7 ms·

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

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).
- renaudg 7y ago
  Wow thanks Yev ! It's #499226 No hard feelings at all against the support guy, who probably has to deal with dubious customer claims all day. But it was pretty frustrating when he told me the log file I looked at couldn't possibly have anything relevant in it, when I had in fact just showed him plenty of relevant things from it :)
  - renaudg 7y ago
    Well, not trying to turn this into a support forum any further, but I've just upgraded to 7.0 and right now SMS 2FA seems broken ("The verification code is invalid" every time)
    - atYevP 7y ago
      Yev here -> I'll do support wherever I see my bat-signal :D Do you have an alternate method set? If you reach out to support -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new (they have live chat right now) - they can try an alternate method if our primary provider isn't reaching your device!
      - Operyl 7y ago
        It's completely broken here as well, which was really frustrating. I already wasted 117 days of a yearly subscription on one machine because it ran Catalina Beta (which was my fault, I needed a test machine, and I ate the time lost without complaint), but not being able to inherit that back up really sucked afterwards.
        atYevP 7y ago
        Yev here -> Have you reached out to support about the issue? They are working with our devs to track all of the issues and could use the additional data points -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. It's working for most users, so we're trying to whittle down the issue.
douglasfshearer 7y ago
I had this same experience in regards to support interaction. Starting from scratch is a less than ideal process IMO, so much so I have not done it in the hope that a future update fixes this, and I don't have to jump through all the hoops.
pieterhg 7y ago
Same here, it's happening on an older version of MacOS on my dad's Mac Mini if that's any help. Weirdest is that updates are normally automatic but now it told my dad to download the new DMG on your website, why?
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> it may be that something "ate" the auto-update process, could be A/V, a Firewall, or a break in the connection. He can grab the latest build from here -> files.backblaze.com and support can walk him through the process (live chat from 9am-12PM and 1PM-5PM Pacific). Edit -> support (https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new)
ryanwaggoner 7y ago
I just had this exact same experience / issue the last few days. First, the whole annoying “Backups are broken! You must manually update” pop up every 30 mins. Any time an update requires some special procedure beyond clicking “Install now”, I view it as likely a dev failure. And providing zero context about WHY makes it worse. Then, the stupid installer fails repeatedly. Just says “installation failed, contact support”. I do and they tell me to delve into /Library and delete the backblaze files there. Feels kludgy. Are they telling thousands of customers to do this? Or is something fucked with my install? Who knows? Then, the stupid “inherit backup” thing stalls at 50% repeatedly for hours and uses 99% of my CPU. I finally just killed it and resolved to tackle all this mess later. Honestly, it’s making me rethink using Backblaze at all. Who knows if my backup will even be there when I need it if this is how they run things? (And yes, I know I need to test my backups. I don’t.) I went looking for alternatives today...

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).

renaudg 7y ago
Wow thanks Yev ! It's #499226 No hard feelings at all against the support guy, who probably has to deal with dubious customer claims all day. But it was pretty frustrating when he told me the log file I looked at couldn't possibly have anything relevant in it, when I had in fact just showed him plenty of relevant things from it :)
- renaudg 7y ago
  Well, not trying to turn this into a support forum any further, but I've just upgraded to 7.0 and right now SMS 2FA seems broken ("The verification code is invalid" every time)
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Yev here -> I'll do support wherever I see my bat-signal :D Do you have an alternate method set? If you reach out to support -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new (they have live chat right now) - they can try an alternate method if our primary provider isn't reaching your device!
    - Operyl 7y ago
      It's completely broken here as well, which was really frustrating. I already wasted 117 days of a yearly subscription on one machine because it ran Catalina Beta (which was my fault, I needed a test machine, and I ate the time lost without complaint), but not being able to inherit that back up really sucked afterwards.
      - atYevP 7y ago
        Yev here -> Have you reached out to support about the issue? They are working with our devs to track all of the issues and could use the additional data points -> https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. It's working for most users, so we're trying to whittle down the issue.

douglasfshearer 7y ago

I had this same experience in regards to support interaction. Starting from scratch is a less than ideal process IMO, so much so I have not done it in the hope that a future update fixes this, and I don't have to jump through all the hoops.

pieterhg 7y ago

Same here, it's happening on an older version of MacOS on my dad's Mac Mini if that's any help. Weirdest is that updates are normally automatic but now it told my dad to download the new DMG on your website, why?

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> it may be that something "ate" the auto-update process, could be A/V, a Firewall, or a break in the connection. He can grab the latest build from here -> files.backblaze.com and support can walk him through the process (live chat from 9am-12PM and 1PM-5PM Pacific). Edit -> support (https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new)

ryanwaggoner 7y ago

I just had this exact same experience / issue the last few days. First, the whole annoying “Backups are broken! You must manually update” pop up every 30 mins. Any time an update requires some special procedure beyond clicking “Install now”, I view it as likely a dev failure. And providing zero context about WHY makes it worse. Then, the stupid installer fails repeatedly. Just says “installation failed, contact support”. I do and they tell me to delve into /Library and delete the backblaze files there. Feels kludgy. Are they telling thousands of customers to do this? Or is something fucked with my install? Who knows? Then, the stupid “inherit backup” thing stalls at 50% repeatedly for hours and uses 99% of my CPU. I finally just killed it and resolved to tackle all this mess later. Honestly, it’s making me rethink using Backblaze at all. Who knows if my backup will even be there when I need it if this is how they run things? (And yes, I know I need to test my backups. I don’t.) I went looking for alternatives today...