7 ms·
Yikes, that's a lot of good will burned. Doesn't matter if it is unintentional or not.
by guywhocodes 6y ago
Yikes, that's a lot of good will burned. Doesn't matter if it is unintentional or not.
- celsoazevedo 6y agoThe inclusion of Facebook tracking was intentional: https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1373751015594356739 https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1373751015594356739 Not sure if they intended to send file names and sizes to FB, but in any case this doesn't look good. I'm currently looking for alternatives.
- chunkles 6y agorsync.net was posted here on HN a few days ago. Also, tarsnap is another popular service. Neither have the special additions that makes Backblaze so popular, but could be popular alternatives.
- latchkey 6y agovorta + borg backing up to cloud disk.
- minxomat 6y agoIf you’re in the EU, Hetzner Storage boxes.
- danieldk 6y agoKeep in mind that their storage boxes only use RAID and do not provide any other kind of redundancy by default. If the machine goes up in flames, your data is gone.
- Skunkleton 6y agoRsync.net has a self-supported borg option that is a great deal.
- thayne 6y agoFrom a quick look at pricing pages it looks like rsync.net is 5x as expensive as backblaze b2, and has a minimum of 400gb per month (it also looks like you might have to preallocate vs pay on demand). And tarsnap is 10x as expensive as rsync.net. My guess the bulk of that price difference is due to economies of scale.
- jiveturkey 6y agothe rsync guy posted in another recent thread that it’s actually 3x above a certain size, which i took to be most serious usage.
- kelnos 6y agoI don't have huge backup needs (around 500GB, doesn't grow much over time), so I just use duplicity and upload to AWS S3 with the "infrequent access" setting, and have the bucket auto-replicate to another region in another country. Costs me around $12/mo just for the data storage. The AWS calculator tells me if I had to retrieve all that data it would cost under $10 to do so. Given it's all personal data that I can stand to be without for days if needed, I could probably use Glacier (or even Glacier Deep Archive) and pay less than a third of the cost (or less than a twelfth!), but the absolute dollar amount isn't high enough for me to go through the trouble of changing up my backup scripts. Sure, if you're running a business and are constantly generating lots of new data that needs to be backed up, that gets more expensive, but I also would expect a business with that much data could easily afford to spend several orders of magnitude more than I do on backups.
- monsieurbanana 6y agoI use Linode Object Storage (a S3-like service) with rclone to manage my backups. (my backups are only a few dozens of gb, I don't need something like duplicity at the moment) So far I'm happy with it, pricing is $5/month per 250gb + 1To egress. And, most importantly, none of the AWS complexity overhead. I have enough of that at work.
- viraptor 6y agoOne big difference is that with B2 you can't have append-only backups. (or maybe it's very non-obvious from the docs?) That's pretty much why I use rsync.net instead - I can configure a separate key for uploads. Otherwise what's to stop anyone lifting the B2 access key from the host with automatic backups configured and just deleting all old data?
- gpm 6y agoSo, looking at some potential things to switch to... OVH has two interesting products here: OVH cloud archive works with rsync, costs roughly half as much for storage as blackblaze, roughly the same for egress, but charges for ingress (at the same rate as egress). OVH object store is s3 compatible (like blackblaze), charges roughly the same for bandwidth, 2x for storage. https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#439 https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#439 Digitalocean has a blob store with the same pricing on bandwidth, 4x the pricing on storage, a minimum spend of $5/month on storage, but the first tb ($10) of bandwidth free. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing#spaces-object-storage https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing#spaces-object-storage
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoAlso, you know OVH will be investing significantly in fire prevention strategies, so that will all be state of the art.
- spzb 6y agoWell, you would hope they would be but then they thought they had done so already and look how that worked out.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoBefore you experience a major problem, you tend to guess what is good enough to mitigate it. Once you've experienced a major problem, you tend to ensure that exact failure mode never happens again. I would be surprised if OVH had another fire in the future.
- celsoazevedo 6y agoAnd that's why we should always keep backups somewhere else.
- avinassh 6y ago> OVH cloud archive seems this the cheapest of all
- tbodt 6y agoThe only reason I use Backblaze instead of tarsnap is it is 62 times cheaper for the same amount of storage. tarsnap is dramatically overpriced if you ask me.
- jlawer 6y agoI get the feeling the reason for the Tarsnap price is simply a lack of scale and bootstrap nature of it. (i.e. there isn't a VC feeding money into hosting costs to drive the costs down to grow the userbase). The cost seems fair, but noncompetitive against other vendors on most easy to find quantitative measures (Cost, features, SLAs, locations, etc). However I do think there is value in Tarsnap if security is really that important. Colin is really switched on, and I trust both the service, and if anything happened, he would deal with it quickly and professionally. If I had the kind of profile that meant I needed to protect myself against determined attackers, then tarsnap would be a no-brainer for me.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoBackblaze is also bootstrapped, no VC investment except a small initial round. They’re likely investing in the business using the profits thrown off by their unlimited desktop storage offering.
- nvarsj 6y agoIt's more of the fact that S3 is expensive for storing lots of data, isn't it? I think tarsnap charges only a small margin on top of S3.
- floatboth 6y agoAnd tarsnap possibly uses the most expensive tier of S3: > the original version, which can survive the loss of 2 datacenters, not the "reduced redundancy" version which can only survive the loss of a single datacenter These days, there's not just reduced redundancy, but also infrequent access, which seems better for backups…
- avinassh 6y agomay it's just me, I had a hard time calculating the pricing of tarsnap. Wish they had provided an easy calculator too, on their site.
- varispeed 6y agoDoes rsync.net offer end to end encryption of data?
- rsync 6y agoYes, of course. First, we only offer SSH / TCP22 so the transit is encrypted. Second, we have installed, and maintain on the server side tools like 'borg' and 'rclone'. So while you might just 'rsync' or 'sftp' your data to us (in which cases it would not be encrypted on our end) you can also use sophisticated, encrypted backup tools like (borg, duplicity, git-annex, rclone, restic, etc.) If you choose a tool like that, rsync.net does not hold the encryption keys. The data appears to be random from our viewpoint.
- varispeed 6y agoThis is great, thank you!
- teruakohatu 6y agoIncluding the filenames seems to have been unintentional, looks like they were logging analytics to Facebook, probably an even (form submission) but uploaded the form html with contents. But why they need to submit that to Facebook for paying users I don't understand. The only thing I can think of is excluding active users from advertising... But is that worth the privacy intrusion?
- robbiemitchell 6y agoThey answered in the Twitter thread: they send data about paying users to Facebook so they can build lookalike audience targeting for new user acquisition. Other major ad platforms (Google, LinkedIn) have similar features. This doesn’t look like the right data to be sending FB for that, though.
- mcny 6y agoThat’s my gripe with “if you aren’t a paying customer, you are the product” because if you pay you are still the product. Good job, backblaze. So many years of work building goodwill with transparency in hard disk reports ruined completely with one stroke.
- BeefySwain 6y agoCan someone here translate the PR/marketing speak here for us mere mortals? How does having Facebook tracking on the web front-end of existing and paying users help with lead generation?
- busymom0 6y agoThat PR/marketing tweet comes across as from someone who doesn't understand how big deal this actually is and why customers won't be comfortable with a FB pixel on their dashboards with data filenames and sizes.
- yellow_postit 6y agoAssuming it’s to build lookalike audiences [1] (find me people that act like the paying customers). [1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531?id=401668390442328 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531?id=40...
- CuriousNinja 6y agoThanks for the link, I didn't know that was a thing. Having said that, this sounds like "Hey guess what? We are gonna snoop on you, and profile the hell out of you and leak all of your sensitive data all over the place (filenames can be) all because you are a paying customer" That's about the worst way to disrespect a paying customer. Is there a way to easily identify companies that does this, I can avoid them?
- manigandham 6y agoNo, they don't need to snoop on you. Just fire a single pixel saying this is a user that they would like to find more of. FB does the rest based on data in FB, not on Backblaze. The mistake was them just adding it to the online dashboard because that's the easy way to automatically include paying users. > "easily identify companies that does this" No. And this can happen for a lot of reasons as explained so even harder to check for.
- cosmie 6y ago
- busymom0 6y agoSome might find this tweet useful for the time being: > What happens if you resolve http://facebook.com http://facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 via hosts-file? (Or put it into your Pi-Hole DNS Ad-Blocker, or the like.) Does the Backblaze UI still work? > Answer: Seems to work well. You need to add the main domain and sub domains (www. in this case), btw.
- whenlambo 6y agoTake a look on https://wasabi.com/ https://wasabi.com/
- ev1 6y agoSigning up for Wasabi resulted in a deluge of unwanted marketing spam, all written to be "cheerful and your friend" Also, huge warning for Wasabi newbies so you are not surprised. This might wreck your wallet. Your egress is capped at your total amount stored. You cannot store 5TB and have 6TB of downloads against that account. The front page is covered in 'No Charges For Egress' 'no additional charges for egress or API requests'.. etc. This is not written anywhere on the main marketing pages, only behind a small link. Another important point is file deletion. You are required to pay for multiple billing cycles (months) of files. Be very cautious about this. Using it as a temporary bucket will incur significant costs, if you upload a file, YOU WILL PAY FOR 90 DAYS OF THAT FILE. It is almost certainly not cost effective to store files in Wasabi any less than long term. Deleting a file that you just uploaded will incur a deletion fee equivalent to 3 months of storing that file.
- bb101 6y agoOne thing people should bear in mind when looking at Wasabi is that they have a 90 day minimum retention period for their PAYG plans. So if you upload a large file and overwrite it tomorrow, you'll be charged the storage fee for the day plus the storage fee for the remaining 89 days, and then the storage fee for the new file, and so on. The same goes for AWS IA and Glacier classes and Google's Nearline and Coldline. Unless you're storing files for a long time, always factor in the minimum retention period before estimating costs. It'll prevent any nasty billing surprises -- speaking from experience unfortunately.
- mdoms 6y agoWow they're doubling down? Wow.
- nvarsj 6y agoWhy not just use client side encryption and be done with it? Why would anyone browse their personal files remotely on a web ui? If you care about privacy, take the proper precautions. There really isn't any competitor to B2 on price, or convenience (e.g. them sending you a NAS device for recovery).
- kardos 6y agoYep that pretty much burns the service :/
- neilv 6y agoThey could maybe salvage goodwill with genuine corporate soul-searching that ends up asserting/reasserting values -- and leads them to focus on providing trustworthy service to their users, and conspicuously away from some "tech" industry norms of selling out one's users. As a provider of a paid service, it seems like they're in a better position to take the high road than a lot of tech companies are, but they have to decide that's who they are, and be clear they mean it.