30 ms·

Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

162 points by mrchucklepants 7y ago

semicolon_storm 7y ago
Very surprised it took this long to implement. I’ve had a good experience with B2B + Duplicati, but the main reason I went with that over the simpler Backblaze Cloud was the retention policy. 30 days to recover files was just too short of a time span to be a guarantee that my files were safe.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> Glad you're enjoying the Duplicati integration with B2! It did take us a while, but we wanted to make sure that we did it the right way and in a sustainable fashion. It's been an ongoing project for the past 10 months or so - and came after a lot of customer demand following CrashPlan leaving the consumer market. We're hoping people dig it, apologies it took so long!
zomg 7y ago
i've been a customer of backblaze for a about a decade now. everyone has their opinion, but for me, it's always just hummed along in the background, doing it's thing. i've had to restore almost a terabyte of data (on more than one occasion, derp) -- and had no issues. it's up there (again, for me) as one of the annual software subscriptions that's worth every penny, if not more.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> Thank you so much! :D
  - zomg 7y ago
    keep up the great work -- great products!
- ghaff 7y ago
  I've only had restore the odd file now and then. But that's OK :-) I have a pretty thorough and redundant on-site backup system these days. But I still really appreciate having a totally independent off-site backup system. Nothing makes you suddenly wonder if your backup system is really all in order as when you lose your primary disk. It's definitely a subscription that a lot of people should have if they don't.
- inovica 7y ago
  Same here. It's on 3 machines at home and was put on when I nearly lost all my photos of my kids. It's wonderful. Even did a 'drive by' when I was on holiday in California. I did Apple, Google, Facebook and.... Backblaze. Wonderful product and company.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I'm curious how you did the restore and roughly how it went? I've done a few restores years ago. I don't know if this reflects the current process, but my experience was a bit rough. However, I'm still a long term customer with little interest in going elsewhere. In late 2016 my laptop's drive died suddenly. I tried to restore everything via a shipped drive. I'm not sure if it was because of copy on their website (at the time) pointing out that they overnight USB drives or me just expecting that's the fastest way to get my data, but I was disappointed at the turnaround. Because it was a relatively large amount of data (a few hundred gigs?) there was a "staging" process that took a day or two. It got interrupted and had to start again (a server reboot on their side?). After receiving the drive everything went smoothly; I believe the data had been encrypted in transit, but wasn't onerous to restore from. I even think I was outside of their 30-day return and it wasn't an issue (the problem wasn't my hard drive, but a cable...with no hot spares and a special cable it took longer to resolve). At work I had a similarly annoying experience with Amazon Snowball where physically locating it and "testing" it took a few days longer than expected when expecting tight turnaround...maybe I need to adjust my expectations for physical logistics. Many years previous I noticed my music files were showing up as 0-size--my hard drive was failing. Thankfully I could pull my collection from 30 days previous and I chose a download option. It was a bit annoying that they had created a series of zip files (which makes sense), but I believe I was restricted to the web interface for downloading them which made managing it difficult.
  - yreg 7y ago
    For me the restore experience was painful. I attempted to restore about 1TB of data (on macOS). Since I have 500mbit internet I assumed I'd be able to download it through the app, but that didn't prove easy. Even when split into smaller zip archives, the download would go terribly slow. Often, the archives would be corrupted and I'd have to re-download them. In the end I had to order a drive to Europe (and pay the tariffs), which is a pain in the ass. (But they did return the deposit even though I missed the 30 day window.) Edit: Oh yea, and when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! That's what happened to me right before a multi-week trip, so I was pretty unhappy that I wasn't able to download my backup in the 5-or-so days I had at my disposal, thus having to order the physical drive.
tpmx 7y ago
Do they still have a very slow upload performance with their backup service? That's been the main complaint I've been reading over the years. (I'd probably be happy with something in the range of 50-100 Mbit/s.) (My home connection is 250/100.)
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> try it now. We've spent the last few updates honing in the way we handle uploads and have introduce threading to make the process more efficient. We'll always be bottle-necked by the available bandwidth to your machine and latency, but it's worth trying again if you haven't for a while!
  - tpmx 7y ago
    Sure, but you surely you have stats? And why is latency a factor - surely you can work around that by improving your network protocol (think less TCP, more QUIC or something similar, etc)? Anyway, okay, I'll test your trial again. :)
    - atYevP 7y ago
      This speedtest is somewhat accurate and is pointed to our data center so should give you a decent idea of speed -> https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/ https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/. The reason latency is a factor is that it affects how quickly data leaves your computer and gets to our data center, so if you're far away, it can play a factor!
      - lubblig 7y ago
        Unless I missed some setting it seems like the speedtest is only for the US data center(s). Is there any way to test the speed to the EU data center?
        brianwski 7y ago
        Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Is there any way to test the speed to the EU data center? Create a free Backblaze account in the EU datacenter region. Then upload/download some data! The first 10 GBytes of B2 is 100% free, you don't even need to give us a credit card so you can try it all utterly risk free with no way we could mess with you. If you run the Backblaze Personal Backup, make sure you manually configure it to use 30 threads, then let it rip and watch your bandwidth meter to see what it can use. The first 14 days are completely free, again no Credit Card required! Personally I get about 100 Mbits/sec from my home in California to the European datacenter (capped by my ISP), but if you are in Europe you should be able to hit 500 Mbits/sec using the Personal Backup Client with 30 threads if you are close enough to Amsterdam (where the datacenter is). Oh, one hint -> don't judge Backblaze Personal Backup until you have been backing up for at least 12 hours. Backblaze backs up small files first, and the latency to push 1 byte files murders performance. But after we get through all your small files, it should rip. In the end, everybody has enough bandwidth to reach everywhere in the world now, and you really shouldn't pick a service based on total throughput. I think you should pick it based on cost, comfort with the security model and how sensitive your data is, ease of use, etc. Unless you have a Petabyte or more of data, you can backup hundreds of TBytes to anywhere in the world nowadays. Easily. No problem.
CharlesW 7y ago
Yev, can you clarify whether this new release supports NAS? I see that it allows you to "Back up all your attached external drives", but my drives happen to be connected via Ethernet.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Probably not. They’ve said repeatedly that unlimited storage for $5 wouldn’t be a sustainable business model if they supported NAS. For that there are third party solutions that support backing up to B2.
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    Thank you, I know the history and what they've said in the past, and also know about their B2 product. I'm hoping for a real answer from Yev, but if not I've been reasonably happy with CrashPlan (which is a NAS-friendly solution).
    - Faark 7y ago
      Crashplan is more than twice the price, so you'd even have the budget for an extra device. Did you ever have to restore a significant amount of data with CrashPlan? Its been more than a month since a 3tb drive died on me and I'v only got 1/3 of it restored so far. I don't see any local bottlenecks. Its restore-or-upload, so recent data in unsecured as well. :( CrashPlan does supports client side encryption, making Blackblaze not really an option for me.
      - brianwski 7y ago
        Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. > supports client side encryption, making Blackblaze not really an option for me Just to be clear, Backblaze Personal Backup encrypts all files on the client side, period. Now by default, Backblaze has the ability to decrypt those files, but you can set a "Private Encryption Key" and then if you forget that private encryption key nobody (including you, any Backblaze employees, the NSA) will EVER read those files, they are gone. Some people point out that you have to supply your private encryption key in order to prepare a restore, and at that moment you have to hand it over to Backblaze (for 10 seconds). But look at the work flow and think about it: 1) If you never prepare a restore, your files are uncrackable by the NSA or Backblaze, period, end of story. 2) If Backblaze's datacenter is hacked for the 3 years before you prepare a restore, nobody can read your files because it simply isn't possible, you have never provided the private encryption key to Backblaze. This is most evident for any "zero day security breach" where the world goes haywire for 24 hours and hackers gain entry into all systems everywhere. If you avoid preparing a restore in those 24 hours, your data was safe before the hack, safe during the hack, and safe after it is all cleaned up and the systems are locked down again. 3) Ok, the day comes that you need a restore -> you hand over your private encryption keys, and our servers NEVER write that to disk! They keep it in RAM, which is pretty dang hard to hack. The restore is prepared, you download it, then you can manually delete the restore! Yes, technically this opened up a 10 second or more window of vulnerability where you were only protected by our hardened systems and all of our OTHER security measures. No human ever looked at your files. The systems are all automated and billions of files are flowing around. Honestly, you're pretty safe. 4) If you have something on your computer that you will go DIRECTLY TO JAIL if it is ever discovered, then I'd highly encourage you to encrypt that in a little encrypted file at rest on your computer anyway (regardless whether or not you use Backblaze). I mean, the FBI caught that guy that ran "The Silk Road" by distracting him in the library and sliding his laptop away from him before he could close it. As long as your file is pre-encrypted "at rest" on your laptop, Backblaze can back it up and no matter what even if you prepare a restore safely. Meanwhile we can keep all your photos and music and not illegal or overly private stuff backed up conveniently for you.
maikhoepfel 7y ago
Cool changes! Any plans to ever add Linux support? That’s a dealbreaker for me. I need to backup both Linux and Windows machines. I wanted to use B2, but restic seems not ideal on Windows.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> No plans on the Computer Backup side. We haven't been able to come up with a way to do it affordably and in a way that makes sense for us - so we recommend folks use B2 Cloud Storage and any of the integrations that work for both. Cloudberry and Comet backup work pretty well. You can see more on: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linux&use-case=backup https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... (I set it to use Linux + Backup as the parameters).
  - cweagans 7y ago
    B2 isn't really a solution for people that are looking for a robust computer backup service like Backblaze currently offers for Mac and Windows. I went down that road and ended up very frustrated. I ended up buying a Synology NAS (which does offer the same computer backup features + revisioning and all that), and then syncing the backup out to B2. It's not an ideal solution by any means, and I would get rid of my NAS in a heartbeat if there were a real solution for Linux desktops. It really sucks to have had to go through all of that setup (+ have another machine to maintain) when I just wanted to get things done and know my data was safe. Would you consider working with the community to find a better solution? Maybe offer a closed source library (a la libspotify, but for Backblaze) for the storage bits + get the community pointed in the right direction for an open source frontend for Linux or something?
    - calcifer 7y ago
      I imagine the problem isn't closed vs open source, but the fact that on Linux it would be trivial to mount a massive NAS (think dozens of TBs) in a way that's completely invisible to the Backblaze client and pay $6/month for unlimited backups. There were people on /r/datahoarder who stored petabytes on Amazon's "unlimited" backup before the whole product got canceled.
ryanmercer 7y ago
I really miss Backblaze. I was a customer for years and years and actually was fortunate (I guess?) enough to have to use them to recover around a terabyte once but when I switched to using a Chromebox as my daily driver (then a Chromebox 2) I found I was turning my Windows machine on once a month just to keep kosher with the Backblaze servers. Such a great service and I still always look forward to the emails, stuff like the drive failure rates is always a neat read!
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > I found I was turning my Windows machine on once a month just to keep kosher with the Backblaze servers I’ve been burnt badly by this, I wish there was a better way. I was in the habit of doing this and when I fired the drive up for some reason it failed to be backed up and the backup was deleted at their end. 1TB had to be re-uploaded on a 4Mbps connection. I know I shouldn’t have done the backup on the last day (no data had changed) but wow was that irritating.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    With the new service, they are announcing, that shouldn’t be an issue.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    Fortunately for me I realized none of the 5~ terabytes on that machine mattered whatsoever as I never actually used any of it. I would archive podcasts I liked, download YT videos I found worthy of it, I had 100gb or so of 9/11 news coverage from the day of the attacks and the next few days, insane amounts of exes for pretty much every revision of every scrap of software I used in case I ever wanted to go back to an old version, insane amounts of images from where I'd rip entire tumblr accounts based around different fandoms/topics, I had half a century of Lodge meeting minutes for one of my Lodges scanned as high-resolution OCRd pdfs, entire websites I'd wget for offline (why?!) viewing etc. It's all presumably still there but I haven't turned that box on in about a year now. Man, switching to a Chromebox was so freeing.
renaudg 7y ago
In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation could not complete, please contact support" each time. Support advised me to wipe /Library/Backblaze* , reinstall, then inherit the existing backup. Well, we never managed to get the inherit process to complete : it failed with "ERR_error_unknown" every time. And I started freaking out. That's where things get interesting : I became frustrated with the canned responses from support and decided to delve into the client logs myself. I quickly found a potential smoking gun (in bzbmenu.log) : a spelling mismatch in an XML attribute name between the server response (support_inherit="true") and what the client was expecting ("ERROR could not read attribute named supports_inherit"). Notice the extra "s" ? Pretty obvious typo and one that could definitely explain the failure (client can't confirm that the selected backup is eligible for inheritance, bails out) I was rather happy with my findings and shared them in plenty of details with support (including log excerpts), but instead of a "thank you and here's some free months of service !" response, I got "meh, this log file is irrelevant", and worse: no promise to escalate the issue (until I insisted a second time). They suggested updating to the 6.1.0.372 beta, which turned out to have the exact same bug. Now, I'm left wondering if should try upgrading to 7.0 and inheriting my 6.1 backup from there. But the point of this message is to share my disappointment with this support experience. I went out of my way as a customer and spent a couple of hours researching and finding something potentially useful to the company, but had no appropriate way to report it. I even tried security contacts, but was (rightfully) told it wasn't a security issue. No word on whether they were going to pass it on to the relevant team. EDIT: I've just confirmed that the same issue is present in 7.0.0.386. Still can't inherit my existing backup.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue. I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).
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sanbor 7y ago
Any plans to restore an encrypted backup without having to send the private key to Backblaze servers?
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Looks like yes, but it's not a particularly high priority, based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21205948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21205948
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novok 7y ago
Does backblaze co. have access to the contents of your backups or is it client side encrypted?
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> the backup service is client-side encrypted before transmission.
elfchief 7y ago
I've only ever had one problem with Backblaze, in my ... 7 or 8? ... years as a customer. The problem: The UI for excluding directories is horrific. It uses the Windows "Browse for Folder" *SHBrowseForFolder) dialog, which requires you click down through each and every level of your directory structure to get to the directory you want to exclude. You can't cut and paste, it doesn't start from the directory you added your last exclusion in, it's just lots and lots and lots and lots of clicking. This doesn't seem like it would be hard to fix, so I'm guessing they don't consider it broken? If the Backblaze folks are still reading: Could you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, for the love of god, fix your fucking exclusions interface? Please?
- froindt 7y ago
  I'm baffled that anyone uses that interface! I think it's literally my least favorite interface in Windows. Is there a saving grace for that browse folder interface? A certain use case where it's really good?
- AlfeG 7y ago
  >> You can't cut and paste, it doesn't start from the directory you added your last exclusion in, it's just lots and lots and lots and lots of clicking. But it's not entirely true. You can paste full path to needed folder in input below directory tree. I've used this many many times https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/58tncadu2z7ix29/bzbui_2019-10-09_09-03-28.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/58tncadu2z7ix29/bzbui_20...
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> if you don't want to use the UI (meant for non-tech savvy folks) we do have advanced exclusions via XML - take a look -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/220973007-Advanced-Topic-Setting-Custom-Exclusions-via-XML https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/220973007-Advan....
  - elfchief 7y ago
    That's the thing -- I do want to use the UI and I don't want to have to hand-edit XML. I just want the UI to not use the single worst dialog box in all of windows. I am baffled at why Backblaze clings so tightly to the existing dialog box.
Trias11 7y ago
Are you (BackBlaze) still happily deleting user's backup files if user's computer does not contact BackBlaze servers within some arbitrary time? Yes/No? Source: 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-... This is malice. If you are still doing this to your users - your service is a non-starter. Backup service that deletes user's valuable files under some TOS excuse should not exist.
- deleted 7y ago
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- MrGilbert 7y ago
  > [...] within some arbitrary time? It's 6 months - and you receive notifications after 14, 21, 28, 60 and 90 days. It should be possible for the backup machine to connect to the backblaze server twice a year. I think it's reasonable.
  - Trias11 7y ago
    Is it reasonable to expect that paying recurring fee for backup service is enough to keep my data safe? Or should I pay for service AND do some time critical technology acrobatics to comply with confusing fine-printed TOS to keep my data safe?
- theshrike79 7y ago
  Backblaze is a backup service, not a file storage service. If the computer you are backing up isn't online for 6 months, it clearly isn't that important. If it is, you can use B2 to store files indefinitely.
  - aweb 7y ago
    Is it though? What if I plan to travel for a long time and still want my data to be backup up just in case?
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
jbergens 7y ago
Hm, if I turn on 1-year-history or history-forever and includes my node_modules folders in the backup will I fill their whole storage cluster?
- atYevP 7y ago
  No, but don't do that. :P

Very surprised it took this long to implement. I’ve had a good experience with B2B + Duplicati, but the main reason I went with that over the simpler Backblaze Cloud was the retention policy. 30 days to recover files was just too short of a time span to be a guarantee that my files were safe.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> Glad you're enjoying the Duplicati integration with B2! It did take us a while, but we wanted to make sure that we did it the right way and in a sustainable fashion. It's been an ongoing project for the past 10 months or so - and came after a lot of customer demand following CrashPlan leaving the consumer market. We're hoping people dig it, apologies it took so long!

zomg 7y ago

i've been a customer of backblaze for a about a decade now. everyone has their opinion, but for me, it's always just hummed along in the background, doing it's thing. i've had to restore almost a terabyte of data (on more than one occasion, derp) -- and had no issues. it's up there (again, for me) as one of the annual software subscriptions that's worth every penny, if not more.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> Thank you so much! :D
- zomg 7y ago
  keep up the great work -- great products!
ghaff 7y ago
I've only had restore the odd file now and then. But that's OK :-) I have a pretty thorough and redundant on-site backup system these days. But I still really appreciate having a totally independent off-site backup system. Nothing makes you suddenly wonder if your backup system is really all in order as when you lose your primary disk. It's definitely a subscription that a lot of people should have if they don't.
inovica 7y ago
Same here. It's on 3 machines at home and was put on when I nearly lost all my photos of my kids. It's wonderful. Even did a 'drive by' when I was on holiday in California. I did Apple, Google, Facebook and.... Backblaze. Wonderful product and company.
pfranz 7y ago
I'm curious how you did the restore and roughly how it went? I've done a few restores years ago. I don't know if this reflects the current process, but my experience was a bit rough. However, I'm still a long term customer with little interest in going elsewhere. In late 2016 my laptop's drive died suddenly. I tried to restore everything via a shipped drive. I'm not sure if it was because of copy on their website (at the time) pointing out that they overnight USB drives or me just expecting that's the fastest way to get my data, but I was disappointed at the turnaround. Because it was a relatively large amount of data (a few hundred gigs?) there was a "staging" process that took a day or two. It got interrupted and had to start again (a server reboot on their side?). After receiving the drive everything went smoothly; I believe the data had been encrypted in transit, but wasn't onerous to restore from. I even think I was outside of their 30-day return and it wasn't an issue (the problem wasn't my hard drive, but a cable...with no hot spares and a special cable it took longer to resolve). At work I had a similarly annoying experience with Amazon Snowball where physically locating it and "testing" it took a few days longer than expected when expecting tight turnaround...maybe I need to adjust my expectations for physical logistics. Many years previous I noticed my music files were showing up as 0-size--my hard drive was failing. Thankfully I could pull my collection from 30 days previous and I chose a download option. It was a bit annoying that they had created a series of zip files (which makes sense), but I believe I was restricted to the web interface for downloading them which made managing it difficult.
- yreg 7y ago
  For me the restore experience was painful. I attempted to restore about 1TB of data (on macOS). Since I have 500mbit internet I assumed I'd be able to download it through the app, but that didn't prove easy. Even when split into smaller zip archives, the download would go terribly slow. Often, the archives would be corrupted and I'd have to re-download them. In the end I had to order a drive to Europe (and pay the tariffs), which is a pain in the ass. (But they did return the deposit even though I missed the 30 day window.) Edit: Oh yea, and when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! That's what happened to me right before a multi-week trip, so I was pretty unhappy that I wasn't able to download my backup in the 5-or-so days I had at my disposal, thus having to order the physical drive.

tpmx 7y ago

Do they still have a very slow upload performance with their backup service? That's been the main complaint I've been reading over the years. (I'd probably be happy with something in the range of 50-100 Mbit/s.) (My home connection is 250/100.)

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> try it now. We've spent the last few updates honing in the way we handle uploads and have introduce threading to make the process more efficient. We'll always be bottle-necked by the available bandwidth to your machine and latency, but it's worth trying again if you haven't for a while!
- tpmx 7y ago
  Sure, but you surely you have stats? And why is latency a factor - surely you can work around that by improving your network protocol (think less TCP, more QUIC or something similar, etc)? Anyway, okay, I'll test your trial again. :)
  - atYevP 7y ago
    This speedtest is somewhat accurate and is pointed to our data center so should give you a decent idea of speed -> https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/ https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/. The reason latency is a factor is that it affects how quickly data leaves your computer and gets to our data center, so if you're far away, it can play a factor!
    - lubblig 7y ago
      Unless I missed some setting it seems like the speedtest is only for the US data center(s). Is there any way to test the speed to the EU data center?
      - brianwski 7y ago
        Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Is there any way to test the speed to the EU data center? Create a free Backblaze account in the EU datacenter region. Then upload/download some data! The first 10 GBytes of B2 is 100% free, you don't even need to give us a credit card so you can try it all utterly risk free with no way we could mess with you. If you run the Backblaze Personal Backup, make sure you manually configure it to use 30 threads, then let it rip and watch your bandwidth meter to see what it can use. The first 14 days are completely free, again no Credit Card required! Personally I get about 100 Mbits/sec from my home in California to the European datacenter (capped by my ISP), but if you are in Europe you should be able to hit 500 Mbits/sec using the Personal Backup Client with 30 threads if you are close enough to Amsterdam (where the datacenter is). Oh, one hint -> don't judge Backblaze Personal Backup until you have been backing up for at least 12 hours. Backblaze backs up small files first, and the latency to push 1 byte files murders performance. But after we get through all your small files, it should rip. In the end, everybody has enough bandwidth to reach everywhere in the world now, and you really shouldn't pick a service based on total throughput. I think you should pick it based on cost, comfort with the security model and how sensitive your data is, ease of use, etc. Unless you have a Petabyte or more of data, you can backup hundreds of TBytes to anywhere in the world nowadays. Easily. No problem.

CharlesW 7y ago

Yev, can you clarify whether this new release supports NAS? I see that it allows you to "Back up all your attached external drives", but my drives happen to be connected via Ethernet.

scarface74 7y ago
Probably not. They’ve said repeatedly that unlimited storage for $5 wouldn’t be a sustainable business model if they supported NAS. For that there are third party solutions that support backing up to B2.
- CharlesW 7y ago
  Thank you, I know the history and what they've said in the past, and also know about their B2 product. I'm hoping for a real answer from Yev, but if not I've been reasonably happy with CrashPlan (which is a NAS-friendly solution).
  - Faark 7y ago
    Crashplan is more than twice the price, so you'd even have the budget for an extra device. Did you ever have to restore a significant amount of data with CrashPlan? Its been more than a month since a 3tb drive died on me and I'v only got 1/3 of it restored so far. I don't see any local bottlenecks. Its restore-or-upload, so recent data in unsecured as well. :( CrashPlan does supports client side encryption, making Blackblaze not really an option for me.
    - brianwski 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. > supports client side encryption, making Blackblaze not really an option for me Just to be clear, Backblaze Personal Backup encrypts all files on the client side, period. Now by default, Backblaze has the ability to decrypt those files, but you can set a "Private Encryption Key" and then if you forget that private encryption key nobody (including you, any Backblaze employees, the NSA) will EVER read those files, they are gone. Some people point out that you have to supply your private encryption key in order to prepare a restore, and at that moment you have to hand it over to Backblaze (for 10 seconds). But look at the work flow and think about it: 1) If you never prepare a restore, your files are uncrackable by the NSA or Backblaze, period, end of story. 2) If Backblaze's datacenter is hacked for the 3 years before you prepare a restore, nobody can read your files because it simply isn't possible, you have never provided the private encryption key to Backblaze. This is most evident for any "zero day security breach" where the world goes haywire for 24 hours and hackers gain entry into all systems everywhere. If you avoid preparing a restore in those 24 hours, your data was safe before the hack, safe during the hack, and safe after it is all cleaned up and the systems are locked down again. 3) Ok, the day comes that you need a restore -> you hand over your private encryption keys, and our servers NEVER write that to disk! They keep it in RAM, which is pretty dang hard to hack. The restore is prepared, you download it, then you can manually delete the restore! Yes, technically this opened up a 10 second or more window of vulnerability where you were only protected by our hardened systems and all of our OTHER security measures. No human ever looked at your files. The systems are all automated and billions of files are flowing around. Honestly, you're pretty safe. 4) If you have something on your computer that you will go DIRECTLY TO JAIL if it is ever discovered, then I'd highly encourage you to encrypt that in a little encrypted file at rest on your computer anyway (regardless whether or not you use Backblaze). I mean, the FBI caught that guy that ran "The Silk Road" by distracting him in the library and sliding his laptop away from him before he could close it. As long as your file is pre-encrypted "at rest" on your laptop, Backblaze can back it up and no matter what even if you prepare a restore safely. Meanwhile we can keep all your photos and music and not illegal or overly private stuff backed up conveniently for you.

maikhoepfel 7y ago

Cool changes! Any plans to ever add Linux support? That’s a dealbreaker for me. I need to backup both Linux and Windows machines. I wanted to use B2, but restic seems not ideal on Windows.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> No plans on the Computer Backup side. We haven't been able to come up with a way to do it affordably and in a way that makes sense for us - so we recommend folks use B2 Cloud Storage and any of the integrations that work for both. Cloudberry and Comet backup work pretty well. You can see more on: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linux&use-case=backup https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... (I set it to use Linux + Backup as the parameters).
- cweagans 7y ago
  B2 isn't really a solution for people that are looking for a robust computer backup service like Backblaze currently offers for Mac and Windows. I went down that road and ended up very frustrated. I ended up buying a Synology NAS (which does offer the same computer backup features + revisioning and all that), and then syncing the backup out to B2. It's not an ideal solution by any means, and I would get rid of my NAS in a heartbeat if there were a real solution for Linux desktops. It really sucks to have had to go through all of that setup (+ have another machine to maintain) when I just wanted to get things done and know my data was safe. Would you consider working with the community to find a better solution? Maybe offer a closed source library (a la libspotify, but for Backblaze) for the storage bits + get the community pointed in the right direction for an open source frontend for Linux or something?
  - calcifer 7y ago
    I imagine the problem isn't closed vs open source, but the fact that on Linux it would be trivial to mount a massive NAS (think dozens of TBs) in a way that's completely invisible to the Backblaze client and pay $6/month for unlimited backups. There were people on /r/datahoarder who stored petabytes on Amazon's "unlimited" backup before the whole product got canceled.

ryanmercer 7y ago

I really miss Backblaze. I was a customer for years and years and actually was fortunate (I guess?) enough to have to use them to recover around a terabyte once but when I switched to using a Chromebox as my daily driver (then a Chromebox 2) I found I was turning my Windows machine on once a month just to keep kosher with the Backblaze servers. Such a great service and I still always look forward to the emails, stuff like the drive failure rates is always a neat read!

lostlogin 7y ago
> I found I was turning my Windows machine on once a month just to keep kosher with the Backblaze servers I’ve been burnt badly by this, I wish there was a better way. I was in the habit of doing this and when I fired the drive up for some reason it failed to be backed up and the backup was deleted at their end. 1TB had to be re-uploaded on a 4Mbps connection. I know I shouldn’t have done the backup on the last day (no data had changed) but wow was that irritating.
- scarface74 7y ago
  With the new service, they are announcing, that shouldn’t be an issue.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Fortunately for me I realized none of the 5~ terabytes on that machine mattered whatsoever as I never actually used any of it. I would archive podcasts I liked, download YT videos I found worthy of it, I had 100gb or so of 9/11 news coverage from the day of the attacks and the next few days, insane amounts of exes for pretty much every revision of every scrap of software I used in case I ever wanted to go back to an old version, insane amounts of images from where I'd rip entire tumblr accounts based around different fandoms/topics, I had half a century of Lodge meeting minutes for one of my Lodges scanned as high-resolution OCRd pdfs, entire websites I'd wget for offline (why?!) viewing etc. It's all presumably still there but I haven't turned that box on in about a year now. Man, switching to a Chromebox was so freeing.

renaudg 7y ago

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation could not complete, please contact support" each time. Support advised me to wipe /Library/Backblaze* , reinstall, then inherit the existing backup. Well, we never managed to get the inherit process to complete : it failed with "ERR_error_unknown" every time. And I started freaking out. That's where things get interesting : I became frustrated with the canned responses from support and decided to delve into the client logs myself. I quickly found a potential smoking gun (in bzbmenu.log) : a spelling mismatch in an XML attribute name between the server response (support_inherit="true") and what the client was expecting ("ERROR could not read attribute named supports_inherit"). Notice the extra "s" ? Pretty obvious typo and one that could definitely explain the failure (client can't confirm that the selected backup is eligible for inheritance, bails out) I was rather happy with my findings and shared them in plenty of details with support (including log excerpts), but instead of a "thank you and here's some free months of service !" response, I got "meh, this log file is irrelevant", and worse: no promise to escalate the issue (until I insisted a second time). They suggested updating to the 6.1.0.372 beta, which turned out to have the exact same bug. Now, I'm left wondering if should try upgrading to 7.0 and inheriting my 6.1 backup from there. But the point of this message is to share my disappointment with this support experience. I went out of my way as a customer and spent a couple of hours researching and finding something potentially useful to the company, but had no appropriate way to report it. I even tried security contacts, but was (rightfully) told it wasn't a security issue. No word on whether they were going to pass it on to the relevant team. EDIT: I've just confirmed that the same issue is present in 7.0.0.386. Still can't inherit my existing backup.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue. I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).

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sanbor 7y ago

Any plans to restore an encrypted backup without having to send the private key to Backblaze servers?

Dylan16807 7y ago
Looks like yes, but it's not a particularly high priority, based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21205948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21205948

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novok 7y ago

Does backblaze co. have access to the contents of your backups or is it client side encrypted?

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> the backup service is client-side encrypted before transmission.

elfchief 7y ago

I've only ever had one problem with Backblaze, in my ... 7 or 8? ... years as a customer. The problem: The UI for excluding directories is horrific. It uses the Windows "Browse for Folder" *SHBrowseForFolder) dialog, which requires you click down through each and every level of your directory structure to get to the directory you want to exclude. You can't cut and paste, it doesn't start from the directory you added your last exclusion in, it's just lots and lots and lots and lots of clicking. This doesn't seem like it would be hard to fix, so I'm guessing they don't consider it broken? If the Backblaze folks are still reading: Could you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, for the love of god, fix your fucking exclusions interface? Please?

froindt 7y ago
I'm baffled that anyone uses that interface! I think it's literally my least favorite interface in Windows. Is there a saving grace for that browse folder interface? A certain use case where it's really good?
AlfeG 7y ago
>> You can't cut and paste, it doesn't start from the directory you added your last exclusion in, it's just lots and lots and lots and lots of clicking. But it's not entirely true. You can paste full path to needed folder in input below directory tree. I've used this many many times https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/58tncadu2z7ix29/bzbui_2019-10-09_09-03-28.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/58tncadu2z7ix29/bzbui_20...
atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> if you don't want to use the UI (meant for non-tech savvy folks) we do have advanced exclusions via XML - take a look -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/220973007-Advanced-Topic-Setting-Custom-Exclusions-via-XML https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/220973007-Advan....
- elfchief 7y ago
  That's the thing -- I do want to use the UI and I don't want to have to hand-edit XML. I just want the UI to not use the single worst dialog box in all of windows. I am baffled at why Backblaze clings so tightly to the existing dialog box.

Trias11 7y ago

Are you (BackBlaze) still happily deleting user's backup files if user's computer does not contact BackBlaze servers within some arbitrary time? Yes/No? Source: 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-... This is malice. If you are still doing this to your users - your service is a non-starter. Backup service that deletes user's valuable files under some TOS excuse should not exist.

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MrGilbert 7y ago
> [...] within some arbitrary time? It's 6 months - and you receive notifications after 14, 21, 28, 60 and 90 days. It should be possible for the backup machine to connect to the backblaze server twice a year. I think it's reasonable.
- Trias11 7y ago
  Is it reasonable to expect that paying recurring fee for backup service is enough to keep my data safe? Or should I pay for service AND do some time critical technology acrobatics to comply with confusing fine-printed TOS to keep my data safe?
theshrike79 7y ago
Backblaze is a backup service, not a file storage service. If the computer you are backing up isn't online for 6 months, it clearly isn't that important. If it is, you can use B2 to store files indefinitely.
- aweb 7y ago
  Is it though? What if I plan to travel for a long time and still want my data to be backup up just in case?
- paranoidrobot 7y ago

jbergens 7y ago

Hm, if I turn on 1-year-history or history-forever and includes my node_modules folders in the backup will I fill their whole storage cluster?

atYevP 7y ago
No, but don't do that. :P