. Thank you!
    • brianwski 11y ago
      There are several of us that are very happy to hear that!
    • larrys 11y ago
      I want a way to be able to use this with ssh rsync scp and so on to preserve legacy backup routines that are now in place. (Including on systems that you will not be writing b2 clients for like old versions of Solaris).
      • hga 11y ago
        The canonical $$$ (relatively) way to do this is rsync.net: http://rsync.net/pricing.html http://rsync.net/pricing.html Saved me from losing quite a bit of data when a tornado trashed my apartment.
    • bedros 11y ago
      Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form. Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all that data I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google. Another question, what's the max number of buckets can an account hold? Looking forward to try this service out, Thanks Bedros
• Bud 11y ago
  Real attention to detail in this announcement. I signed up right away. If there's attention to detail with one thing, odds are you'll find it in other places, too.
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev at Backblaze -> So pleased to hear your say that! I'll forward it to the engineering team. They have LITERALLY been working nonstop on this for a year and deserve some praise! Thank you for signing up, I'm excited for you to start using it!
• gaul 11y ago
  Updated object store comparison: http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev from Backblaze -> That's cool!
  • kbenson 11y ago
    This is nice, but I have one critique: Having the sorting indicators right justified and the text for the column header left justified without any column borders had my clicking on the sorting indicators for the wrong column for a few seconds and wondering why the sorting was wonky. You can click anywhere on the header column to sort, which once you realize that makes it easy to use as intended, but a visual indication of separate columns in the header (a right/left border, or horizontal striping) would make it just a tad more obvious.
  • bedros 11y ago
    your chart is missing https://nimbus.io/ https://nimbus.io/ which is .02 per GB/Mo.
    • gaul 11y ago
      I added an issue to track this since Nimbus is still in private beta: https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison/issues/9 https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-comparison/issues...
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • retrack 11y ago
    Nice table, it provides a good overview of what is available. I would suggest also to add the protocol (S3, Swift,...) used and coverage by libs/languages. I also created a PR to add support for Exoscale.
• devit 11y ago
  Finally some more reasonable prices in this space. Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download your data to analyze it. What I'd really like is a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.
    • jagger27 11y ago
      Amazon might not be open to it, but I would bet Digital Ocean would be.
      • inopinatus 11y ago
        I would rate the likelihood of AWS offering free, multi-path, multi-Tbps connectivity into their AZs to a competitor to be effectively nil. If the alternative cloud ecosystem wants to compete effectively against AWS, it desperately needs a more sophisticated authorization scheme. Don't forget that IAM/STS is a major enabling factor in applications integration of EC2 and S3.
    • meritt 11y ago
      Yup. That is the deal breaker for us. Our infrastructure exists on AWS so 100% of the data transfer is free (within the same region). While your per-GB storage is indeed less, the transfer costs would make too expensive ultimately
• graniter 11y ago
  The price is being heralded as the thing to get excited about, but I'm also very concerned about the security and availability of my data. I suppose those details are somewhere, but they're not in this article which is quite lengthy. I would like to know more of the implementation of this and more information on policies to protect access to my data. And I would like to know where the data is stored. I suppose I got read the manual, but maybe some info tidbits could be included in the announcement.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy and pretty much everything we do. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... You can also read about our "Backblaze Storage Pods" (the things filled with drives) here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod/ Also, we are the only company we know of that releases our drive failure rates. We release them quarterly, here is the most recent failure analysis: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-...
• Osmium 11y ago
  Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual. Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though, so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup scheme is, for example (though it seems pretty simple - https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt). I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure. It's probably good enough for my use, given that I'm not storing state secrets or anything, but it's still a little unsettling to 'lose control' of one's data. From Backblaze's point of view, I guess this is either smart (diversifying themselves–people can use other backup software if they like, and Backblaze still profits) or less smart (turning themselves into a commodity), but it seems like their software is still first rate, so I guess it'll work for them.
  • Freaky 11y ago
    > I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES. I can only assume they do this because migrating would cost them money, and being able to advertise "448 bit encryption" actually sounds like a plus to most people and not the glaring red flag it actually is. > it seems like their software is still first rate What, like their backup client that can't actually do restores? It's still all "log in to our website and let us decrypt your data for you" :/
    • Osmium 11y ago
      > They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES. Not defending it, because I know it's old and there are weaknesses, but aren't Blowfish and 3DES both still technically secure? This is a genuine question. It was my understanding that if implemented correctly, with a random key etc., that neither has been formally broken. 3DES is 2^112 no? which is still not practically accessible by brute force. Not that this means anyone should use them, of course, AES is a standard for a reason... As you say, I had just assumed the migration cost was too high to move to something newer, but I don't think it necessarily means data stored there is unsafe?
• Thaxll 11y ago
  Are they using Ceph?
  • khc 11y ago
    From their previous blog posts they built their own storage stack
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• venomsnake 11y ago
  > Downloads are just $0.05/GB Can anyone compare that to other similar providers? While the storage is cheap, it seems more useful for cold storage.
  • ehPReth 11y ago
    http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/ mentioned by @gaul a little bit ago has outbound pricing listed for a bunch of providers
  • brianwski 11y ago
    There is a chart here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html Backblaze is the same cost or cheaper as the cheapest tier in several other popular services like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. We don't know of anybody with a lower cost of downloads.
  • vidarh 11y ago
    It's cheap for blob storage. It's terribly expensive compared to hosting yourself. So yeah, I'd agree with you. But for anyone prepared to use S3 for anything but cold storage, this is still a lot cheaper. My suggestion would be to use this for cold storage + big cache boxes at a provider with low bandwidth charges. Especially if your "hot" objects make up a relatively small percentage.
• aidenn0 11y ago
  Reading the API, it seems that I need to precalculate a SHA-1 before uploading? This makes it impossible to stream data to b2 from another source, I'll need to store it first then send to b2.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Right now your only option would be to "buffer" packets of say 1 MByte in RAM, calculate the SHA-1, then store them as separate files in Backblaze B2. We do plan to add file offset access and larger file support very soon, so you would be able to append a 1 MByte chunk to an existing file in Backblaze with a SHA-1 of only the 1 MByte chunk. That should allow you to stream? All great feedback, by the way. We really want to hear about these shortcomings in our API right away.
    • aidenn0 11y ago
      > We do plan to add file offset access and larger file support very soon, so you would be able to append a 1 MByte chunk to an existing file in Backblaze with a SHA-1 of only the 1 MByte chunk. That should allow you to stream? Yeah, that would be sufficient.
    • nickcw 11y ago
      Having to know the SHA1 in advance would be a show stopper for rclone ( http://rclone.org http://rclone.org ) as it uses a streaming model internally (it can stream between cloud providers). Being able to append to a file in 1 MByte chunks (or larger) would be perfect - that is exactly the way Amazon S3 multipart uploads and google drive multipart uploads work.
      • voltagex_ 11y ago
        I'm planning on storing files as encrypted X megabyte chunks (where X is TBD) - would calculating per-chunk and then uploading solve it? There's metadata support which could store original filenames etc.
    • dfinlay 11y ago
• ehPReth 11y ago
  What provider does Backblaze use for SMS verification? I'm using a Twilio number and it seems that the two disagree with each other. (It might be due to short-code use, but I'm not sure what their outbound number is.)
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Backblaze uses Plivo (and we have a short code if that makes sense to you).
    • ehPReth 11y ago
      Thanks! Twilio isn't able to handle incoming SMS from short codes at this point so that would explain the issue. I'll use another method to verify for now until they do
• scott_karana 11y ago
  Good lord, that's affordable! I cannot wait until someone writes a Duplicity[1] backend for this... :-D 1 http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
• martin-adams 11y ago
  I couldn't tell from the docs, but is it possible (or will it be possible) to generate a single use download URL to return to clients? I wouldn't want to have to pay double for outbound traffic going from B2 -> my server -> client.
  • zdrummond 11y ago
    We heavily use this feature on S3, and I would hope B2 does/will support it
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, you could get a URL and give it to somebody. Every time that person accesses it though, there'd be a charge (unless you're within our free parameters). If I understand correctly...
    • martin-adams 11y ago
      Thanks Yev, is it possible to have the URL auto expire after a time period or number of accesses?
• kiwidrew 11y ago
  One feature that I'd love to see: the ability to update part of a file (e.g. replace bytes 512-1023 with new content of the same length) and/or append to an existing file! For whatever reason, these cloud storage products are always implemented as either block-based (so you can replace parts of the file) or as file-based (so you can create a hierarchy of files with names and metadata). Why can't I have my cake and eat it??
  • brianwski 11y ago
    > Why can't I have my cake and eat it? :-) We definitely plan to add an API to append to an existing file. The current largest file size is 5 GBytes, and we want to support much larger (imagine a 1 TByte encrypted disk image). That will be by appending chunks to files followed by a "commit" declaring the file as complete. I think the reason most of us cloud providers don't like replacing parts of files is it helps our caching layer be much simpler, and it would change the SHA-1 checksum on the file which just means "more complexity". But it isn't out of the question, it might just come with a "cost" (like you can replace the span but it might take a while and then we provide you the final checksum of the whole file in the response).
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• atrophying 11y ago
  Fair warning: Backblaze has a habit of making major changes silently (without any indication to the user), and their customer support is TERRIBLE. I was a customer for several years and never had a positive interaction with their support staff. The final straw was losing several files last year after they changed their backup method without notifying users, a method that contradicted their documentation. I got full IDGAF treatment from their support. That's right - a backup solution failed to backup, then support basically shrugged and said "your loss, too bad, so sad" when I contacted them even though they admitted it was their fault. Buyer beware when it comes to Backblaze.
  • Dylan16807 11y ago
    How did it change that you lost data?
    • atrophying 11y ago
      They started picking and choosing which parts of AppData they backed up, but never informed their users and kept on claiming they backed up "everything." See, the backup app used to be set up so you could see what was being excluded, and modify it if need be. I had the entirety of AppData selected as "for backup," then had several bits of saved user data wiped out. One of those was an extension that stored its data in the browser user profile, something I used frequently and had restored a half-dozen times from backup. Then it was gone. Backblaze stopped backing it up, deleted it from their servers, and I had no way to restore it. Three years of data lost and zero effort from Backblaze to recover it, not even an apology. The technology isn't bad, but their customer service is some of the worst I've ever seen. I was a Backblaze customer for three years and not once did I have what I'd consider a positive experience. If anything goes wrong they leave you hanging. They're not a company I'd ever trust with valuable data again.
• GordonS 11y ago
  I didn't see this - are data centres available in different regions? Or is this a US-centric offering? I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were very slow.
  • kalleboo 11y ago
    They only have a single data-center. > I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were very slow. Curiously from here in Japan, I've managed to clock 80 MBit/s backing up to Backblaze. I presume it all has to do with what kind of international peering your ISP has.
• dchest 11y ago
  Looks like you still don't accept customers from Montenegro. "For security reasons, we are blocking your country's IP address." Why?
• derekp7 11y ago
  Are there any plans to add application hosting along with this offering? Specifically, it could be useful to have a shim application that has direct access to the data without traversing the Internet, to minimize what needs to be transferred. For example, if used for a backup application, each day's incremental delta may be in one archive, but a periodic operation would be to move files from one archive to another. Or a full system restore may be pulling some data out of multiple archives, and a "shim" app (running within Backblaze's data center) would eliminate unnecessary transfers out.
  • brianwski 11y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here. We'll add a LITTLE bit of app hosting support around this, but you won't be seeing a full blown EC2 type of product out of Backblaze for a while, realistically we don't have a large enough team to charge down that path and still do a great job at B2 and also our traditional online backup product that we still maintain. What I'd really like in the short term is to do a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.
• tzz 11y ago
  Nine months ago, I said the following. It feels good to predict things before they happen: Backblaze should expand their service to a cheaper cloud storage service similar to Amazon S3. They already have the infrastructure and the know-how. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119
  • atYevP 11y ago
    Yev from Backblaze -> Yea, it was hard not say..."we're working on it".
• JungleGymSam 11y ago
  Please tell me you're working on a PowerShell module. Microsoft is pushing PowerShell HARD (because it's awesome) and admins that do use it know its power and want ALL their vendors to use it. You can open yourself up to a large number of customers by making it easy to get started via PowerShell.
• Poiesis 11y ago
  For me, the signup page loaded once but now I get redirected to a 404 page at http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html when trying to load the signup page.
• willcodeforfoo 11y ago
  This is awesome! I've been waiting for this for awhile. I saw the comment about getting drives shipped to you, which is pretty neat, but what about the other way? I have about 50 TB of data we'd like to store, but only 5mbps upstream. Can we ship drives to you?
  • brianwski 11y ago
    We call that feature "drive seeding" and it is requested often. Realistically I don't think we'll get to implement it in the next few months, but maybe in the 6 month timeframe?
• DoubleMalt 11y ago
  Just yesterday I was discussing with a friend that I'd like to use Backblaze as backend for our zero-knowledge backup at https://cloudfleet.io https://cloudfleet.io and that I'll ask them for a metered pricing model when we're big enough. And voilá ... here it is.
• tachion 11y ago
  Congratulations on the launch! And I am also happy to announce, that the official command line tool, b2, is already ported to FreeBSD: http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/ http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/
• robhu 11y ago
  I asked Arq support if / when it would support B2 and got this reply: Hi Robert, I don’t know whether or not Arq will be integrated with B2. - Stefan
• jadegrade 11y ago
  What do we think about the charges for deleting on b2?