11 ms·

How Backblaze Got Started (2017)

101 points by slyall 9y ago

pgrote 9y ago
Backblaze is one of the few companies where I pay for a service and am 100% satisfied. I've never had an issue with the service and when I've had questions they are prompt and informative. I use them for personal and business backups. They are more than happy to share what they build and we've used their storage pods plans to build 2 for work.
- Nk26 9y ago
  I never really thought about this until just now but your 100% right. I use both B2 and their consumer service and never had any issues.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze -> Great to hear that from both of you! :)
    - icelancer 9y ago
      In general it's a bad look to respond to the good reports but not the bad ones.
      - atYevP 9y ago
        Happy to chat about all of them - these were the only ones I saw when I check here last night if you look at the times!
- gogopuppygogo 9y ago
  I felt that way until I needed to complete a restore of a backup that was roughly 500GB in size. It took around two weeks to restore on their servers for me to download as a zip. I posted on here about it at the time and the CTO reached out to let me know the server the restored started on was very old and they were going to decommission it afterward. I hope they did. I hope others don't wait that long. I also really wish they would let customers buy a hard drive with multiple backups on it instead of one hard drive per backup. It would be great to purchase one drive every year with all the backups on it and not have to worry about downloading backups for retention.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    Wouldn't just asking them to send a hard drive of your backup have been faster? You could have either kept the hard drive or returned it and got your money back.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Since the server (and not the Internet connection) was the bottleneck, it wouldn't have helped, as they would still have to read the files to copy them to the new drive.
      - brianwski 9y ago
        Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze > Since the server (and not the Internet connection) was the bottleneck, it wouldn't have helped As Yev mentioned above, we MASSIVELY sped up restores fairly recently (August 2017). We understood waiting for restores for a few days was an inconvenience for customers and I'm personally very proud of the results. Would LOVE for you to try it again, but I fully understand if you don't want to. Here is the blog post about the faster restores (and faster backups): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access...
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> sorry to hear about the long restore process. We definitely take restores seriously and our latest release 5.0 (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access...) addressed a lot of bottlenecks that could affect some customers. You can now also restore-by-mail and send us that hard drive back for a refund, so should you try us again in the future, you'll have more options!
gallerdude 9y ago
There's a good moral here. Everytime they had a question, they asked their users. Users don't lie.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> That's right! For better or worse they usually tell it like they see it, and that helps us inform decisions!
  - dhbanes 9y ago
    Yev, I’m a new Backblaze customer and am worried by some of the negative reports by other HNers above. Would you mind taking the time to respond to the less positive comments about Backblaze rather than just thanking the two positive commenters? That would make me feel much more comfortable relying on Backblaze in the future.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Hey there sorry - if you look at my reply history you'll see I try to hit most topics, but when I looked last night those were the only comments there :D I'll get to the rest!
dkd903 9y ago
I cancelled their account. It has a weird policy of deleting backups from hard drives that have not been connected within the last 3 months. Very weird policy.
- aikinai 9y ago
  It’s one month, not three, but the policy is totally reasonable since they charge one flat rate to back up your whole computer (not everything your computer has ever seen). If they didn’t delete disconnected drives, they’d be offering unlimited storage for $50/year which is obviously unsystainable. The plan is already as impressive as it is considering how much data you can easily connect to one computer. I also have plenty of complaints about the service (posted above), but there’s nothing weird about this policy as written. What’s weird is when permanently connected drives get classified as disconnected (see my other post).
  - dpwm 9y ago
    Whilst I agree the policy is reasonable given the amount they charge per month, it's something I've only learnt about from reading comments and not from their marketing. In fact, their marketing claims "Never lose a file again. Get unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC. Just $5/month." Only on reading the help does it seem that if the client doesn't connect with the server within 6 months, then all your backups are gone. I'm not saying this is unreasonable, but it seems a bit counterintuitive given you are still paying for the service. I just still haven't found the bit about disconnected drives. I really like Backblaze's articles on HDDs and they really seem to be customer focused, but I had to dig in the help to find this.
    - newscracker 9y ago
      I don't use Backblaze, but I suspect from the above comments that the client does not even display some kind of warning saying, "Hey, you haven't connected this drive for X months. We just wanted to let you know that this data will be deleted from our systems in Y days. Please connect the drive to make sure we retain the data." and then proceed to display this warning periodically a few times, like a countdown (but not annoying enough to be shown on every run of the client). This kind of warning would be my suggestion to the Backblaze team. This becomes more important with SSD based machines that generally have a lot lesser storage than before while people are taking a lot more pictures and videos and resorting to storing them in cheaper (per GB) external HDDs (at least the people who do like to have a local copy).
mikestew 9y ago
Such a great service that I’ve never used it for its intended purpose (thankfully, except for very occasional verification), and forget about it until I get the “we’re charging your credit card” email. I then delete the mail, happily let the charge go through, and proceed to forget that it’s there. I backup to a NAS, from which important stuff is backed to another, single drive. Backblaze is a small price for the “house burns down” scenario. Yeah, I could rotate drives offsite, but I’m not going to do that, and neither are most of us after a couple months, if at all.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> glad to see you're at least trying the restore process! You'd be surprised how many folks forgo that in its entirety and then panic should they need to restore. Always good to check the system out from upload to download! Kudos!
aikinai 9y ago
I see a lot of praise for Backblaze’s services and support and I just wanted to warn that I’ve had the opposite experience and am in the middle of switching to another service. I’ve used Backblaze since 2010 and in the past year contacted support twice. In both cases, they were only interested in quoting esoteric policies and technical limitations rather than actually solving my issue. As in, “Oh that’s because our system works like this and this and has this limitation.” Ooookay, that’s not what I asked; I asked how to solve this problem of mine that your poor system is causing. For example, the most recent time was when I started getting emails warning that all of my external drives were offline and my data would be soon deleted. Instead of “Very sorry about that, here’s how to fix the issue,” I got this long response about the ways their system looks for new files in serial and it can get jammed and start ignoring everything, with no apology, no acknowledgement this was their issue, and no solution. I had to go fishing for solutions and drag the information out of them to finally figure out what I needed to do. Which it turns out is to get back an internal drive (totally unrelated to the other drives Backblaze abandoned) I had physically removed and repurposed, put it back the computer, wait a long time for Backblaze to see it, then uncheck that drive in Backblaze and remove it again. This was a good example showing how the client design is poor and the support is worse. The other two major technical issues that convinced me I need a new service asap are: 1. The client will lie to you and you never know what’s really backed up. Even if you use the secret alt-click to force a full drive scan, it can still miss files and tell you fully backed up when files from days ago are still nowhere to be found. Luckily I’ve never actually needed to do a restore, but I almost thought I did one time and would have been furious at all the missing files I noticed. 2. This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up. I hate to badmouth them since the company seems like a really good citizen, they project a very positive image, and their software seems good on the surface. But when you dig in, there are a lot of issues with the software and service, and I recently realized having Backblaze wouldn’t actually reassure me in the event of a local disaster, so migrated away and I wanted to warn others too.
- timcederman 9y ago
  I had an extremely disappointing experience with Backblaze's support team (documented here - http://www.cederman.com/2016/12/tracking-down-rogue-bandwidth-a-story-of-comcast-data-caps-and-offsite-backup/ http://www.cederman.com/2016/12/tracking-down-rogue-bandwidt...), and in the process of researching the issues I was having, discovered a rabbit hole of reports of folks having issues restoring their data. Backblaze have not acknowledged my issues at all, even though I have tried to engage with the team numerous times. I switched to CrashPlan, and have had to do two full restores since doing so, both of which went flawlessly and quickly. The Java client is a bit cumbersome, but it's reliable, and I am much happier with the performance and support I've received from them.
ohhhoh 9y ago
> Then one of our co-founders Tim wondered, "what if we didn’t ask any questions and just backed up everything?" But that is not what they do exactly: "we do not backup your operating system, application folder, or temporary internet files that are transient and would not be useful in the future. Backblaze also excludes podcasts in iTunes." https://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html https://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html Is there an online backup service that makes a complete image that you can just pop a boot CD in, and restore from online? That seems like the holy grail.
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  Check Veeam.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  It's not online, but you might checkout RedoBackup... seems like it could be modified to be used this way.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Backblaze isn't intended to be a bare-metal restore, just the data that's on the machine. In addition to the ones listed below, you might also take a look at Acronis - they do good work. Not sure if they have an offline component, but you could use their software to make a system image, and then toss that image in the cloud (like with Backblaze B2) and then grab it whenever needed. Might work well for what you're looking for!
abalone 9y ago
The rise of cloud storage has totally transformed the "backup" problem. Just by using cloud storage, you get near-realtime offsite backup without thinking about it. Vendors like Apple have built it into the OS. It's really one of the nicer things that's happened in personal computing lately. Granted, there's still benefit to doing a traditional "snapshot" style backup. Something like Backblaze is still a good idea. But arguably it's more of a belt-and-suspenders thing at this point. (Especially if your cloud storage offers version history.) While I've loved Backblaze's blog posts over the years, seems like this was not on their radar ten years ago. They were seeing it just as a traditional backup/restore problem. I see they've since introduced a cloud storage product (B2), but it doesn't sound that competitive.[1] Here's iCloud for comparison: - $0.005/gb/mo (2TB plan) with unlimited data transfer - Baked deep into the OS, totally automatic - Intelligently purges local files when storage runs low - Integrates with Photos app for optimized media storage - Syncs while the device is asleep (Power Nap) - HSM-protected keychain backup (geeky but groundbreaking security feature)[2] (Not so nice: doesn't do version history. Dropbox does.) Again, I've really enjoyed Backblaze's posts and hope they continue thriving in this new landscape. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html [2] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.p...
- mintplant 9y ago
  > The rise of cloud storage has totally transformed the "backup" problem. Just by using cloud storage, you get near-realtime offsite backup without thinking about it Then an unaccountable algorithm closes your Google account, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Your cloud storage provider's backups are not your backups.
  - abalone 9y ago
    > Then an unaccountable algorithm closes your Google account, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Then a fire destroys your local backups, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Like I said, traditional snapshot backups are still a good extra step, but cloud storage has brought very good backup practices to the vast majority of the population. The difference versus ten years ago is probably several orders of magnitude.
kup0 9y ago
I use B2 (sparingly so far) for personal storage and it's been a good experience. I prefer B2 since it's permanent and very inexpensive per GB.

101 points by slyall 9y ago

Backblaze is one of the few companies where I pay for a service and am 100% satisfied. I've never had an issue with the service and when I've had questions they are prompt and informative. I use them for personal and business backups. They are more than happy to share what they build and we've used their storage pods plans to build 2 for work.

Nk26 9y ago
I never really thought about this until just now but your 100% right. I use both B2 and their consumer service and never had any issues.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze -> Great to hear that from both of you! :)
  - icelancer 9y ago
    In general it's a bad look to respond to the good reports but not the bad ones.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Happy to chat about all of them - these were the only ones I saw when I check here last night if you look at the times!
gogopuppygogo 9y ago
I felt that way until I needed to complete a restore of a backup that was roughly 500GB in size. It took around two weeks to restore on their servers for me to download as a zip. I posted on here about it at the time and the CTO reached out to let me know the server the restored started on was very old and they were going to decommission it afterward. I hope they did. I hope others don't wait that long. I also really wish they would let customers buy a hard drive with multiple backups on it instead of one hard drive per backup. It would be great to purchase one drive every year with all the backups on it and not have to worry about downloading backups for retention.
- scarface74 9y ago
  Wouldn't just asking them to send a hard drive of your backup have been faster? You could have either kept the hard drive or returned it and got your money back.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Since the server (and not the Internet connection) was the bottleneck, it wouldn't have helped, as they would still have to read the files to copy them to the new drive.
    - brianwski 9y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze > Since the server (and not the Internet connection) was the bottleneck, it wouldn't have helped As Yev mentioned above, we MASSIVELY sped up restores fairly recently (August 2017). We understood waiting for restores for a few days was an inconvenience for customers and I'm personally very proud of the results. Would LOVE for you to try it again, but I fully understand if you don't want to. Here is the blog post about the faster restores (and faster backups): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access...
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> sorry to hear about the long restore process. We definitely take restores seriously and our latest release 5.0 (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access...) addressed a lot of bottlenecks that could affect some customers. You can now also restore-by-mail and send us that hard drive back for a refund, so should you try us again in the future, you'll have more options!

gallerdude 9y ago

There's a good moral here. Everytime they had a question, they asked their users. Users don't lie.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> That's right! For better or worse they usually tell it like they see it, and that helps us inform decisions!
- dhbanes 9y ago
  Yev, I’m a new Backblaze customer and am worried by some of the negative reports by other HNers above. Would you mind taking the time to respond to the less positive comments about Backblaze rather than just thanking the two positive commenters? That would make me feel much more comfortable relying on Backblaze in the future.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Hey there sorry - if you look at my reply history you'll see I try to hit most topics, but when I looked last night those were the only comments there :D I'll get to the rest!

dkd903 9y ago

I cancelled their account. It has a weird policy of deleting backups from hard drives that have not been connected within the last 3 months. Very weird policy.

aikinai 9y ago
It’s one month, not three, but the policy is totally reasonable since they charge one flat rate to back up your whole computer (not everything your computer has ever seen). If they didn’t delete disconnected drives, they’d be offering unlimited storage for $50/year which is obviously unsystainable. The plan is already as impressive as it is considering how much data you can easily connect to one computer. I also have plenty of complaints about the service (posted above), but there’s nothing weird about this policy as written. What’s weird is when permanently connected drives get classified as disconnected (see my other post).
- dpwm 9y ago
  Whilst I agree the policy is reasonable given the amount they charge per month, it's something I've only learnt about from reading comments and not from their marketing. In fact, their marketing claims "Never lose a file again. Get unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC. Just $5/month." Only on reading the help does it seem that if the client doesn't connect with the server within 6 months, then all your backups are gone. I'm not saying this is unreasonable, but it seems a bit counterintuitive given you are still paying for the service. I just still haven't found the bit about disconnected drives. I really like Backblaze's articles on HDDs and they really seem to be customer focused, but I had to dig in the help to find this.
  - newscracker 9y ago
    I don't use Backblaze, but I suspect from the above comments that the client does not even display some kind of warning saying, "Hey, you haven't connected this drive for X months. We just wanted to let you know that this data will be deleted from our systems in Y days. Please connect the drive to make sure we retain the data." and then proceed to display this warning periodically a few times, like a countdown (but not annoying enough to be shown on every run of the client). This kind of warning would be my suggestion to the Backblaze team. This becomes more important with SSD based machines that generally have a lot lesser storage than before while people are taking a lot more pictures and videos and resorting to storing them in cheaper (per GB) external HDDs (at least the people who do like to have a local copy).

mikestew 9y ago

Such a great service that I’ve never used it for its intended purpose (thankfully, except for very occasional verification), and forget about it until I get the “we’re charging your credit card” email. I then delete the mail, happily let the charge go through, and proceed to forget that it’s there. I backup to a NAS, from which important stuff is backed to another, single drive. Backblaze is a small price for the “house burns down” scenario. Yeah, I could rotate drives offsite, but I’m not going to do that, and neither are most of us after a couple months, if at all.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> glad to see you're at least trying the restore process! You'd be surprised how many folks forgo that in its entirety and then panic should they need to restore. Always good to check the system out from upload to download! Kudos!

aikinai 9y ago

I see a lot of praise for Backblaze’s services and support and I just wanted to warn that I’ve had the opposite experience and am in the middle of switching to another service. I’ve used Backblaze since 2010 and in the past year contacted support twice. In both cases, they were only interested in quoting esoteric policies and technical limitations rather than actually solving my issue. As in, “Oh that’s because our system works like this and this and has this limitation.” Ooookay, that’s not what I asked; I asked how to solve this problem of mine that your poor system is causing. For example, the most recent time was when I started getting emails warning that all of my external drives were offline and my data would be soon deleted. Instead of “Very sorry about that, here’s how to fix the issue,” I got this long response about the ways their system looks for new files in serial and it can get jammed and start ignoring everything, with no apology, no acknowledgement this was their issue, and no solution. I had to go fishing for solutions and drag the information out of them to finally figure out what I needed to do. Which it turns out is to get back an internal drive (totally unrelated to the other drives Backblaze abandoned) I had physically removed and repurposed, put it back the computer, wait a long time for Backblaze to see it, then uncheck that drive in Backblaze and remove it again. This was a good example showing how the client design is poor and the support is worse. The other two major technical issues that convinced me I need a new service asap are: 1. The client will lie to you and you never know what’s really backed up. Even if you use the secret alt-click to force a full drive scan, it can still miss files and tell you fully backed up when files from days ago are still nowhere to be found. Luckily I’ve never actually needed to do a restore, but I almost thought I did one time and would have been furious at all the missing files I noticed. 2. This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up. I hate to badmouth them since the company seems like a really good citizen, they project a very positive image, and their software seems good on the surface. But when you dig in, there are a lot of issues with the software and service, and I recently realized having Backblaze wouldn’t actually reassure me in the event of a local disaster, so migrated away and I wanted to warn others too.

timcederman 9y ago
I had an extremely disappointing experience with Backblaze's support team (documented here - http://www.cederman.com/2016/12/tracking-down-rogue-bandwidth-a-story-of-comcast-data-caps-and-offsite-backup/ http://www.cederman.com/2016/12/tracking-down-rogue-bandwidt...), and in the process of researching the issues I was having, discovered a rabbit hole of reports of folks having issues restoring their data. Backblaze have not acknowledged my issues at all, even though I have tried to engage with the team numerous times. I switched to CrashPlan, and have had to do two full restores since doing so, both of which went flawlessly and quickly. The Java client is a bit cumbersome, but it's reliable, and I am much happier with the performance and support I've received from them.

ohhhoh 9y ago

> Then one of our co-founders Tim wondered, "what if we didn’t ask any questions and just backed up everything?" But that is not what they do exactly: "we do not backup your operating system, application folder, or temporary internet files that are transient and would not be useful in the future. Backblaze also excludes podcasts in iTunes." https://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html https://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html Is there an online backup service that makes a complete image that you can just pop a boot CD in, and restore from online? That seems like the holy grail.

ComodoHacker 9y ago
Check Veeam.
arca_vorago 9y ago
It's not online, but you might checkout RedoBackup... seems like it could be modified to be used this way.
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Backblaze isn't intended to be a bare-metal restore, just the data that's on the machine. In addition to the ones listed below, you might also take a look at Acronis - they do good work. Not sure if they have an offline component, but you could use their software to make a system image, and then toss that image in the cloud (like with Backblaze B2) and then grab it whenever needed. Might work well for what you're looking for!

abalone 9y ago

The rise of cloud storage has totally transformed the "backup" problem. Just by using cloud storage, you get near-realtime offsite backup without thinking about it. Vendors like Apple have built it into the OS. It's really one of the nicer things that's happened in personal computing lately. Granted, there's still benefit to doing a traditional "snapshot" style backup. Something like Backblaze is still a good idea. But arguably it's more of a belt-and-suspenders thing at this point. (Especially if your cloud storage offers version history.) While I've loved Backblaze's blog posts over the years, seems like this was not on their radar ten years ago. They were seeing it just as a traditional backup/restore problem. I see they've since introduced a cloud storage product (B2), but it doesn't sound that competitive.[1] Here's iCloud for comparison: - $0.005/gb/mo (2TB plan) with unlimited data transfer - Baked deep into the OS, totally automatic - Intelligently purges local files when storage runs low - Integrates with Photos app for optimized media storage - Syncs while the device is asleep (Power Nap) - HSM-protected keychain backup (geeky but groundbreaking security feature)[2] (Not so nice: doesn't do version history. Dropbox does.) Again, I've really enjoyed Backblaze's posts and hope they continue thriving in this new landscape. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html [2] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Krstic.p...

mintplant 9y ago
> The rise of cloud storage has totally transformed the "backup" problem. Just by using cloud storage, you get near-realtime offsite backup without thinking about it Then an unaccountable algorithm closes your Google account, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Your cloud storage provider's backups are not your backups.
- abalone 9y ago
  > Then an unaccountable algorithm closes your Google account, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Then a fire destroys your local backups, and suddenly all that data is inaccessible. Like I said, traditional snapshot backups are still a good extra step, but cloud storage has brought very good backup practices to the vast majority of the population. The difference versus ten years ago is probably several orders of magnitude.

kup0 9y ago

I use B2 (sparingly so far) for personal storage and it's been a good experience. I prefer B2 since it's permanent and very inexpensive per GB.