9 ms·

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

by 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.
  - buildzr 7y ago
    > when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! Uhhh... this one could be a significant issue for me right now. I've got a laptop that's been offline for about 2 months now due to a motherboard failure due to liquid damage. I haven't bothered dumping the drive yet because I figured even if it's got issues Backblaze has a copy. You're telling me that if I login to my account right now, the data is gone? If so, they really need to make that one more obvious. EDIT: Just checked Backblaze, still looks like the data is there after 70+ days. Has this policy changed at some point?
    - brianwski 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Has this policy changed at some point? It is more complicated than just "after 30 days" (and always has been). If your laptop is entirely offline (or you simply uninstall the client from your laptop), then the policy is ACTUALLY that we keep your backup for 6 months as long as you keep paying your bill. But to be honest, it's more like a year or two. The 6 month policy is we guarantee the backup will be preserved, not that we will immediately go out and delete it at exactly 6 months and 1 day. This is a completely different situation than files you delete but the backup continues. For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into. Or, if you have a hard drive that you disconnect and aren't willing to reconnect for more than 30 days. Since your backup is continuing, Backblaze assumes the drive will never come back, so the files are then deleted to save money in the datacenter. Of course, this changes with the 1 year retention policy, you can unplug the drive for up to 1 year and still dial back time and restore all your files.

by zomg 7y ago

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.
- buildzr 7y ago
  > when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! Uhhh... this one could be a significant issue for me right now. I've got a laptop that's been offline for about 2 months now due to a motherboard failure due to liquid damage. I haven't bothered dumping the drive yet because I figured even if it's got issues Backblaze has a copy. You're telling me that if I login to my account right now, the data is gone? If so, they really need to make that one more obvious. EDIT: Just checked Backblaze, still looks like the data is there after 70+ days. Has this policy changed at some point?
  - brianwski 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Has this policy changed at some point? It is more complicated than just "after 30 days" (and always has been). If your laptop is entirely offline (or you simply uninstall the client from your laptop), then the policy is ACTUALLY that we keep your backup for 6 months as long as you keep paying your bill. But to be honest, it's more like a year or two. The 6 month policy is we guarantee the backup will be preserved, not that we will immediately go out and delete it at exactly 6 months and 1 day. This is a completely different situation than files you delete but the backup continues. For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into. Or, if you have a hard drive that you disconnect and aren't willing to reconnect for more than 30 days. Since your backup is continuing, Backblaze assumes the drive will never come back, so the files are then deleted to save money in the datacenter. Of course, this changes with the 1 year retention policy, you can unplug the drive for up to 1 year and still dial back time and restore all your files.