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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

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.
- underwater 9y ago
  I loathed Crashplan’s client. On a cheapish Windows laptop it would absolutely clobber the day-to-day performance of the machine. The machine was 2-3x faster when I finally uninstalled Crashplan. It seemed to be polling small files continuously.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Crashplan is killing off their home service, though. I've switched to Arq + Backblaze's B2, we'll see how that goes.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    I gave Arq a go but usability wise it has some catching up to do. It's hard to find an arbitrary file that's been deleted to restore unless you know exactly where it lived on disk. The search didn't work too well for me.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> After the CrashPlan announcement, we've seen a large uptick in that exact combination! Seems to be working really well for folks!
- insaneirish 9y ago
  Just another data point on CrashPlan... I've used them for a long while and previously had good experiences. I was recently adding a new backup to CrashPlan and was a bit miffed that my backup is capping out at around 3 Mbps (and down to about 500 kbps at times). Opened a support ticket, went through a whole bunch of things, and they basically came back saying 1 - 5 Mbps is the expected range. In 2018, I really don't think that's acceptable when you're trying to backup a couple terabytes of data. I have not had this issue with other backup services I use.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Hello Tim! I'm very sorry to hear you had a bad experience with support. If you still have it and are able to respond w/ a ticket number I'd love to take a look and get it to folks who can use it for training. Not suggesting you switch back off of CrashPlan (we like those folks and they do good work) but we've changed quite a bit since your last interaction with us and the issue you were experiencing sounds like it may have been one of the burrs we've able to knock off. Again, I'm sorry you had a poor experience with us, but glad you're using an online solution that's working well for you!
nothrabannosir 9y ago
Your comment describes my recent interaction with them perfectly. I suddenly got a big fat warning about something, yada yada long story short “oh yes but that’s just how our system works, and I can’t give you access to the diffs because that’s how our system works, you have to do X Y Z now.” No “we understand our design decisions are causing you a problem which shouldn’t be yours” or anything like it. Let me know if you find anything worth switching to :) ( tangent: word of warning: it seems to silently ignore folders with the same path except for case on case sensitive disks. Fringe issue, but I only accidentally saw my two most important folders weren’t backed up.)
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I suddenly got a big fat warning about something, > yada yada long story short > ... I can’t give you access to the diffs because > that’s how our system works I would love to understand what the specifics were. Backblaze's whole design is based on a "log format" where you really SHOULD be able to understand the diffs and exactly what occurred at what days and times. In other words, a complete, total, absolute history of everything that occurred is found both on your local system, and then (encrypted) on our servers. What I mean by "log format" is that when a file is backed up, a line is added to what we call the "bz_done" files that says something like this: + /pictures/puppy.jpg The "+" means it was added to your backup. Then if you delete that file later we don't REMOVE that line, we add an additional line to the very end of the log like this: - /pictures/puppy.jpg The "-" signs means it was removed FROM YOUR LOCAL DISK (but not yet from the backup). Then 30 days later, the final line might appear like this: x /pictures/puppy.jpg That means the "30 day roll back history" period has expired and the file has been cleaned up from the Backblaze datacenter. The whole point is we can determine exactly what occurred at what times, and you can understand the diffs yourself.
astro_robot 9y ago
Thank you for sharing your experiences with Backblaze. I've been debating which cloud back up service to go with and your comment has started to sway me away from Backblaze. It is also disconcerting to see the employee from Backblaze only responding to the positive comments below.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> non-chronological view makes it tough, but those were the only comments on this thread when I check it last night! I've been sweeping the rest this morning! :D
tedmiston 9y ago
Backblaze is so overrated; I really don't understand why so many high profile computing people have endorsed it. Last year they lost one of my drives — the whole backup of the entire drive 100+ GB and support just threw their hands up. Of course I only discovered that they lost it after the physical drive failed. Still looking for a better replacement. Arq didn't quite do it for me.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > I really don't understand why so many high profile computing people have endorsed it. https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze -> Ted - it sounds like you hit the 30-day retention period with the drive (if we don't see a hard drive and/or data for 30-days we remove our backup copy of it). Is it possible that hard drive was disconnected before failing? We'd normally send warning repeated warning emails when we see the drive not connected for an extended period of time.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    The drive was connected regularly frequently specifically because of this particular issue with Backblaze which was a pain point for years. The software did not report any of my drives as missing and the other partitions on the same drive were not lost :/. IIRC it was a bug in the OS X client. Still, what good is a backup service that can't recover one's backed up files? The least support could have done is refunded my plan which is much less than the cost of the lost data but they didn't even do that. This combination is how you lost a customer. -Taylor
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Ted thanks for the additional information, I'll make sure it gets forwarded to the right folks.
- 9y ago
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not sure it would have fixed your particular issue, but we recently introduced a new client that fixes a few outstanding issues with the way external drives were being handled - it sounds like it might have helped in your case. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with support, if you can post your ticket number, I'll take a look at it and make sure that the head of support sees it so they can do training on it if necessary.
dreamcompiler 9y ago
> This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up. It matters to me. There's a lot of metadata on MacOS files and this is the reason I don't use Backblaze.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > absolutely no meta data is backed up > There's a lot of metadata on MacOS files To be perfectly clear, Backblaze backs up and restores TYPE and CREATOR metadata (on the Macintosh), and restores the file creation date and the file last modified date. Backblaze does not backup anything else, for example, what color you chose for your icons in the Finder, and Backblaze does not restore the file and folder permissions. This works for most customers, but some customers won't be happy with it. We just want to be clear what we do and what we don't do. The concept of "file creation date" and "file last modified" are fairly universal, and can be restored "across platform". What that means is if you backup on Macintosh you can restore to Windows and vice versa. If you restore a Macintosh TYPE and CREATOR to Windows it will lose that data since Windows (NTFS) does not have that concept. Windows has the most sophisticated (complicated) set of ACL (Access Control Lists) that anybody has ever seen, and frankly I've never met anybody who could fully explain why Microsoft went crazy on these (and Microsoft. Backblaze does NOT backup the ACLs on Windows. But NTFS and Microsoft ACLs will simply never survive the test of time. In 30 years your iOS phone or Android tablet will never be able to understand what occurred and why "joe" had permissions as "System" while "jane" only had permissions as "Administrator" on a photo of a puppy even though those logins are long gone. Most people who are worried about backing these sorts of things up should look into "Drive Cloning" software, which is different than "backup against catastrophic long term photo loss". On Macintosh you can look into "Carbon Copy Cloner". Not sure what to use for Windows?
Mandatum 9y ago
BackBlaze is very similar to AWS and similar services - it's not made for the consumer. You need to read and understand their entire stack, process and features available. If there's a single limitation that won't fit the bill - find something else. They'll suit 80-90% of customers, but I'd say there's a portion that don't do their due diligence and test every use case they have (which is fair enough, most people don't and most people don't know every use case they will have going forward).

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.

underwater 9y ago
I loathed Crashplan’s client. On a cheapish Windows laptop it would absolutely clobber the day-to-day performance of the machine. The machine was 2-3x faster when I finally uninstalled Crashplan. It seemed to be polling small files continuously.
icebraining 9y ago
Crashplan is killing off their home service, though. I've switched to Arq + Backblaze's B2, we'll see how that goes.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  I gave Arq a go but usability wise it has some catching up to do. It's hard to find an arbitrary file that's been deleted to restore unless you know exactly where it lived on disk. The search didn't work too well for me.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> After the CrashPlan announcement, we've seen a large uptick in that exact combination! Seems to be working really well for folks!
insaneirish 9y ago
Just another data point on CrashPlan... I've used them for a long while and previously had good experiences. I was recently adding a new backup to CrashPlan and was a bit miffed that my backup is capping out at around 3 Mbps (and down to about 500 kbps at times). Opened a support ticket, went through a whole bunch of things, and they basically came back saying 1 - 5 Mbps is the expected range. In 2018, I really don't think that's acceptable when you're trying to backup a couple terabytes of data. I have not had this issue with other backup services I use.
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Hello Tim! I'm very sorry to hear you had a bad experience with support. If you still have it and are able to respond w/ a ticket number I'd love to take a look and get it to folks who can use it for training. Not suggesting you switch back off of CrashPlan (we like those folks and they do good work) but we've changed quite a bit since your last interaction with us and the issue you were experiencing sounds like it may have been one of the burrs we've able to knock off. Again, I'm sorry you had a poor experience with us, but glad you're using an online solution that's working well for you!

nothrabannosir 9y ago

Your comment describes my recent interaction with them perfectly. I suddenly got a big fat warning about something, yada yada long story short “oh yes but that’s just how our system works, and I can’t give you access to the diffs because that’s how our system works, you have to do X Y Z now.” No “we understand our design decisions are causing you a problem which shouldn’t be yours” or anything like it. Let me know if you find anything worth switching to :) ( tangent: word of warning: it seems to silently ignore folders with the same path except for case on case sensitive disks. Fringe issue, but I only accidentally saw my two most important folders weren’t backed up.)

brianwski 9y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I suddenly got a big fat warning about something, > yada yada long story short > ... I can’t give you access to the diffs because > that’s how our system works I would love to understand what the specifics were. Backblaze's whole design is based on a "log format" where you really SHOULD be able to understand the diffs and exactly what occurred at what days and times. In other words, a complete, total, absolute history of everything that occurred is found both on your local system, and then (encrypted) on our servers. What I mean by "log format" is that when a file is backed up, a line is added to what we call the "bz_done" files that says something like this: + /pictures/puppy.jpg The "+" means it was added to your backup. Then if you delete that file later we don't REMOVE that line, we add an additional line to the very end of the log like this: - /pictures/puppy.jpg The "-" signs means it was removed FROM YOUR LOCAL DISK (but not yet from the backup). Then 30 days later, the final line might appear like this: x /pictures/puppy.jpg That means the "30 day roll back history" period has expired and the file has been cleaned up from the Backblaze datacenter. The whole point is we can determine exactly what occurred at what times, and you can understand the diffs yourself.

astro_robot 9y ago

Thank you for sharing your experiences with Backblaze. I've been debating which cloud back up service to go with and your comment has started to sway me away from Backblaze. It is also disconcerting to see the employee from Backblaze only responding to the positive comments below.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> non-chronological view makes it tough, but those were the only comments on this thread when I check it last night! I've been sweeping the rest this morning! :D

tedmiston 9y ago

Backblaze is so overrated; I really don't understand why so many high profile computing people have endorsed it. Last year they lost one of my drives — the whole backup of the entire drive 100+ GB and support just threw their hands up. Of course I only discovered that they lost it after the physical drive failed. Still looking for a better replacement. Arq didn't quite do it for me.

mgkimsal 9y ago
> I really don't understand why so many high profile computing people have endorsed it. https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze -> Ted - it sounds like you hit the 30-day retention period with the drive (if we don't see a hard drive and/or data for 30-days we remove our backup copy of it). Is it possible that hard drive was disconnected before failing? We'd normally send warning repeated warning emails when we see the drive not connected for an extended period of time.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  The drive was connected regularly frequently specifically because of this particular issue with Backblaze which was a pain point for years. The software did not report any of my drives as missing and the other partitions on the same drive were not lost :/. IIRC it was a bug in the OS X client. Still, what good is a backup service that can't recover one's backed up files? The least support could have done is refunded my plan which is much less than the cost of the lost data but they didn't even do that. This combination is how you lost a customer. -Taylor
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Ted thanks for the additional information, I'll make sure it gets forwarded to the right folks.
9y ago

atYevP 9y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> Not sure it would have fixed your particular issue, but we recently introduced a new client that fixes a few outstanding issues with the way external drives were being handled - it sounds like it might have helped in your case. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with support, if you can post your ticket number, I'll take a look at it and make sure that the head of support sees it so they can do training on it if necessary.

dreamcompiler 9y ago

> This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up. It matters to me. There's a lot of metadata on MacOS files and this is the reason I don't use Backblaze.

brianwski 9y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > absolutely no meta data is backed up > There's a lot of metadata on MacOS files To be perfectly clear, Backblaze backs up and restores TYPE and CREATOR metadata (on the Macintosh), and restores the file creation date and the file last modified date. Backblaze does not backup anything else, for example, what color you chose for your icons in the Finder, and Backblaze does not restore the file and folder permissions. This works for most customers, but some customers won't be happy with it. We just want to be clear what we do and what we don't do. The concept of "file creation date" and "file last modified" are fairly universal, and can be restored "across platform". What that means is if you backup on Macintosh you can restore to Windows and vice versa. If you restore a Macintosh TYPE and CREATOR to Windows it will lose that data since Windows (NTFS) does not have that concept. Windows has the most sophisticated (complicated) set of ACL (Access Control Lists) that anybody has ever seen, and frankly I've never met anybody who could fully explain why Microsoft went crazy on these (and Microsoft. Backblaze does NOT backup the ACLs on Windows. But NTFS and Microsoft ACLs will simply never survive the test of time. In 30 years your iOS phone or Android tablet will never be able to understand what occurred and why "joe" had permissions as "System" while "jane" only had permissions as "Administrator" on a photo of a puppy even though those logins are long gone. Most people who are worried about backing these sorts of things up should look into "Drive Cloning" software, which is different than "backup against catastrophic long term photo loss". On Macintosh you can look into "Carbon Copy Cloner". Not sure what to use for Windows?

Mandatum 9y ago

BackBlaze is very similar to AWS and similar services - it's not made for the consumer. You need to read and understand their entire stack, process and features available. If there's a single limitation that won't fit the bill - find something else. They'll suit 80-90% of customers, but I'd say there's a portion that don't do their due diligence and test every use case they have (which is fair enough, most people don't and most people don't know every use case they will have going forward).