4 ms·

> Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer fromthe backup on your servers after 30 days? The original

> Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer fromthe backup on your servers after 30 days? The original reason was to prevent customers who owned a single 1 TByte hard drive from filling it with content, backing it up to Backblaze, writing down the date, then emptying the hard drive and filling it with DIFFERENT content, backing up to Backblaze, writing down the date, repeat 50 times. The idea was this: if the data is not important enough for you to keep a local copy, Backblaze is not going to keep it either. You aren't allowed to go down to just "one copy in Backblaze". We chose the 30 days as something we thought of as "reasonable". For example, we expected that within 30 days you would realize your laptop was stolen so you could request a full restore. That sort of thing. However, and now we're all furiously debating the 30 days based on the enormous amount of feedback we are getting today. We will do an analysis and if we can afford it, we will be increasing that number.

rrauenza 9y ago
Maybe you could also furiously debate the Linux client while you're at it :) (I can better understand the policy now as well -- keep people from using as primary offline storage.)
domador 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand the use case you mention. Is it in essence the idea of someone abusing an unlimited plan to back up more data that you'd reasonably expect them to? Can it be boiled down to Backblaze's cost of hard drive space and whether users pay enough to cover Backblaze's costs? The use case you mention seems to be very exotic, but who knows, maybe it's not as rare as I would expect. To me, expunging deleted files because of this rare, somewhat-malicious case seems like it would cause undesirable collateral damage among your service's typical users.
magicalhippo 9y ago
Lack of file versioning and not persisting deleted files means Backblaze isn't even on my radar. The mentions here of poor restore options doesn't sound all that positive either, but due to the former I'm not even considering going as far as trying you guys out. The way things are looking I'm probably going to stay with Crashplan, migrating to their business plan. I'm not a data hoarder (backup set is ~400GB), but I haven't found anything else which has the same feature set for a reasonable price.
magicalhippo 9y ago
To expand on my post, the features I require are: - Keep at least first (non-zero sized) version of file, at least one version per month (if modified), at least one version per 15 minutes for last week, last version of file. - Ability to back up files in certain directories very frequently (ie 15 minutes intervals). - Ability to search for and restore individual files in client, ie without sending my password to someone else. For this I find the $10/mo Crashplan now charges to be reasonable (my current backup set is ~400GB). I would be prepared to pay more if I required more storage, though within reason.
alphapapa 9y ago
A couple of years ago I went to use GPG for the first time in a long time. My private key didn't work. I looked at the file, and its size was 0 bytes. Cosmic ray? GPG crash? System crash while the file was being written? How it got truncated, I'll never know. No problem, I'll just restore from backup. I have CrashPlan online backups, and local backups with Obnam, so I'll just recover it from one of them. Every snapshot in CrashPlan and Obnam had the truncated file, going all the way back to the first snapshots. I thought I had lost my GPG key forever. Then I remembered that I had some old CD-R/RW backups from years ago. I started going through them. Some of the discs were unreadable. Finally I found one that was readable and had the untruncated private key file. Lesson learned: always keep your old backups. You never know which files on your system have suffered from bitrot or accidental truncation or accidental deletion--until you try to access them. It's very likely that some of them will have been destroyed more than 30 days ago. Now keeping old backups doesn't mean keeping every snapshot, ever. CrashPlan takes 15-minute snapshots by default, so obviously I don't need every one of those going back years. But I definitely want to keep at least one snapshot for every year I've used the system, at least one for each of the last 12 months, etc.
Nerm81A 9y ago
As a personal anecdote: I was a BackBlaze customer for over a year around 2011/2012. I backed up one computer with 2 attached hard drives. Over a period of time one of the drives failed; slowly. It would lock up sometimes; and I would restart it. Months later I realized it was losing files when it did this. And when I tried to restore those files from BackBlaze I discovered that they had been purged; and that this was considered normal behavior. BackBlaze had lulled me into a false sense of security regarding my data by claiming to back up my files but actually mirroring a hardware failure on my local system. I had an unhappy email exchange with BackBlaze tech support, and also Brian, and came to realize how flawed the system was. I switched to CrashPlan at that point. I will not consider using a product that lacks proper file versioning; and a much longer lifetime for deleted files.

rrauenza 9y ago

Maybe you could also furiously debate the Linux client while you're at it :) (I can better understand the policy now as well -- keep people from using as primary offline storage.)

domador 9y ago

I'm not sure I understand the use case you mention. Is it in essence the idea of someone abusing an unlimited plan to back up more data that you'd reasonably expect them to? Can it be boiled down to Backblaze's cost of hard drive space and whether users pay enough to cover Backblaze's costs? The use case you mention seems to be very exotic, but who knows, maybe it's not as rare as I would expect. To me, expunging deleted files because of this rare, somewhat-malicious case seems like it would cause undesirable collateral damage among your service's typical users.

magicalhippo 9y ago

Lack of file versioning and not persisting deleted files means Backblaze isn't even on my radar. The mentions here of poor restore options doesn't sound all that positive either, but due to the former I'm not even considering going as far as trying you guys out. The way things are looking I'm probably going to stay with Crashplan, migrating to their business plan. I'm not a data hoarder (backup set is ~400GB), but I haven't found anything else which has the same feature set for a reasonable price.

magicalhippo 9y ago

To expand on my post, the features I require are: - Keep at least first (non-zero sized) version of file, at least one version per month (if modified), at least one version per 15 minutes for last week, last version of file. - Ability to back up files in certain directories very frequently (ie 15 minutes intervals). - Ability to search for and restore individual files in client, ie without sending my password to someone else. For this I find the $10/mo Crashplan now charges to be reasonable (my current backup set is ~400GB). I would be prepared to pay more if I required more storage, though within reason.

alphapapa 9y ago

A couple of years ago I went to use GPG for the first time in a long time. My private key didn't work. I looked at the file, and its size was 0 bytes. Cosmic ray? GPG crash? System crash while the file was being written? How it got truncated, I'll never know. No problem, I'll just restore from backup. I have CrashPlan online backups, and local backups with Obnam, so I'll just recover it from one of them. Every snapshot in CrashPlan and Obnam had the truncated file, going all the way back to the first snapshots. I thought I had lost my GPG key forever. Then I remembered that I had some old CD-R/RW backups from years ago. I started going through them. Some of the discs were unreadable. Finally I found one that was readable and had the untruncated private key file. Lesson learned: always keep your old backups. You never know which files on your system have suffered from bitrot or accidental truncation or accidental deletion--until you try to access them. It's very likely that some of them will have been destroyed more than 30 days ago. Now keeping old backups doesn't mean keeping every snapshot, ever. CrashPlan takes 15-minute snapshots by default, so obviously I don't need every one of those going back years. But I definitely want to keep at least one snapshot for every year I've used the system, at least one for each of the last 12 months, etc.

Nerm81A 9y ago

As a personal anecdote: I was a BackBlaze customer for over a year around 2011/2012. I backed up one computer with 2 attached hard drives. Over a period of time one of the drives failed; slowly. It would lock up sometimes; and I would restart it. Months later I realized it was losing files when it did this. And when I tried to restore those files from BackBlaze I discovered that they had been purged; and that this was considered normal behavior. BackBlaze had lulled me into a false sense of security regarding my data by claiming to back up my files but actually mirroring a hardware failure on my local system. I had an unhappy email exchange with BackBlaze tech support, and also Brian, and came to realize how flawed the system was. I switched to CrashPlan at that point. I will not consider using a product that lacks proper file versioning; and a much longer lifetime for deleted files.