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> No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not li

> No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we disconnect a drive. I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the trip, I'd have been shit out of luck. Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies: https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_version_settings https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v... https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_download_deleted_files https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_... None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days" bullshit. Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.

jve 8y ago
Just this week logged on to Backblaze to restore my external disk which kind of died. Was a little late and no backup there :( I still hope that the HDD is alive but perhaps USB controller is dead and will try to revive it.
- propogandist 8y ago
  You can try a product called SpinRite (grc.com) - it can help revive the drive to get your data out of it.
  - jve 8y ago
    My computer doesn't see that drive. Once I connected it saw it for a moment, files were there. It's not the USB cable - same with different cable. Data recovery software (like photorec) wouldn't be problem. I'll try to hook it directly to a desktop PC
    - propogandist 8y ago
      it's not meant to be data recovery, it's positioned as a harddrive maintenance software. The drive may be failing and this will help fix some of the problematic things to get the drive working.
- davidbarker 8y ago
  I'm not sure if it'll apply in your case, but I contacted support and they actually showed me that the backups were still available up to 30 days ~after~ the backup was supposedly deleted from the servers. I managed to recover my files with one day to spare (29 days after Backblaze supposedly deleted them). So it actually gave me 59 days since I last plugged the drive in. If you're within that window it might work for you. This is what they said to me: When you are viewing the contents of your backup, keep the "From" field at "Beginning of time" and change the "To" to a time when the data you need was still available. Please note that this can only be done up to the last 30 days since the last update on the backup. Here is an article that describes the process https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002936953-How-to-Roll-Back-Time https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002936953-Ho...
nicolaslem 8y ago
This is so annoying. I have a computer dedicated to photography and sometimes I just don't take pictures for many weeks. Still I have to remember to turn on the computer from time to time so that Backblaze can know that I'm not cheating the system. > Now, with the ability to save a restore to B2, these customers can take a Snapshot of the data already backed up from these drives and save it to a B2 account. Which reads as: we've created an artificial limitation on the product you pay for so that you can buy a second product from us.
- mwexler 8y ago
  Works for airlines. Til it doesn't.
martin-adams 8y ago
What I would like to see is a simple surcharge for any external drives connected after 30 days. If the restriction is because it's capped at $5 a month and they don't want abuse, then rather than delete, make some money. I can choose to discard the data after 30 days (if I no longer have a use), or continue to trust that it's securely backed up.
- phoobahr 8y ago
  If I had to guess it's probably not the $5/month as much as that it's an incremental offsite backup service designed and marketed for ease of use and high availability... not an Amazon Glacier competitor. If you didn't plug a removable drive in for a month then this really isn't the market they're looking for. I could be wrong but it seems at least as likely as the suggestion that they're just out to get you somehow.
sreitshamer 8y ago
That's one big reason why we made Arq Cloud Backup not delete anything. It's 1 TB of storage and unlimited computers, vs 1 computer and unlimited storage with Backblaze. But we won't drop the backups of your external drives, ever.

jve 8y ago

Just this week logged on to Backblaze to restore my external disk which kind of died. Was a little late and no backup there :( I still hope that the HDD is alive but perhaps USB controller is dead and will try to revive it.

propogandist 8y ago
You can try a product called SpinRite (grc.com) - it can help revive the drive to get your data out of it.
- jve 8y ago
  My computer doesn't see that drive. Once I connected it saw it for a moment, files were there. It's not the USB cable - same with different cable. Data recovery software (like photorec) wouldn't be problem. I'll try to hook it directly to a desktop PC
  - propogandist 8y ago
    it's not meant to be data recovery, it's positioned as a harddrive maintenance software. The drive may be failing and this will help fix some of the problematic things to get the drive working.
davidbarker 8y ago
I'm not sure if it'll apply in your case, but I contacted support and they actually showed me that the backups were still available up to 30 days ~after~ the backup was supposedly deleted from the servers. I managed to recover my files with one day to spare (29 days after Backblaze supposedly deleted them). So it actually gave me 59 days since I last plugged the drive in. If you're within that window it might work for you. This is what they said to me: When you are viewing the contents of your backup, keep the "From" field at "Beginning of time" and change the "To" to a time when the data you need was still available. Please note that this can only be done up to the last 30 days since the last update on the backup. Here is an article that describes the process https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002936953-How-to-Roll-Back-Time https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002936953-Ho...

nicolaslem 8y ago

This is so annoying. I have a computer dedicated to photography and sometimes I just don't take pictures for many weeks. Still I have to remember to turn on the computer from time to time so that Backblaze can know that I'm not cheating the system. > Now, with the ability to save a restore to B2, these customers can take a Snapshot of the data already backed up from these drives and save it to a B2 account. Which reads as: we've created an artificial limitation on the product you pay for so that you can buy a second product from us.

mwexler 8y ago
Works for airlines. Til it doesn't.

martin-adams 8y ago

What I would like to see is a simple surcharge for any external drives connected after 30 days. If the restriction is because it's capped at $5 a month and they don't want abuse, then rather than delete, make some money. I can choose to discard the data after 30 days (if I no longer have a use), or continue to trust that it's securely backed up.

phoobahr 8y ago
If I had to guess it's probably not the $5/month as much as that it's an incremental offsite backup service designed and marketed for ease of use and high availability... not an Amazon Glacier competitor. If you didn't plug a removable drive in for a month then this really isn't the market they're looking for. I could be wrong but it seems at least as likely as the suggestion that they're just out to get you somehow.

sreitshamer 8y ago

That's one big reason why we made Arq Cloud Backup not delete anything. It's 1 TB of storage and unlimited computers, vs 1 computer and unlimited storage with Backblaze. But we won't drop the backups of your external drives, ever.