5 ms·

Backblaze lost over 13TB of my data

58 points by ValentineC 9y ago

fleitz 9y ago
I loaded 5 tonnes of sand into my 4runner and now it's ruined, Toyota claims a 4Runner is not a 5 tonne truck won't give me my money back or honor the warranty, I swear the mechanics were laughing at me.
- infecto 9y ago
  While its reads snarky I kind of agree.
- lancefisher 9y ago
  Backblaze should be able to handle 17TB of data.
  - blunte 9y ago
    BB handles many PBs of data. Actually I think it's ZBs. However, I'm not sure how many of their clients have single drives with 17TB of data. Perhaps this is an edge case that they didn't adequately test for. And since a vast majority of their customers will not have more than 3TB on any single drive, I can see why this might not be well tested.
    - dastbe 9y ago
      i think you meant exabytes, not zettabytes, and as they state on their website "350 million GB stored ... (and counting)" that means there at about 1/3 of an exabyte now
      - blunte 9y ago
        Probably so. I can't count past a million anyway.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> we have customer for Backblaze Online Backup with over 40TB of data, and customers with 100s of TBs if not Petabytes on B2 Cloud Storage, so we can certainly handle it. Not sure what happened in this particular case as I'm not familiar with it, but I'd venture to guess that something occurred on the computer that caused the client to think it needed to re-upload those 13TB of data, so it scheduled them for re-upload.
- blunte 9y ago
  And as I recall, BB charges something like $5/mo for unlimited backups. The fact that they won't refund him is both dumb on their part (because really, what is $5) and pointless to mention on his part (because really, how is $5 going to compensate him?)
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> we did offer them a refund when they cancelled their account. In general we have a pretty generous refund policy for our yearly and bi-yearly plans, but giving refunds for the $5-rate, is a bit cumbersome.
    - blunte 9y ago
      No surprise, and anyone with 17TB of data can absorb $5 as a "cost of taking advantage of a company".
      - atYevP 9y ago
        I wonder if the support rep recommended Backblaze B2, but I have no idea :P
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
I just wonder what someone could have 17TB at home of. In 2010 the Library of Congress text database was 20TB. I know videos can take up some room but do people back up their video libraries to the cloud?
- salesguy222 9y ago
  probably movies and music, large images, maybe backups of wikipedia and other large text archives ^.^
- quadrature 9y ago
  A small blu-ray ripped movie collection could do it. Also the subreddit is called "DataHoarder".
  - rys 9y ago
    Coincidentally I just ripped my Blu-ray collection. 82 films, 542GB (x264 with a high profile encode). 17TB for me would mean close to 3000 films.
    - bluedino 9y ago
      In that case why backup what you can just re-download?
- der_ketzer 9y ago
  Well according to another post[0] "Breaking bad in 4k is 1.7Tb" or "star wars 200gb for first 6 movies. thats just 1080p". So I can imagine that much data being saved. Also, the subreddit is called datahoarder, so I imagine gathering bytes is important and "easy". [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6j06qp/how_do_you_all_manage_to_quickly_fill_up_1tb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6j06qp/how_do_...
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> we have customers with over 40TB of data on our backup service. We have NO idea what they're doing :P
madebysquares 9y ago
if you have 17TB of data. Where is the best place to back up that much data? Other then redundant back up drives... Is there a suitable cloud solution for this? If not is there enough demand to build one? I dont own that much data. I cant imagine having to keep track of that much data, I hate having more than 1 TB of data to keep track of.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Amazon Snowball? 17TB is a lot to send over the wire. If you've got a residential ISP connection it'll probably take months.
  - writeslowly 9y ago
    Backblaze and Crashplan both have (or had) a thing where they'd mail you a large hard drive to load your data on for a deposit of a few hundred dollars. Although at 13 TB I guess you'd still need to prioritize what you really wanted backed up straight away.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It's trivial: use a couple of USB external hard drives. You don't want to deal with cloud on a home connection, it's gonna take forever. If you are a company, you pay for storage on S3, Google Storage, OVH or IBM Softlayer. It's great quality yet simple and moderate costs. Companies keeping data in house pay for NetApp, NetBackup and tape hardware.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Even with USB it's going to take many days to back up 17TB.
    - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
      You should have started the backup process well before you hit 17gb of data.
    - 9y ago
thaumaturgy 9y ago
So much facepalm here. A Backblaze rep is in that thread confirming that they do have a failure case where they can lose backup data -- or at least, it'll become inconsistent. Ok, that's bad. I don't think they're idiots, but it'd be interesting to know what's so technically challenging about the index problem that they haven't been able to solve it. But ... 17 TB total? For online backups? That's just not what they're designed for, unless you've got one hell of an internet connection. The complainant says it's going to take over a year to re-upload the 13TB. That's insane. I think you have to give up on online backups for that use case and settle for a pretty beefy home rig in a fire-resistant box. Moving that kind of data up and down an internet connection just doesn't work real well yet.
- strict9 9y ago
  It's not insane when it's incremental. I don't have any kind of special connection, but when I switched computers had to go through the process of deleting my entire online backup in order to use my new machine. Took a few weeks (not a year) for 5TB from scratch, all the while on pins and needles hoping nothing happened to my local disk. I love Backblaze, but their confusing and weird policy re: switching machines made for a nail biting and slow, painful process. After reading this, I'm now considering alternative offsite backups.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here - as far as the technical aspects, it's tough for me to say b/c I don't know what happened in this case, but we do have use-cases where we need to "Freeze" backups (more info: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666178-Safety-Freeze-Your-Backup-is-Safety-Frozen- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666178-Safet...). I would venture to guess that since this occurred on their C: drive, something similar to that happened here, and they needed to re-upload the data (in most cases, previously uploaded data is still available for restore - but with 13TB of data to re-upload and not a lot of bandwidth, it would have taken them way longer than our 30-day history to do that).
- arielweisberg 9y ago
  I could do it in 13 days if Backblaze supported backing up at line rate. If you have gigabit it's even less. This isn't too much for online backup in general. 17t is not so bad in a lot of cases. It might be too much for Backblaze. I don't know. I don't know if they can effectively back up at line rate. They couldn't for me.
user5994461 9y ago
>>> It took 8 months or so for my initial backup and will definitely take over a year with the added data now [upload 13 TB again] so I just cancelled and they gave me a refund for the last payment. >>> So, all in all just a waste of time and money. Dude wanted to backup 18 TB of backup on a home connection until he realized it's not going well. Messaged the customer support to complain => he got a timely reply, then decided to leave the service and got a refund. That looks like good service to me. P.S. I feel sorry for companies who have to deal with that kind of customers.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> It's all good :)
- arsoon 9y ago
  Also from what I can tell, he didn't lose any data - he just lost the ability to continue his backup, and had to start it again. I mean it's not an ideal circumstance, but not the end of the world. He really just needs a faster connection to support that much data.
cmurf 9y ago
Seed drive service. ~20 hours to copy 10T of local data to a few drives, few days to ship, ~20 hours to copy the data to the cloud. But I guess some people think that cost is greater than 8 months of uploading? Whatever...not my data.
blunte 9y ago
Let's just be real. It's assholes like this that take advantage of the buffet line, thereby costing all of the rest of us. And then they complain when they can't go back for the 45th plate of food. People like this are why Amazon's unlimited cloud storage just became limited. The people out there abusing the spirit of the offer know who they are. The finance world is FULL of those people, and it's a good part of why the economic world is really fucked up. Be a team player. Be thoughtful of your peers and neighbors. We'll all end up better off, even you. /rant
- therobot24 9y ago
  There is just so much wrong with your statement. You're not a comcast rep by chance are you?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vortico 9y ago
  This is why I hate services that offer "unlimited" of some resource, like Dreamhost and AWS, so I will never use them. Everyone is worse off. People who use less than a ridiculous amount are paying for a few outliers using 100x more. People who use a ridiculous amount can no longer be sure whether their service will be active the next day because an employee deems their use "ridiculous". And I don't think they're at fault like you're suggesting. Suppose I have a legitimate use case for storing 17TB of data and need to do it on a budget. During my shopping, I discover ten $1000/yr services for 20TB storage and three $100/yr services for unlimited storage. To me, the $100 services seem like scams or that they have no idea what they're doing. Amazon, Backblaze, and Dreamhost are literally giving off these vibes! Regardless, I'm on a budget so I purchase Backblaze and upload my 17TB. But in the back of my mind I'm nervous that they will shut off my service, despite the contract I entered with them to keep an "unlimited" amount of data for the price I paid. Or, if the contract says they have the right to terminate my service if they deem the amount to be too much, that would make nervous even as a normal user of the service, since the definition of "ridiculous" might be decided by some judge in a court if the service decides to cancel the contract and my company decides to sue. Would you really want a judge to decide that, or would you prefer a hard limit to be placed on the website and the contract in the first place? I truly don't understand the appeal of "unlimited" plans compared to simple hard limited, tiered plans.
chx 9y ago
If you want to store data as cheap as possible online, you are looking at 4 EUR / TB / month of capacity. https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6d1h34/oneprovider_advertises_2x2tb_hw_raid_unltd_1gbps/di44nzg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6d1h34/oneprovid... To lower that with a significant up front cost, you could buy the drives yourself, perhaps shucking external ones and then send them over to Vapornode https://vapornode.com/storage-vps https://vapornode.com/storage-vps so they can host it at 10 USD a month per disk. If you have a Fry's close by, they have 8TB units for 200, recently Best Buy had them for 180 but I think that ended. So that's 200 + 10 / month vs 4.5 * 8 = 36 USD / month, you are saving 26 USD a month, it takes eight months for this to be cheaper. I would say it's not worth it because replacing dead disks are on you but it's up to you. Also getting many smaller disks make for better RAID. Finally, lowendtalk regularly has discussions on bring your own disk providers. You need to know what you are buying but it's doable.
- joshbaptiste 9y ago
  Also Delimiter in Atlanta slot hosting for $10/month https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/ https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/
  - chx 9y ago
    And a lot of problems. Read lowendtalk, there are reports of disks mailed in and not hosted for weeks or months.
- imaginenore 9y ago
  Backblaze supposedly has B2 storage, which is $5/TB/month, and they claim it's redundant. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
  - chx 9y ago
    We need to factor the two cents per gigabyte download somehow but I agree that the latest cut from five to two cents made it much more appealing. But it's very funny how it is practically the same 4 EUR a month a terabyte as the rent-a-server-for-its disks solutions.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
Has anyone tried Sia? From what I've read it is an order of magnitude cheaper form of cloud storage but I don't know anyone that has tried it.
- imaginenore 9y ago
  Maybe a binary order of magnitude. Sia = $2/TB/month. Amazon Glacier = $4/TB/month. Time4VPS Storage = $4/TB/month. Backblaze B2 = $5/TB/month.
  - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
    Interesting, thank you.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - prirun 9y ago
    I just checked out Time4VPS. Their storage VPS's have a 200 IO/s limit. At the typical 4K per IO, that's 800K bytes/sec, 1.6MB/s, or 2.1TB per month. It's a little misleading that they advertise a 10TB bandwidth limit per month on a 100Mbit/s port, when the IO limit kicks in way before that. Backblaze B2
capnrefsmmat 9y ago
I wonder what the overhead is like on 13TB of data. I have about 80GB with Backblaze right now -- just documents, photos and music on my laptop -- and the metadata it stores in /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg takes up 46GB, or about half the size of the actual backup. Most of this is in uncompressed plain-text log files showing every file which has been backed up, going back years. On a 256GB SSD that overhead hurts. I asked their support, but their only solution was to delete the backup, reinstall the client, and start from scratch, which seems... less than optimal. (On the other hand I do understand the impulse to squirrel away terabytes of data... I now make a point of archiving all of my mail accounts and PDFs of papers I read, knowing that with good search, they'll be valuable for years to come. But I haven't quite read 13TB worth of papers yet.)
- bluedino 9y ago
  Have other BackBlaze users reported similar amounts of metadata? That's enormous.
therobot24 9y ago
I've stated this before in a previous thread, but I had previously used backblaze on a few computers but found it was taking up almost 8GB of space on my laptop for the backup list of files. This seemed very odd to me so i reached out to backblaze and the response was to make a new account to re-upload everything. Given the time it takes to re-upload everything (i didn't quite have 13 TB, but i had enough) i just terminated my account.
bane 9y ago
I'm really surprised by how many people think 17tB is a lot of data. It's what...<$400 in storage? [1] Crap, just between the main drives on computers in my house I easily have 20-30tB of raw disk space. It might be a lot to transfer...yeah. At 50Mbps that's what...a month of sustained transfer? But how valuable is your data? 1 - https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178951&cm_re=external_hard_drive-_-22-178-951-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682217...
- jbob2000 9y ago
  What the heck are you storing that you've used 20-30TB? I don't really get it. UHD Movies? Why would you save those in the age of streaming? Family pictures/videos? At 20TB, you must have hundreds of thousands of pictures. There's not enough time in your life to look at all those! The only thing I can think of is that you shoot photo/video professionally, or maybe do some kind of 3D/video rendering? But I agree with you - when you have this much data, why the hell are you transferring it to the cloud? Buy a couple harddrives, load them up, and stick them in a safe.
  - bane 9y ago
    Who said I'm storing anything? A handful of machines with the cheap default spinning rust HDs in them and you get to 30tB very quickly. A typically family of three probably has double digits tB just in their Costco purchased laptops. Heck, my parents have >10tB of raw storage between their home and work computers. Even though they aren't data hoarders, between software, important documents and email and videos and pictures of grandkids and friends they probably easily sit at 4 or 5 tB of total storage that deserves backup.

58 points by ValentineC 9y ago

I loaded 5 tonnes of sand into my 4runner and now it's ruined, Toyota claims a 4Runner is not a 5 tonne truck won't give me my money back or honor the warranty, I swear the mechanics were laughing at me.

infecto 9y ago
While its reads snarky I kind of agree.
lancefisher 9y ago
Backblaze should be able to handle 17TB of data.
- blunte 9y ago
  BB handles many PBs of data. Actually I think it's ZBs. However, I'm not sure how many of their clients have single drives with 17TB of data. Perhaps this is an edge case that they didn't adequately test for. And since a vast majority of their customers will not have more than 3TB on any single drive, I can see why this might not be well tested.
  - dastbe 9y ago
    i think you meant exabytes, not zettabytes, and as they state on their website "350 million GB stored ... (and counting)" that means there at about 1/3 of an exabyte now
    - blunte 9y ago
      Probably so. I can't count past a million anyway.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> we have customer for Backblaze Online Backup with over 40TB of data, and customers with 100s of TBs if not Petabytes on B2 Cloud Storage, so we can certainly handle it. Not sure what happened in this particular case as I'm not familiar with it, but I'd venture to guess that something occurred on the computer that caused the client to think it needed to re-upload those 13TB of data, so it scheduled them for re-upload.
blunte 9y ago
And as I recall, BB charges something like $5/mo for unlimited backups. The fact that they won't refund him is both dumb on their part (because really, what is $5) and pointless to mention on his part (because really, how is $5 going to compensate him?)
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> we did offer them a refund when they cancelled their account. In general we have a pretty generous refund policy for our yearly and bi-yearly plans, but giving refunds for the $5-rate, is a bit cumbersome.
  - blunte 9y ago
    No surprise, and anyone with 17TB of data can absorb $5 as a "cost of taking advantage of a company".
    - atYevP 9y ago
      I wonder if the support rep recommended Backblaze B2, but I have no idea :P

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

I just wonder what someone could have 17TB at home of. In 2010 the Library of Congress text database was 20TB. I know videos can take up some room but do people back up their video libraries to the cloud?

salesguy222 9y ago
probably movies and music, large images, maybe backups of wikipedia and other large text archives ^.^
quadrature 9y ago
A small blu-ray ripped movie collection could do it. Also the subreddit is called "DataHoarder".
- rys 9y ago
  Coincidentally I just ripped my Blu-ray collection. 82 films, 542GB (x264 with a high profile encode). 17TB for me would mean close to 3000 films.
  - bluedino 9y ago
    In that case why backup what you can just re-download?
der_ketzer 9y ago
Well according to another post[0] "Breaking bad in 4k is 1.7Tb" or "star wars 200gb for first 6 movies. thats just 1080p". So I can imagine that much data being saved. Also, the subreddit is called datahoarder, so I imagine gathering bytes is important and "easy". [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6j06qp/how_do_you_all_manage_to_quickly_fill_up_1tb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6j06qp/how_do_...
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> we have customers with over 40TB of data on our backup service. We have NO idea what they're doing :P

madebysquares 9y ago

if you have 17TB of data. Where is the best place to back up that much data? Other then redundant back up drives... Is there a suitable cloud solution for this? If not is there enough demand to build one? I dont own that much data. I cant imagine having to keep track of that much data, I hate having more than 1 TB of data to keep track of.

ams6110 9y ago
Amazon Snowball? 17TB is a lot to send over the wire. If you've got a residential ISP connection it'll probably take months.
- writeslowly 9y ago
  Backblaze and Crashplan both have (or had) a thing where they'd mail you a large hard drive to load your data on for a deposit of a few hundred dollars. Although at 13 TB I guess you'd still need to prioritize what you really wanted backed up straight away.
user5994461 9y ago
It's trivial: use a couple of USB external hard drives. You don't want to deal with cloud on a home connection, it's gonna take forever. If you are a company, you pay for storage on S3, Google Storage, OVH or IBM Softlayer. It's great quality yet simple and moderate costs. Companies keeping data in house pay for NetApp, NetBackup and tape hardware.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Even with USB it's going to take many days to back up 17TB.
  - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
    You should have started the backup process well before you hit 17gb of data.
  - 9y ago

thaumaturgy 9y ago

So much facepalm here. A Backblaze rep is in that thread confirming that they do have a failure case where they can lose backup data -- or at least, it'll become inconsistent. Ok, that's bad. I don't think they're idiots, but it'd be interesting to know what's so technically challenging about the index problem that they haven't been able to solve it. But ... 17 TB total? For online backups? That's just not what they're designed for, unless you've got one hell of an internet connection. The complainant says it's going to take over a year to re-upload the 13TB. That's insane. I think you have to give up on online backups for that use case and settle for a pretty beefy home rig in a fire-resistant box. Moving that kind of data up and down an internet connection just doesn't work real well yet.

strict9 9y ago
It's not insane when it's incremental. I don't have any kind of special connection, but when I switched computers had to go through the process of deleting my entire online backup in order to use my new machine. Took a few weeks (not a year) for 5TB from scratch, all the while on pins and needles hoping nothing happened to my local disk. I love Backblaze, but their confusing and weird policy re: switching machines made for a nail biting and slow, painful process. After reading this, I'm now considering alternative offsite backups.
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here - as far as the technical aspects, it's tough for me to say b/c I don't know what happened in this case, but we do have use-cases where we need to "Freeze" backups (more info: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666178-Safety-Freeze-Your-Backup-is-Safety-Frozen- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666178-Safet...). I would venture to guess that since this occurred on their C: drive, something similar to that happened here, and they needed to re-upload the data (in most cases, previously uploaded data is still available for restore - but with 13TB of data to re-upload and not a lot of bandwidth, it would have taken them way longer than our 30-day history to do that).
arielweisberg 9y ago
I could do it in 13 days if Backblaze supported backing up at line rate. If you have gigabit it's even less. This isn't too much for online backup in general. 17t is not so bad in a lot of cases. It might be too much for Backblaze. I don't know. I don't know if they can effectively back up at line rate. They couldn't for me.

user5994461 9y ago

>>> It took 8 months or so for my initial backup and will definitely take over a year with the added data now [upload 13 TB again] so I just cancelled and they gave me a refund for the last payment. >>> So, all in all just a waste of time and money. Dude wanted to backup 18 TB of backup on a home connection until he realized it's not going well. Messaged the customer support to complain => he got a timely reply, then decided to leave the service and got a refund. That looks like good service to me. P.S. I feel sorry for companies who have to deal with that kind of customers.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> It's all good :)
arsoon 9y ago
Also from what I can tell, he didn't lose any data - he just lost the ability to continue his backup, and had to start it again. I mean it's not an ideal circumstance, but not the end of the world. He really just needs a faster connection to support that much data.

cmurf 9y ago

Seed drive service. ~20 hours to copy 10T of local data to a few drives, few days to ship, ~20 hours to copy the data to the cloud. But I guess some people think that cost is greater than 8 months of uploading? Whatever...not my data.

blunte 9y ago

Let's just be real. It's assholes like this that take advantage of the buffet line, thereby costing all of the rest of us. And then they complain when they can't go back for the 45th plate of food. People like this are why Amazon's unlimited cloud storage just became limited. The people out there abusing the spirit of the offer know who they are. The finance world is FULL of those people, and it's a good part of why the economic world is really fucked up. Be a team player. Be thoughtful of your peers and neighbors. We'll all end up better off, even you. /rant

therobot24 9y ago
There is just so much wrong with your statement. You're not a comcast rep by chance are you?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vortico 9y ago
This is why I hate services that offer "unlimited" of some resource, like Dreamhost and AWS, so I will never use them. Everyone is worse off. People who use less than a ridiculous amount are paying for a few outliers using 100x more. People who use a ridiculous amount can no longer be sure whether their service will be active the next day because an employee deems their use "ridiculous". And I don't think they're at fault like you're suggesting. Suppose I have a legitimate use case for storing 17TB of data and need to do it on a budget. During my shopping, I discover ten $1000/yr services for 20TB storage and three $100/yr services for unlimited storage. To me, the $100 services seem like scams or that they have no idea what they're doing. Amazon, Backblaze, and Dreamhost are literally giving off these vibes! Regardless, I'm on a budget so I purchase Backblaze and upload my 17TB. But in the back of my mind I'm nervous that they will shut off my service, despite the contract I entered with them to keep an "unlimited" amount of data for the price I paid. Or, if the contract says they have the right to terminate my service if they deem the amount to be too much, that would make nervous even as a normal user of the service, since the definition of "ridiculous" might be decided by some judge in a court if the service decides to cancel the contract and my company decides to sue. Would you really want a judge to decide that, or would you prefer a hard limit to be placed on the website and the contract in the first place? I truly don't understand the appeal of "unlimited" plans compared to simple hard limited, tiered plans.

chx 9y ago

If you want to store data as cheap as possible online, you are looking at 4 EUR / TB / month of capacity. https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6d1h34/oneprovider_advertises_2x2tb_hw_raid_unltd_1gbps/di44nzg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/6d1h34/oneprovid... To lower that with a significant up front cost, you could buy the drives yourself, perhaps shucking external ones and then send them over to Vapornode https://vapornode.com/storage-vps https://vapornode.com/storage-vps so they can host it at 10 USD a month per disk. If you have a Fry's close by, they have 8TB units for 200, recently Best Buy had them for 180 but I think that ended. So that's 200 + 10 / month vs 4.5 * 8 = 36 USD / month, you are saving 26 USD a month, it takes eight months for this to be cheaper. I would say it's not worth it because replacing dead disks are on you but it's up to you. Also getting many smaller disks make for better RAID. Finally, lowendtalk regularly has discussions on bring your own disk providers. You need to know what you are buying but it's doable.

joshbaptiste 9y ago
Also Delimiter in Atlanta slot hosting for $10/month https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/ https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/
- chx 9y ago
  And a lot of problems. Read lowendtalk, there are reports of disks mailed in and not hosted for weeks or months.
imaginenore 9y ago
Backblaze supposedly has B2 storage, which is $5/TB/month, and they claim it's redundant. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
- chx 9y ago
  We need to factor the two cents per gigabyte download somehow but I agree that the latest cut from five to two cents made it much more appealing. But it's very funny how it is practically the same 4 EUR a month a terabyte as the rent-a-server-for-its disks solutions.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

Has anyone tried Sia? From what I've read it is an order of magnitude cheaper form of cloud storage but I don't know anyone that has tried it.

imaginenore 9y ago
Maybe a binary order of magnitude. Sia = $2/TB/month. Amazon Glacier = $4/TB/month. Time4VPS Storage = $4/TB/month. Backblaze B2 = $5/TB/month.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  Interesting, thank you.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- prirun 9y ago
  I just checked out Time4VPS. Their storage VPS's have a 200 IO/s limit. At the typical 4K per IO, that's 800K bytes/sec, 1.6MB/s, or 2.1TB per month. It's a little misleading that they advertise a 10TB bandwidth limit per month on a 100Mbit/s port, when the IO limit kicks in way before that. Backblaze B2

capnrefsmmat 9y ago

I wonder what the overhead is like on 13TB of data. I have about 80GB with Backblaze right now -- just documents, photos and music on my laptop -- and the metadata it stores in /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg takes up 46GB, or about half the size of the actual backup. Most of this is in uncompressed plain-text log files showing every file which has been backed up, going back years. On a 256GB SSD that overhead hurts. I asked their support, but their only solution was to delete the backup, reinstall the client, and start from scratch, which seems... less than optimal. (On the other hand I do understand the impulse to squirrel away terabytes of data... I now make a point of archiving all of my mail accounts and PDFs of papers I read, knowing that with good search, they'll be valuable for years to come. But I haven't quite read 13TB worth of papers yet.)

bluedino 9y ago
Have other BackBlaze users reported similar amounts of metadata? That's enormous.

therobot24 9y ago

I've stated this before in a previous thread, but I had previously used backblaze on a few computers but found it was taking up almost 8GB of space on my laptop for the backup list of files. This seemed very odd to me so i reached out to backblaze and the response was to make a new account to re-upload everything. Given the time it takes to re-upload everything (i didn't quite have 13 TB, but i had enough) i just terminated my account.

bane 9y ago

I'm really surprised by how many people think 17tB is a lot of data. It's what...<$400 in storage? [1] Crap, just between the main drives on computers in my house I easily have 20-30tB of raw disk space. It might be a lot to transfer...yeah. At 50Mbps that's what...a month of sustained transfer? But how valuable is your data? 1 - https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178951&cm_re=external_hard_drive-_-22-178-951-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682217...

jbob2000 9y ago
What the heck are you storing that you've used 20-30TB? I don't really get it. UHD Movies? Why would you save those in the age of streaming? Family pictures/videos? At 20TB, you must have hundreds of thousands of pictures. There's not enough time in your life to look at all those! The only thing I can think of is that you shoot photo/video professionally, or maybe do some kind of 3D/video rendering? But I agree with you - when you have this much data, why the hell are you transferring it to the cloud? Buy a couple harddrives, load them up, and stick them in a safe.
- bane 9y ago
  Who said I'm storing anything? A handful of machines with the cheap default spinning rust HDs in them and you get to 30tB very quickly. A typically family of three probably has double digits tB just in their Costco purchased laptops. Heck, my parents have >10tB of raw storage between their home and work computers. Even though they aren't data hoarders, between software, important documents and email and videos and pictures of grandkids and friends they probably easily sit at 4 or 5 tB of total storage that deserves backup.