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I love Backblaze for their drive stats posts, but has anyone else run into multiple annoyances with their main services? FWIW I am a mostly-happy customer for

by nja 5y ago

I love Backblaze for their drive stats posts, but has anyone else run into multiple annoyances with their main services? FWIW I am a mostly-happy customer for multiple years, and I always seem to be able to find files that I am looking for in my backups. However, I've run into the following issues on _multiple Windows PCs_: - `bzfilelist.exe` takes up 100% disk constantly on my SSD. I have to kill it anytime I want to do anything remotely disk-intensive (such as running a game or editing video). Not sure if this is a workaround to avoid having to watch the filesystem, but it is an annoyance. Changing the process priority can help in some cases, but usually I have to kill it to get acceptable performance in other applications. Also not sure if this is good for the SSD's health. - Certain folders are hardcoded to be excluded. Standard folders such as `C:/Windows` make sense, but it also hardcodes excluding _all of program files_. This means that Steam game files are not automatically backed up (yes, this is not an ideal spot for Steam to store files, but it's how it has done it for a long, long time). I had to hack together a powershell script that periodically copies my files to another drive so they can be backed up by Backblaze. "Automatic backups" eh? - Despite the above, it _does_ automatically back up Chrome's temporary files, which means a ton of churn as I browse throughout the day. I can manually exclude a path, but if they're going to be draconian about hardcoding paths to not back up, why not hardcode Chrome's app data too? In addition, I have played around with their B2 service, an "S3-compatible" offering, and run into issues there as well: - The S3-compatible hosting is not at parity with S3. There is no index.html autodetection, so I had to hack together an nginx proxy to assume `index.html` files at directories. - The S3-compatible web hosting is extremely slow. It's a common pattern to want to host a periodically-updated static site out of an S3 bucket, but I have found the speed to be insufficient for even basic HTML in B2. - I was unable to get their provided tooling for backing up local files to B2 working on a local Raspberry Pi. I ended up rsyncing to a different service. Am I the only one with these problems?

quaffapint 5y ago
I haven't tried hosting things in B2 - But I've been backing up to B2 via Duplicati and it has yet to have a single hiccup and the pricing is great. I have around 190G on there updated every night and I pay around $0.90/month - truly less than a cup of coffee.
intev 5y ago
In my experience B2 Cloud hosting is at least a magnitude slower for larger files and 2-5x slower for smaller files. If you need to do lots of look ups, forget about it. I'm mostly using it as a sort of archival system. Storing data that doesn't need to get there quickly. It's a very small use case. Even for larger server backups, its way too slow. Oh also they don't allow you to change regions, or have region specific buckets. You are locked into it with your account creation. Their prices are so low that their real price is the $ cost and this slowness. So I use a mix of B2 and S3 depending on the use case.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Have you tried S3 with auto tiered storage? Only the most recent stuff lives on fast media, the older stuff gets auto migrated to media that has much better cost/byte ratios, including all the way to Deep Glacier storage if that’s what you want. I would be very curious to see what the TCO is of a well-configured Backblaze B2 storage solution is, compared to a well-configured S3 auto-tier solution. And then also compare relative performance, too.

by nja 5y ago

quaffapint 5y ago

I haven't tried hosting things in B2 - But I've been backing up to B2 via Duplicati and it has yet to have a single hiccup and the pricing is great. I have around 190G on there updated every night and I pay around $0.90/month - truly less than a cup of coffee.

intev 5y ago

In my experience B2 Cloud hosting is at least a magnitude slower for larger files and 2-5x slower for smaller files. If you need to do lots of look ups, forget about it. I'm mostly using it as a sort of archival system. Storing data that doesn't need to get there quickly. It's a very small use case. Even for larger server backups, its way too slow. Oh also they don't allow you to change regions, or have region specific buckets. You are locked into it with your account creation. Their prices are so low that their real price is the $ cost and this slowness. So I use a mix of B2 and S3 depending on the use case.

bradknowles 5y ago
Have you tried S3 with auto tiered storage? Only the most recent stuff lives on fast media, the older stuff gets auto migrated to media that has much better cost/byte ratios, including all the way to Deep Glacier storage if that’s what you want. I would be very curious to see what the TCO is of a well-configured Backblaze B2 storage solution is, compared to a well-configured S3 auto-tier solution. And then also compare relative performance, too.