4 ms·

Cold storage looks cheap at first glance, but for the amount of data I have to backup (about 3 TB), I work out the cost to: (0.7 * / 100) * 3000 = $21 / month

Cold storage looks cheap at first glance, but for the amount of data I have to backup (about 3 TB), I work out the cost to: (0.7 * / 100) * 3000 = $21 / month * 12 = $252 / yr For that price, I'm better off just paying $60 / yr for CrashPlan, which is unlimited storage. I'd say that applies to anyone who has a terabyte or more of stuff to back up.

devopsproject 10y ago
Have you tried downloading any significant portion of your backup from CrashPlan? Is so, how was performance?
- AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  Not a significant portion, no. CrashPlan is only my third layer of backup, the offsite backup. Each of my drives have a clone backup drive (typically just a WD My Passport that makes them easy to transport when I travel), and then a larger external that holds backups of all of them--I usually keep that one in storage and only plug it in once a month or so to sync. CP is the third layer of backup. The most I do in a typical week is use the Android app to grab a few movies or documents from the CP storage to get it onto my phone and tablet. I should probably "test" doing a recovery from CrashPlan at some point, but I fear that even getting a third of it (1TB) would probably trip some sort of overcharge from my ISP.
- jrnichols 10y ago
  I have. It was decent. accidentally hosed a vmware image and it was easier for me to just pull the whole thing down from Crashplan. Speeds were decent, limited mostly by my cable modem. I don't recall the exact throughput but I remember looking and saying "Hey, this isn't bad" and not being annoyed by anything. Plus the price isn't too bad.
crudbug 10y ago
https://www.backblaze.com https://www.backblaze.com
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hga 10y ago
  As far as I can tell, they're still operating out of one data centers, and while they claim it's Sacramento location is outside of earthquake danger zones, I can still see one to the west impacting availability depending on fiber routing, electrical supply, etc. Echoing another comment, I'm not sure if this is a big a danger as a programmer's or operator's potential to wipe out all your data no matter how many datacenters it's located in, but....
  - ProblemFactory 10y ago
    That seems acceptable for a consumer backup (not cloud storage) solution. I have data on my laptop, an external disk that I keep at home, and BackBlaze. The likelihood of all three failing in the same week so that I can't restore from any single copy is low.
    - hga 10y ago
      Indeed, and I have seriously considered them for their 71% lower price than AWS Glacier and now Google's Coldline, but I wanted to point out the apples vs. oranges difference in one way each does redundancy, or not in the case of Backblaze.
    - brianwski 10y ago
      > That seems acceptable for a consumer backup (not cloud storage) solution. I work at Backblaze, so I'm biased. :-) But the use case is important, meaning I wouldn't group together all "cloud storage solution" as one use case. Backblaze does not have compute at all (like EC2) so Backblaze is a terrible choice for a company that will spend a lot of cycles analyzing the data stored in the cloud or doing compute on the data stored in the cloud. That is a much larger issue than the one data center for that use case. On the other hand, it is my profound belief that for long term durability of data you should have AT LEAST three copies of the data stored by profoundly different vendors. Hopefully different file systems and stored by software written by different programmers so the same bug that affects one copy won't affect the other copies. Hopefully stored at separate physical locations. Put a different way: the only way to get more reliable than data stored at Amazon Glacier is to have one copy in Amazon Glacier, another copy on Google Coldline, and another copy in Backblaze. In that use case, the single data center of Backblaze is obviously a non-issue.
Gigablah 10y ago
CrashPlan removed all my data since I wasn't keeping my disks online. Fair enough -- it's a backup solution, not remote storage. Still, I'd rather have paid for the latter in the first place and saved myself the trouble of having to upload everything again.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  This has happened to me too and it is annoying. However, I believe the delete is a soft-delete unless you specifically configure CrashPlan to remove deleted files after so many days. I have mine configured to NEVER remove files, even deleted ones. I've found that you can alleviate some of the headache by assigning the disks unique drive names. The reason for the deletion is that you might plug in your external HDD that gets mounted as drive F. You let it finish backing up, then disconnect it. If you later plug in a tiny flash drive that also gets mounted as F:, CrashPlan will see the contents of that drive and assume that you deleted everything from the previous drive and accordingly mark is as deleted in the backup. If you mount the external HDD as drive Z:, however, when you disconnect it, CrashPlan will simply show the device as "Missing", but won't delete it unless something else gets mounted as Z while CrashPlan is running.

devopsproject 10y ago

Have you tried downloading any significant portion of your backup from CrashPlan? Is so, how was performance?

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Not a significant portion, no. CrashPlan is only my third layer of backup, the offsite backup. Each of my drives have a clone backup drive (typically just a WD My Passport that makes them easy to transport when I travel), and then a larger external that holds backups of all of them--I usually keep that one in storage and only plug it in once a month or so to sync. CP is the third layer of backup. The most I do in a typical week is use the Android app to grab a few movies or documents from the CP storage to get it onto my phone and tablet. I should probably "test" doing a recovery from CrashPlan at some point, but I fear that even getting a third of it (1TB) would probably trip some sort of overcharge from my ISP.
jrnichols 10y ago
I have. It was decent. accidentally hosed a vmware image and it was easier for me to just pull the whole thing down from Crashplan. Speeds were decent, limited mostly by my cable modem. I don't recall the exact throughput but I remember looking and saying "Hey, this isn't bad" and not being annoyed by anything. Plus the price isn't too bad.

crudbug 10y ago

https://www.backblaze.com https://www.backblaze.com

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hga 10y ago
As far as I can tell, they're still operating out of one data centers, and while they claim it's Sacramento location is outside of earthquake danger zones, I can still see one to the west impacting availability depending on fiber routing, electrical supply, etc. Echoing another comment, I'm not sure if this is a big a danger as a programmer's or operator's potential to wipe out all your data no matter how many datacenters it's located in, but....
- ProblemFactory 10y ago
  That seems acceptable for a consumer backup (not cloud storage) solution. I have data on my laptop, an external disk that I keep at home, and BackBlaze. The likelihood of all three failing in the same week so that I can't restore from any single copy is low.
  - hga 10y ago
    Indeed, and I have seriously considered them for their 71% lower price than AWS Glacier and now Google's Coldline, but I wanted to point out the apples vs. oranges difference in one way each does redundancy, or not in the case of Backblaze.
  - brianwski 10y ago
    > That seems acceptable for a consumer backup (not cloud storage) solution. I work at Backblaze, so I'm biased. :-) But the use case is important, meaning I wouldn't group together all "cloud storage solution" as one use case. Backblaze does not have compute at all (like EC2) so Backblaze is a terrible choice for a company that will spend a lot of cycles analyzing the data stored in the cloud or doing compute on the data stored in the cloud. That is a much larger issue than the one data center for that use case. On the other hand, it is my profound belief that for long term durability of data you should have AT LEAST three copies of the data stored by profoundly different vendors. Hopefully different file systems and stored by software written by different programmers so the same bug that affects one copy won't affect the other copies. Hopefully stored at separate physical locations. Put a different way: the only way to get more reliable than data stored at Amazon Glacier is to have one copy in Amazon Glacier, another copy on Google Coldline, and another copy in Backblaze. In that use case, the single data center of Backblaze is obviously a non-issue.

Gigablah 10y ago

CrashPlan removed all my data since I wasn't keeping my disks online. Fair enough -- it's a backup solution, not remote storage. Still, I'd rather have paid for the latter in the first place and saved myself the trouble of having to upload everything again.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
This has happened to me too and it is annoying. However, I believe the delete is a soft-delete unless you specifically configure CrashPlan to remove deleted files after so many days. I have mine configured to NEVER remove files, even deleted ones. I've found that you can alleviate some of the headache by assigning the disks unique drive names. The reason for the deletion is that you might plug in your external HDD that gets mounted as drive F. You let it finish backing up, then disconnect it. If you later plug in a tiny flash drive that also gets mounted as F:, CrashPlan will see the contents of that drive and assume that you deleted everything from the previous drive and accordingly mark is as deleted in the backup. If you mount the external HDD as drive Z:, however, when you disconnect it, CrashPlan will simply show the device as "Missing", but won't delete it unless something else gets mounted as Z while CrashPlan is running.