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Hi Brian, Thank you for reaching out. I love it when company folks will get into the conversation on HN. As far as connection, I've got 300/300 from Frontier.

by akulbe 8y ago

Hi Brian, Thank you for reaching out. I love it when company folks will get into the conversation on HN. As far as connection, I've got 300/300 from Frontier. It's good, and I can help out my friends. But more questions below... I had been using CrashPlan for years. Converted to their business plan when they decided to ditch the Consumer stuff. My confidence in their viability/user experience has eroded. I have personally ditched their service. My concern is for some family members who I've also had on my plan. I think they have roughly ~3TB of photos backed up. I want to find them a new home. Color me skeptical that folks outside of the public cloud providers are going to be around in 10 years. Convince me why Backblaze is a good option to send folks to, and please understand, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just wary after having "the CrashPlan experience." Know what I mean? Thanks.

rolleiflex 8y ago
Same here, another burned ex-Crashplan customer. My setup was like a few TBs of personal data, and a few GBs each of family from 7-8 different computers (I was on the family plan). Not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to find a replacement for my own data than the family's, and they are under higher risk. Per computer pricing is a terrible deal for that — I'd love to have a per computer plan, plus quota of x Gb per month for N amount of computers that I can distribute as I wish. Though what I probably want is just S3... Maybe I should just build it and sell that.
brianwski 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so you should always view my answers skeptically. :-) > Color me skeptical that folks outside of the public cloud providers are going to be around in 10 years. Backblaze is now 12 years old, and we're actually kind of unique in that we have never raised any significant VC funding and we're (slightly) profitable. We have run the business entirely as a business (not on unsustainable VC dollars), and we aren't planning on going anywhere. Backblaze is employee owned and run, the only voting board members are the original five founders. We have a couple of "board observers" from outside the company for "adult supervision and experienced advice", but they cannot control us, and they cannot even vote. Side Note: The Backblaze founders and a good portion of the staff all came from the same previous startup/company, and in that case the VCs forced us to sell it, which murdered it. The whole reason we self funded Backblaze and ran a sustainable (profitable) business was a reaction to how horrible that situation was. Backblaze currently has 803 PBytes of storage in our three datacenters, and business is really going well and we are growing quite healthy. We also understand (and talk about among ourselves) the large responsibility here, which is realistically that amount of data cannot ever be moved. If Backblaze decided on a whim to shut down, we would seriously, SERIOUSLY hurt or even manage to destroy thousands of businesses which depend on us. So we are not going to do that.

by akulbe 8y ago

rolleiflex 8y ago

Same here, another burned ex-Crashplan customer. My setup was like a few TBs of personal data, and a few GBs each of family from 7-8 different computers (I was on the family plan). Not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to find a replacement for my own data than the family's, and they are under higher risk. Per computer pricing is a terrible deal for that — I'd love to have a per computer plan, plus quota of x Gb per month for N amount of computers that I can distribute as I wish. Though what I probably want is just S3... Maybe I should just build it and sell that.

brianwski 8y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so you should always view my answers skeptically. :-) > Color me skeptical that folks outside of the public cloud providers are going to be around in 10 years. Backblaze is now 12 years old, and we're actually kind of unique in that we have never raised any significant VC funding and we're (slightly) profitable. We have run the business entirely as a business (not on unsustainable VC dollars), and we aren't planning on going anywhere. Backblaze is employee owned and run, the only voting board members are the original five founders. We have a couple of "board observers" from outside the company for "adult supervision and experienced advice", but they cannot control us, and they cannot even vote. Side Note: The Backblaze founders and a good portion of the staff all came from the same previous startup/company, and in that case the VCs forced us to sell it, which murdered it. The whole reason we self funded Backblaze and ran a sustainable (profitable) business was a reaction to how horrible that situation was. Backblaze currently has 803 PBytes of storage in our three datacenters, and business is really going well and we are growing quite healthy. We also understand (and talk about among ourselves) the large responsibility here, which is realistically that amount of data cannot ever be moved. If Backblaze decided on a whim to shut down, we would seriously, SERIOUSLY hurt or even manage to destroy thousands of businesses which depend on us. So we are not going to do that.