6 ms·

Why not use $60 you're paying per year for 1Tb of online storage to buy a 2Tb hard drive and use it for the backup?

chillydawg 8y ago
Hard drives fail and you need them physically to access the data. Online backups allow you access everywhere and are generally much more reliable than a single, local disk.
chowell 8y ago
Presumably so that the backup is offsite.
billyhoffman 8y ago
Online/offsite backup is a different use case. They are paying $60/year so that, if their house burns down, gets flooded, disk gets fried by lightning, they still have their family pictures. Local backup is cheap and fast, and you should do it too. But it doesn't provide geographic redundancy.
- kachurovskiy 8y ago
  Another $60 buys a water and fireproof safe for the hard drive. I assume it also helps against lightning :-) I honestly think remote backup is an overkill for personal needs and new risks you get by placing your valuable data on someone else's hard drive are not always internalized.
  - nathankunicki 8y ago
    By putting your drive in a safe, you now have to unlock it, take it out, plug it in, sync, unplug it, and lock it away. Which is a hassle if you want to stick to regular (hourly? daily?) backups. It is proven that if you introduce friction into process, over time that process will be followed less.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And you take your non redundantly stored hard drive out in 5 years and you can’t retrieve data on it. But realistically, isn’t it worth $60 a year to have a constantly backed up hard drive? The alternative is to take the hard drive out of the safe every so often and do a backup and put it back.
    - kachurovskiy 8y ago
      I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data. I'm far less confident in a remote company. Your point is valid and constant, seamless backup is indeed a good thing to have. Whether it's worth $60/year is one's own decision.
      - eitland 8y ago
        > I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data Care to share what kind of procedures you use? I've recovered some data for friends and employers who want it back but aren't prepared to pay > USD1000 for it but if I cannot connect to the disk I'm lost. (My tricks: tilting the disk, freezing the disk, leaving ssds powered on but sata unconnected, and even before that photorec and ddrescue etc.) Note: don't do any of the above if data needs to be recovered at any cost, in that case just contact a data recovery company.
    - beagle3 8y ago
      I've recently recovered data from a pair of 15GB and 20GB drives I last used in 2001 (and were stored in an ordinary closet of a house that experienced inside temperatures ranging from 5C to 30C over that time, and great humidity/dryness flactuations over those 17 years). There were 16 bad 512-byte sectors on one of the drives, but otherwise all worked. Modern higher density drives are probably less resilient, and who knows how flash drives will fair after 17 years in the closet - but my experience so far is that HDDs trump backup tapes on every measure including costs except at extreme sizes (at this point in time, into the petabytes).
- voidmain0001 8y ago
  The other point to remember is BB is not for archiving. BB states this itself. At least with external drives it is possible to archive.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    True, the standard Backblaze offering will erase your backup if you’re not online for six months. If you have an external drive that’s offline for 30 days, they will erase your backup. A B2 based backup solution costs more but you don’t have those limitations.
    - voidmain0001 8y ago
      Accord to Backblaze the retention period is thirty days for the personal plan [1]. Where do you see six months? If a file is deleted on the source device, and the deletion is synchronized to the BB repository, the recovery window is 30 days. [1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666628-What-is-a-backup-What-is-Backblaze- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666628-What-...
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Different thing: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-happens-to-my-backups-when-I-m-away-or-on-vacation- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-... If your computer is offline for six months and doesn’t connect to BackBlaze, they erase all of your data. If you have an externally attached drive on your computer and it isn’t connected in 30 days and your computer is online, they erase that backup of the external drive. If you reconnect your computer after a month and you don’t have the external drive connected, they erase your backup.
TomVDB 8y ago
That was my reasoning as well until burglars took my NAS (in addition to the laptops, of course.)
ryanplant-au 8y ago
It's a "cheap, easy, reliable: pick any two" situation. Cheap and easy: buy a 2 TB drive and keep it at home. If some disaster affects your home -- flood, fire, burglary -- it can take out your data and its backup. Cheap and reliable: buy a 2 TB hard drive and keep it somewhere else. Keeping the backup up-to-date means regularly bringing the drove home, updating it, and putting it back. Easy and reliable: pay for a service like Backblaze that automatically backs up all your files to a remote server. There are other benefits to services like B2 especially, namely being able to access your backed-up files from any device or location, or being able to link people to your files on a high-speed server.
- magnetic 8y ago
  Or... You put the 2 TB drive somewhere else (at a relative's) and keep it updated regularly via network. That's my set up (but with a bigger drive). At home, I have the master copy of the data on my file server. Then I have backup #1 that is in the same location and backup #2 that is in a different location. Both #1 and #2 get updated at night with a "timemachine-like" backup system based on rsnapshot. The network traffic goes over ssh. Remote backup system #2 cost a UPS, a RaspberryPi and an 8 TB drive, which is about ~$250-$300 total. The initial sync is best done locally of course, but deltas can generally easily go over network at night. Cheap, reliable, and (relatively) easy (if you're a geek, that is).
  - parliament32 8y ago
    I remember there being software back in the day that did exactly this. The name escapes me right now, but basically you had to add "friends" in the software, then dedicate a certain amount of HDD space to it. It would then back up your files to your friends' computers, and theirs to yours. Backups were encrypted so your friends wouldn't be able to see your files. It was a super neat idea, I wish I could remember what it was called so I could see if they're still around...
    - ajb 8y ago
      There's an open source one called Tahoe: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs There used to be a company with a more usable similar product called allmydata, but it seems to be defunct.
cbluth 8y ago
What do you do when someone spills coffee on your drive?
ghaff 8y ago
I use Backblaze's standard service. I look at it as cheap belt and suspenders insurance. I do onsite backups using Time Machine--along with the occasional sync to another drive.It's offsite and it's a completely independent backup mechanism. $50/year or so is essentially not worth worrying about in this context. WRT your other comment: Yes, there's some small level of incremental security risk but there's so little that's genuinely sensitive in my storage, I'm willing to take that risk. And, yes, it's probably overkill but for the cost, there are a lot of things I spend money on that are probably unnecessary :-)
- brianwski 8y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I do onsite backups using Time Machine, and also Backblaze. You are doing everything correctly. You are following the 3-2-1 backup philosophy, which is: "3 copies of the data, 2 copies locally, 1 copy remote". Here is a blog post we wrote about it: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
tscs37 8y ago
It's much more easy and reliable this way. I perform hourly backups of my VPS and personal computers, storing it all into a giant repo on OVH and B2. If my house goes up in flames, I have to redo, at worst, 1 hour of work. Additionally I won't have to deal with expanding to a 4TB drive eventually.
ereyes01 8y ago
That was my previous solution. It worked well for a couple years until the disk crashed and I lost some of my data :-(
brianwski 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Why not use $60 you're paying per year for 1Tb of online storage to buy a 2Tb hard drive and use it for the backup? We HIGHLY recommend both. There is a philosophy called the 3-2-1 philosophy of backups. You should always have three copies of the data, two onsite, and one remote. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

Hard drives fail and you need them physically to access the data. Online backups allow you access everywhere and are generally much more reliable than a single, local disk.

chowell 8y ago

Presumably so that the backup is offsite.

billyhoffman 8y ago

Online/offsite backup is a different use case. They are paying $60/year so that, if their house burns down, gets flooded, disk gets fried by lightning, they still have their family pictures. Local backup is cheap and fast, and you should do it too. But it doesn't provide geographic redundancy.

kachurovskiy 8y ago
Another $60 buys a water and fireproof safe for the hard drive. I assume it also helps against lightning :-) I honestly think remote backup is an overkill for personal needs and new risks you get by placing your valuable data on someone else's hard drive are not always internalized.
- nathankunicki 8y ago
  By putting your drive in a safe, you now have to unlock it, take it out, plug it in, sync, unplug it, and lock it away. Which is a hassle if you want to stick to regular (hourly? daily?) backups. It is proven that if you introduce friction into process, over time that process will be followed less.
- scarface74 8y ago
  And you take your non redundantly stored hard drive out in 5 years and you can’t retrieve data on it. But realistically, isn’t it worth $60 a year to have a constantly backed up hard drive? The alternative is to take the hard drive out of the safe every so often and do a backup and put it back.
  - kachurovskiy 8y ago
    I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data. I'm far less confident in a remote company. Your point is valid and constant, seamless backup is indeed a good thing to have. Whether it's worth $60/year is one's own decision.
    - eitland 8y ago
      > I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data Care to share what kind of procedures you use? I've recovered some data for friends and employers who want it back but aren't prepared to pay > USD1000 for it but if I cannot connect to the disk I'm lost. (My tricks: tilting the disk, freezing the disk, leaving ssds powered on but sata unconnected, and even before that photorec and ddrescue etc.) Note: don't do any of the above if data needs to be recovered at any cost, in that case just contact a data recovery company.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    I've recently recovered data from a pair of 15GB and 20GB drives I last used in 2001 (and were stored in an ordinary closet of a house that experienced inside temperatures ranging from 5C to 30C over that time, and great humidity/dryness flactuations over those 17 years). There were 16 bad 512-byte sectors on one of the drives, but otherwise all worked. Modern higher density drives are probably less resilient, and who knows how flash drives will fair after 17 years in the closet - but my experience so far is that HDDs trump backup tapes on every measure including costs except at extreme sizes (at this point in time, into the petabytes).
voidmain0001 8y ago
The other point to remember is BB is not for archiving. BB states this itself. At least with external drives it is possible to archive.
- scarface74 8y ago
  True, the standard Backblaze offering will erase your backup if you’re not online for six months. If you have an external drive that’s offline for 30 days, they will erase your backup. A B2 based backup solution costs more but you don’t have those limitations.
  - voidmain0001 8y ago
    Accord to Backblaze the retention period is thirty days for the personal plan [1]. Where do you see six months? If a file is deleted on the source device, and the deletion is synchronized to the BB repository, the recovery window is 30 days. [1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666628-What-is-a-backup-What-is-Backblaze- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666628-What-...
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Different thing: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-happens-to-my-backups-when-I-m-away-or-on-vacation- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-... If your computer is offline for six months and doesn’t connect to BackBlaze, they erase all of your data. If you have an externally attached drive on your computer and it isn’t connected in 30 days and your computer is online, they erase that backup of the external drive. If you reconnect your computer after a month and you don’t have the external drive connected, they erase your backup.

TomVDB 8y ago

That was my reasoning as well until burglars took my NAS (in addition to the laptops, of course.)

ryanplant-au 8y ago

It's a "cheap, easy, reliable: pick any two" situation. Cheap and easy: buy a 2 TB drive and keep it at home. If some disaster affects your home -- flood, fire, burglary -- it can take out your data and its backup. Cheap and reliable: buy a 2 TB hard drive and keep it somewhere else. Keeping the backup up-to-date means regularly bringing the drove home, updating it, and putting it back. Easy and reliable: pay for a service like Backblaze that automatically backs up all your files to a remote server. There are other benefits to services like B2 especially, namely being able to access your backed-up files from any device or location, or being able to link people to your files on a high-speed server.

magnetic 8y ago
Or... You put the 2 TB drive somewhere else (at a relative's) and keep it updated regularly via network. That's my set up (but with a bigger drive). At home, I have the master copy of the data on my file server. Then I have backup #1 that is in the same location and backup #2 that is in a different location. Both #1 and #2 get updated at night with a "timemachine-like" backup system based on rsnapshot. The network traffic goes over ssh. Remote backup system #2 cost a UPS, a RaspberryPi and an 8 TB drive, which is about ~$250-$300 total. The initial sync is best done locally of course, but deltas can generally easily go over network at night. Cheap, reliable, and (relatively) easy (if you're a geek, that is).
- parliament32 8y ago
  I remember there being software back in the day that did exactly this. The name escapes me right now, but basically you had to add "friends" in the software, then dedicate a certain amount of HDD space to it. It would then back up your files to your friends' computers, and theirs to yours. Backups were encrypted so your friends wouldn't be able to see your files. It was a super neat idea, I wish I could remember what it was called so I could see if they're still around...
  - ajb 8y ago
    There's an open source one called Tahoe: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs There used to be a company with a more usable similar product called allmydata, but it seems to be defunct.

cbluth 8y ago

What do you do when someone spills coffee on your drive?

ghaff 8y ago

I use Backblaze's standard service. I look at it as cheap belt and suspenders insurance. I do onsite backups using Time Machine--along with the occasional sync to another drive.It's offsite and it's a completely independent backup mechanism. $50/year or so is essentially not worth worrying about in this context. WRT your other comment: Yes, there's some small level of incremental security risk but there's so little that's genuinely sensitive in my storage, I'm willing to take that risk. And, yes, it's probably overkill but for the cost, there are a lot of things I spend money on that are probably unnecessary :-)

brianwski 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > I do onsite backups using Time Machine, and also Backblaze. You are doing everything correctly. You are following the 3-2-1 backup philosophy, which is: "3 copies of the data, 2 copies locally, 1 copy remote". Here is a blog post we wrote about it: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

tscs37 8y ago

It's much more easy and reliable this way. I perform hourly backups of my VPS and personal computers, storing it all into a giant repo on OVH and B2. If my house goes up in flames, I have to redo, at worst, 1 hour of work. Additionally I won't have to deal with expanding to a 4TB drive eventually.

ereyes01 8y ago

That was my previous solution. It worked well for a couple years until the disk crashed and I lost some of my data :-(

brianwski 8y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Why not use $60 you're paying per year for 1Tb of online storage to buy a 2Tb hard drive and use it for the backup? We HIGHLY recommend both. There is a philosophy called the 3-2-1 philosophy of backups. You should always have three copies of the data, two onsite, and one remote. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/