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Side question: Apart from this maintenance window, is B2 Cloud reliable? I've heard of problems with the S3 API. Is the "native" API more stable? Would love to

Side question: Apart from this maintenance window, is B2 Cloud reliable? I've heard of problems with the S3 API. Is the "native" API more stable? Would love to know your insight, it will potentially save me a lot of time!

mattjaynes 6y ago
Have had live production data on there for a couple of years and it's been very solid outside the maintenance windows. (The exception being the recent outages GoDaddy caused for them, but since they've moved to using Cloudflare as their registrar, I don't anticipate further issues there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119619 )
- truetraveller 6y ago
  Okay, that's great to hear.
tedivm 6y ago
Several years ago Backblaze lost all of my wife's data. Their dashboard said it was all there, and we trusted their systems to be accurate. When attempting to download the data it turned out that none of it was there. When my wife contacted support they tried to blame her. Obviously this was a few years ago, but a backup provider failing at their one job and then blaming the customer left a really bad impression that keeps me from using them.
- jiofih 6y ago
  You were probably a victim of their 30 day deletion policy. If for any reason (firewall, etc) you did not connect to the backup servers your data would just be purged without a grace period. For that reason I built my own backup sync using B2 directly instead of their backup service (and it’s a lot cheaper).
  - tedivm 6y ago
    We actually checked that- the day we went to get the laptop repaired we confirmed that it was active and backed up, and a week later the restore failed. Backblaze eventually admitted that their dashboards aren't realtime, and they had a bug which was showing us (and their client) files that didn't exist.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    It is? I avoided it on my Linux laptop for ages since I assumed their flat pricing was a lot cheaper.
    - sgerenser 6y ago
      Depends entirely on how much data you have. If it’s less than 1TB then $.005/GB/month is less than $5/month. These days most people would blow past 1TB pretty easily so for most people unlimited Backblaze backup would be cheaper (if your on Mac or Windows where it is even an option).
      - jiofih 6y ago
        Surprisingly I’ve never crossed the 200GB mark, even backing up all photos from two phones and three cameras. Guess I don’t make enough videos.
      - dx034 6y ago
        Do people really blow past 1TB easily? Even with all my pictures I don't really get past that mark. Many people I know only have a laptop and all their data on there, it's rare to see laptops with more than 1TB capacity. So apart from people with a high amount of pictures or videos I wouldn't expect many to have more than 1TB backup needs.
        sgerenser 6y ago
        Yeah, most is probably an overstatement. I know for me, between photos, videos, music, VM images, etc. I have way more than 1TB of data that I want to be backed up.
- fulafel 6y ago
  I wonder what the version of the old "if you don't test restoring you don't have backups" rule is for these new services. Restoring costs money and laptop users don't have good ways of doing complete restores just for test as it's a lot of downtime. Maybe it needs a kind of stochastic automated approach.. a program that finds sufficiently small (vs costs) sample of files on your computer (some old, some recently changed, etc) and tries restoring them and verifies.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    > Restoring costs money and laptop users don't have good ways of doing complete restores just for test as it's a lot of downtime. At least for the standard Backblaze service you can download for free. For a USB drive you float the cost of the drive (they reimburse you when you return it)--maybe you pay shipping?
    - tedivm 6y ago
      Downloading my full backup would use the entire month's quota on Comcast, forcing me to pay more money to my crappy ISP.
      - pfranz 6y ago
        Downloading rarely makes sense for a full restore, but is perfect for smaller restores or tests. Even if it didn't blow away your quota they only keep the packaged restores around for 7 days and I've found that difficult to restore a large amount of data with home Internet. To restore it to a drive all you pay out of pocket is return shipping of the drive. The one time I had to use it I was slightly over the 30 days (I was waiting on a repair before I could restore the data) and it wasn't an issue.
Dylan16807 6y ago
I haven't used a it a lot but it's been a solid endpoint for backups. I did some medium-intensity benchmarking a while back and decided not to put certain server data on it because I was getting a few 20+ second timeouts per thousand read requests. I can handle server errors, and I have retry logic, but this was something where I needed to be able to access the data within a second or two. Maybe it would have worked better if I set a very aggressive timeout, I'm not sure. Deeper testing is something I'll worry about some other time if the data actually grows past a couple hundred gigabytes. This was mostly with the S3 API, I don't remember if I ever succeeded in getting the program to use the native one.

mattjaynes 6y ago

Have had live production data on there for a couple of years and it's been very solid outside the maintenance windows. (The exception being the recent outages GoDaddy caused for them, but since they've moved to using Cloudflare as their registrar, I don't anticipate further issues there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119619 )

truetraveller 6y ago
Okay, that's great to hear.

tedivm 6y ago

Several years ago Backblaze lost all of my wife's data. Their dashboard said it was all there, and we trusted their systems to be accurate. When attempting to download the data it turned out that none of it was there. When my wife contacted support they tried to blame her. Obviously this was a few years ago, but a backup provider failing at their one job and then blaming the customer left a really bad impression that keeps me from using them.

jiofih 6y ago
You were probably a victim of their 30 day deletion policy. If for any reason (firewall, etc) you did not connect to the backup servers your data would just be purged without a grace period. For that reason I built my own backup sync using B2 directly instead of their backup service (and it’s a lot cheaper).
- tedivm 6y ago
  We actually checked that- the day we went to get the laptop repaired we confirmed that it was active and backed up, and a week later the restore failed. Backblaze eventually admitted that their dashboards aren't realtime, and they had a bug which was showing us (and their client) files that didn't exist.
- Spivak 6y ago
  It is? I avoided it on my Linux laptop for ages since I assumed their flat pricing was a lot cheaper.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    Depends entirely on how much data you have. If it’s less than 1TB then $.005/GB/month is less than $5/month. These days most people would blow past 1TB pretty easily so for most people unlimited Backblaze backup would be cheaper (if your on Mac or Windows where it is even an option).
    - jiofih 6y ago
      Surprisingly I’ve never crossed the 200GB mark, even backing up all photos from two phones and three cameras. Guess I don’t make enough videos.
    - dx034 6y ago
      Do people really blow past 1TB easily? Even with all my pictures I don't really get past that mark. Many people I know only have a laptop and all their data on there, it's rare to see laptops with more than 1TB capacity. So apart from people with a high amount of pictures or videos I wouldn't expect many to have more than 1TB backup needs.
      - sgerenser 6y ago
        Yeah, most is probably an overstatement. I know for me, between photos, videos, music, VM images, etc. I have way more than 1TB of data that I want to be backed up.
fulafel 6y ago
I wonder what the version of the old "if you don't test restoring you don't have backups" rule is for these new services. Restoring costs money and laptop users don't have good ways of doing complete restores just for test as it's a lot of downtime. Maybe it needs a kind of stochastic automated approach.. a program that finds sufficiently small (vs costs) sample of files on your computer (some old, some recently changed, etc) and tries restoring them and verifies.
- pfranz 6y ago
  > Restoring costs money and laptop users don't have good ways of doing complete restores just for test as it's a lot of downtime. At least for the standard Backblaze service you can download for free. For a USB drive you float the cost of the drive (they reimburse you when you return it)--maybe you pay shipping?
  - tedivm 6y ago
    Downloading my full backup would use the entire month's quota on Comcast, forcing me to pay more money to my crappy ISP.
    - pfranz 6y ago
      Downloading rarely makes sense for a full restore, but is perfect for smaller restores or tests. Even if it didn't blow away your quota they only keep the packaged restores around for 7 days and I've found that difficult to restore a large amount of data with home Internet. To restore it to a drive all you pay out of pocket is return shipping of the drive. The one time I had to use it I was slightly over the 30 days (I was waiting on a repair before I could restore the data) and it wasn't an issue.

Dylan16807 6y ago

I haven't used a it a lot but it's been a solid endpoint for backups. I did some medium-intensity benchmarking a while back and decided not to put certain server data on it because I was getting a few 20+ second timeouts per thousand read requests. I can handle server errors, and I have retry logic, but this was something where I needed to be able to access the data within a second or two. Maybe it would have worked better if I set a very aggressive timeout, I'm not sure. Deeper testing is something I'll worry about some other time if the data actually grows past a couple hundred gigabytes. This was mostly with the S3 API, I don't remember if I ever succeeded in getting the program to use the native one.