15 ms·

Backblaze restore for Personal Backup is awful

• felixforfun 5y ago
  Maybe I’m missing something, but as far as I understand the simplest course of action is to reinstall Backblaze and inherit the existing backup. Or is there something that’s preventing you from doing that?
• NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Could this be related to BackBlaze powering down their service temporarily because of the Log4j 0day exploit? ( should be back up though) https://www.backblaze.com/blog/system-maintenance-update-log4j-vulnerability/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/system-maintenance-update-log...
• ninjin-carh 5y ago
  Maybe you could restore the backblaze data to a cloud VM such as Azure VM or EC2 - the export should be faster to there than back to your home.
• aledalgrande 5y ago
  I like my simple setup of Time Machine + TimeMachineEditor + a Synology on a protected plug. Battle tested with multiple Macbook setups by restoring a backup. One thing I learned is it doesn't work over a VPN connection from thousands of miles away, network is too brittle.
  • b3morales 5y ago
    Do you also have an off-site backup in case of fire, theft, tyrannosaurus, etc.?
    • aledalgrande 5y ago
      No, the data I consider really vital is on some kind of cloud service usually: Github, 1password or mail servers. My DR strategy assumes those events are black swans that I don't need to try manage. It might be a case of considerable pain and some lost data, but I won't be totally zeroed.
• naveen99 5y ago
  Backblaze earnings report tomorrow, Coincidence ?
• gadders 5y ago
  I used to be on Crashplan, but moved to Backblaze when Crashplan went company-only. I have to say, the Crashplan client is far superior to the Backblaze one, which frequently complains I am out of diskspace when I'm not, and just generally seems unreliable.
• mike503 5y ago
  I am sure that BB engineers (or even higher ups) read this. You seem to be a very customer-oriented and open company. Let’s take all that new stock moneys and public market exposure and get things going. You’ve got the foundation built.
• cloogshicer 5y ago
  To actually resolve this issue, here's what I think I'll do (alternative suggestions much appreciated!): - Buy a new hard drive that's big enough to fit all my data - Download all the data from Backblaze to the new drive (will probably take a few days/weeks) - Write some tool that does the hashing/matching for me to see if anything's missing/corrupted (does something like this exist already?) - Switch to a better service or just local backups
  • pieterhg 5y ago
    I've used Beyond Compare, worked really well.
    • cloogshicer 5y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion!
    • tailspin2019 5y ago
      Another vote here for Beyond Compare. Awesome software on both PC and Mac.
    • iJohnDoe 5y ago
      Could Beyond Compare be used as a backup solution to transfer files from a file server to a backup drive (like a Synology)?
  • DenseComet 5y ago
    At the very least, you don't need to do the first two steps. Backblaze can ship you your backup on a hard drive, which you can then return for a full refund. https://www.backblaze.com/restore.html https://www.backblaze.com/restore.html
    • cloogshicer 5y ago
      Thank you for the suggestion! The problem is that this is very expensive if you're not in the US. I'd have to pay for customs + return shipping, which would add up to much more than the cost of a new drive.
• mthoms 5y ago
  I use Backblaze and am quite happy with the service. I wouldn't use it as my sole backup method however.
  • juancn 5y ago
    Try a full recovery and check it works. They lost most of my files.
    • mthoms 5y ago
      I did several years back. It took a while but worked as expected.
  • foundart 5y ago
    Have you done a restore?
    • oneplane 5y ago
      I have a couple of times and it works fine. I suppose I have yet to run into trouble with either of their offerings. Most restores have been individual files or lage archives (in the 5TB range).
• brandon272 5y ago
  Contact Backblaze support and see what they suggest. They may be able to point you to log files that offer more information on the reason for the safety freeze.
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    I already did. They literally told me to manually cross-reference my hundreds of millions of files (edit: seems like it's "only" about half a million. I was mistaken). I did follow up, but haven't gotten a response yet. Will update as I get it. Edit: New update: > I apologize, but this would in fact be the only sure fire way if you are concerned about any deleted files. There wouldn't be a way to compare hashes the way you describe in this case as that mechanism is simply not implemented into the Backblaze software. The Backblaze software is intended to prevent data loss. It would not be intended to be able to automatically cross reference local and server data against each other to display what is and is not backed up on our servers.
    • omg_ponies 5y ago
      I find it very hard to believe that you were told to do something that equates to eyeballing hundreds of millions of files. Would you mind posting the exact information you gave them, and their response - redacting sensitive information of course.
      • cloogshicer 5y ago
        It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? This was my message to them: > Hi, I was safety frozen. How can I find out the cause? I haven't made any significant changes to my system lately. In the support document it says that I should check if any data is missing - I have a lot of data backed up in backblaze, how can I know for sure nothing is missing or corrupted? How should I proceed? I've checked with CrystalDiskInfo and it seems that all SMART data is fine. Computer behaves normally. I've attached bzlogs and bzreports folders, just in case they're important. And this was their response: > Unfortunately there is simply no way to confirm what caused a safety freeze from our end. We can only provide the most common causes in this case, however we wouldn't be able to pinpoint the exact cause. The only way to verify any missing/deleted data would be to access your View/Restore Files page and cross reference what is found on our servers and what is found locally on your system. There wouldn't be any direct or automatic method of checking what data is missing, if any. Edit, New Update: > I apologize, but this would in fact be the only sure fire way if you are concerned about any deleted files. There wouldn't be a way to compare hashes the way you describe in this case as that mechanism is simply not implemented into the Backblaze software. The Backblaze software is intended to prevent data loss. It would not be intended to be able to automatically cross reference local and server data against each other to display what is and is not backed up on our servers.
• azalemeth 5y ago
  I'm looking for a new cloud backup service, one that works on linux/MacOS and with multiple machines. I've heard many mixed things about Backblaze -- ranging from "It's amazing!" to "Use their [pay per GB] buckets unless you are using a single Windows or MacOS computer", to "Other providers are cheaper". Certainly the best in terms of $/GB seems to be OpenDrive's "unlimited" option, which only includes 'no NASes' as a rather nebulous condition. I'd love to know -- what do other HN users for this? The story author's point about backups only being backups once you've used them to restore really* rings true to me.
  • CamperBob2 5y ago
    1. Sign up for Dropbox 2. Sign up for the optional 'PackRat' service, or whatever they call it nowadays 3. xcopy c:\*.* d:\dropbox\backup /s /e /d Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but that's basically what I do, using the Windows equivalent of a cron job to refresh the backup once a day. Not on the whole c: drive, just on my development directory tree. The ability to dig through older versions of all files has been incredibly valuable, given the large number of build targets and other assorted binaries that aren't under source control.
  • S04dKHzrKT 5y ago
    rsync.net has a special pricing tier for Borg users that might be worth looking into. https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://rsync.net/products/attic.html https://rsync.net/products/attic.html
  • deadbunny 5y ago
    I use rsync.net and borgmatic[1] backing up about a terrabyte. It's about the same price as S3 (with no egress charges, cheaper if you use just their Borg plan[2]) and you can backup a multitude of ways from rsync to zfs snapshots. It's not as user friendly as something with a GUI but IMO anyone on HN should be able to get it working in about 30 mins. 1. https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ 2. https://rsync.net/products/attic.html https://rsync.net/products/attic.html
    • 5y ago
• akeck 5y ago
  If I were in your situation with my personal data, I'd spend the money to get the restore hard drive shipped plus get hard drives/arrays for working space to do hash comparisons with the BB data. At this point, for some files, you may only have one good copy.
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, I think this is close to what I'll do (see below). Really sucks though, this is exactly what BB was supposed to prevent in the first place, all this manual labor.
• andrepew 5y ago
  I don't like Backblaze because they require you to hand over your encryption key to their website to restore which kills any hope of it being a 0-knowledge solution. Right now I'm using Arq Backup + S3 and have been happy.
  • Trias11 5y ago
    Same. Arq + Wasabi
  • 1123581321 5y ago
    I'm a fan of Arq and DIY storage, but how do you handle versioning?
    • andrepew 5y ago
      Arq has baked in file versioning unless you mean something else?
      • 1123581321 5y ago
        Ah, of course. Sorry. :)
  • tzs 5y ago
    I was about to use Backblaze Personal and then noticed that. Was then about to use Arq + Backblaze B2 when I realized that (1) Arq supports OneDrive, (2) I have a TB of OneDrive as part of my Microsoft 365 subscription, and (3) I only use cloud storage for file transfer between mobile devices and desktop, so my OneDrive space was almost all unused, so went with Arq + OneDrive. 3 years of weekly backups later and I've still only used about half of my 1 TB. The only thing I'm not happy about with Arq is that a "verify" downloads all the backup data to checksum it. That takes 3 or 4 days on my connection. I thought I read that many cloud storage provider APIs provide a way to ask the server for a checksum of a stored blob. I'd have expected Arq to make use of that, but maybe it is not reliable (the server might just report what the checksum is supposed to be, not actually read the data and checksum it?). Arq documents their storage format. I wonder if it would be possible to use a VM on Azure to access my OneDrive storage and do the checksumming on the VM?
• galonk 5y ago
  A lot of people sing BB's praises but I never had a good experience with them. The client was always slow, buggy, and resource hungry, and its UI is terrible. They got shirty with me for reporting bugs when I was using a macOS beta. And finally, at some point even though nothing about my computer changed (it was a Mac Mini, what was going to change), I got a message saying some security/copy protection system had detected that my computer was "different", and I had to un-install and re-install the entire app to fix it (there apparently being no easier way to unset a flag). I uninstalled and skipped the second part. Instead of using BB, get a Synology/Qnap/FreeNAS box to backup all your stuff locally, and back that up to another service (e.g. Glacier or Synology's own C2).
  • k8sToGo 5y ago
    You need to differentiate between BB Personal Backup and BB B2 service which is more like something you suggested. But these days I just use rsync.net + Wasabi + Kopia + rclone.
    • ericcholis 5y ago
      I really want to use rsync.net, but the price per GB scares me off.
      • rsync 5y ago
        Please email us about the "HN Readers Discount" which we have offered for 12-ish years ...
        • KennyBlanken 5y ago
          Do you understand that popping up like Beetlejuice every time someone mentions rsync pricing and being snarky about an unpublished discount is not a good look? Particularly given you never address the commenter's point, which is that your pricing is pretty expensive? "Price high, low volume" is certainly a valid pricing strategy, but you have no right to be snarky when people say you're priced high. The fact that people are consistently describing you as overpried means your marketing really isn't showing the corresponding value to them.
• mritzmann 5y ago
  More information about "safety freez" from an backblaze engineer: https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/hvcbpw/safety_freeze/ https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/hvcbpw/safety_fr...
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    Thanks! I already found that, unfortunately, they also just say: Do a full restore via shipped hard drive (expensive for non-USA).
  • CamperBob2 5y ago
    "The log files that list what Backblaze has backed up are called "bz_done" files. They list 'what has been done'. Here is where they are located on your computer: ... WARNING: don't edit those files -> you are guaranteed to corrupt your backup. You'll lose everything." Why does the integrity of the backup rely on files stored on the computer being backed up? This seems so stupid that I'm sure I'm missing a clue.
    • cloogshicer 5y ago
      Yup. Sounds pretty terrifying.
      • CamperBob2 5y ago
        That can't possibly be how it works. No way.
        • cloogshicer 5y ago
          Well, their suggested fix basically says that I should "unlink" my computer from the online backup, and relink it (by re-installing the Backblaze app). But before I do that, I should download any missing files, since they will be deleted from the backup upon re-link (if they can't be found on my computer). But I can't do that without knowing which files are missing.
    • 5y ago
• 1123581321 5y ago
  Can you acknowledge you've been hit by a rare bug? The service isn't awful. My own experience with Backblaze personal backup was negative because I had so many directories and files that it took them longer than they anticipated to prepare a recovery drive, but I know that I don't have a typical use case and I recommend it without reservation to people who want that kind of whole computer backup.
  • JadeNB 5y ago
    > Can you acknowledge you've been hit by a rare bug? The service isn't awful. It seems to me that service that can't deal with the bug I'm actually having is awful, whether that bug is rare or common. As an individual user, I care about my experience, not the statistical aggregate of user experiences. (Generalised 'I' here—this is not my bug.)
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      Well, sure, but in the context of a discussion forum it's less helpful, and usually the goal of writing it publicly is to deter potential happy users. We see this often in software support forums where someone has a rare bug and is offended that others won't stop their usage because of it.
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    This doesn't seem to be a rare bug, but intended behavior as hardware components fail: https://www.backblaze.com/safety_frozen.html https://www.backblaze.com/safety_frozen.html Also, the official solution (checking all backed up files manually) is genuinely awful, even if this were actually a rare bug.
    • 1123581321 5y ago
      I agree about that line in the documentation being too simple (though it shouldn't deter the technical users here.) They should advise to order a backup drive and compare all the files, or provide CLI instructions to check the safety log file against the one-liner. They seem to provide much better, candid support for hardware issues/safety freezes on reddit, based on what others have posted here, which is cool of them. Contacting support should yield similarly complete answers.
• quaffapint 5y ago
  That would be very frustrating. I've been using B2 to store my encrypted backups (via Duplicati in my case) and that has been solid (and cheap) in both backup and restores. For those leery of their personal backup solution, maybe go that route.
• brudgers 5y ago
  The cloud is a great availability tool for personal work. It is a poor backup for personal work because the terms and conditions are for B2B. The terms and conditions are suited for contractual obligations under due diligence. They allow a business to avoid negligence claims when something goes wrong in a third party contract. The service is not designed around the sentimental value of baby's first steps. Stop paying for storage and it goes from viewable on everyone's iPad to gone. Personal work should be backed up on physical media. Multiple copies in multiple locations. If there's a copy in the cloud, that's convenient. But it is not durable. Good luck.
  • anamexis 5y ago
    I don't know, I would say B2 (or S3, etc.) are perfectly suitable as a secondary backup location. They are as durable or more durable than a NAS that I have in a friend's basement or something.
    • brudgers 5y ago
      They are as durable as automatic billing from a credit card. Disks in your friend's basement are more durable when not attached to a network and sitting in a Pelican case instead. One of the things a personal backup might want to survive is a long period of incapacitation and or neglect or higher priorities. The cloud, because it takes a dependency on credit cards, doesn't do that. A spinning hard disk in a box tends to and if it doesn't spin up there is still the physical media from which the data can be recovered. S3, etc. are suitable for business records. You can insure against their loss. If you don't have money to pay the bill you're probably not really going to need a backup much longer. etc. To put it another way, there is a decades long track record of success with physical media. There is about a decade and a half of total experience with the cloud.
      • anamexis 5y ago
        The continuous payment is an important point. But for the sample size of me, I feel like I am far more likely to keep paying for cheap cloud storage for 10 years than I am to adequately maintain and test an offsite backup myself. And to be clear, this is secondary backup, on top of my primary, onsite physical backup.
• wanderingmind 5y ago
  I don't use Backblaze but I use rclone which can be connected to a Backblaze backend. Rclone is opensource and has a subcommand check[0] that can compare files between remote/local or remote1/remote2. I suggest using it to find the missing files. [0] https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_check/ https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_check/
  • k8sToGo 5y ago
    Pretty sure what you mean is Backblaze B2, but the author is talking about Backblaze Personal Backup.
    • wanderingmind 5y ago
      Yes sorry didn't know they were different. Well atleast I learnt something today.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• exhibitapp 5y ago
  Tried to use backblaze to save personal files on a laptop I was going to lose access to, at first it said it was incorrectly permissioned. I changed a few setting and the message went away. My fun surprise when I went to restore from the backup and 90% of my files were missing and my former computer was bricked.
• rgovostes 5y ago
  On macOS, Backblaze ships with 21 identical copies of the same executable, nearly 200 MB in all, presumably because they don't realize you can just execute one binary n times (with different argv[0] if they'd like) and they haven't written their code to be thread safe. Needless to say it doesn't instill confidence in the quality of software engineering that I rely on for disaster recovery. % openssl md5 /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bztrans* MD5(/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bztrans_thread00)= 772308dbd9b8083f4dc1c31bfe6a28da MD5(/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bztrans_thread01)= 772308dbd9b8083f4dc1c31bfe6a28da ... MD5(/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bztrans_thread19)= 772308dbd9b8083f4dc1c31bfe6a28da MD5(/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bztransmit)= 772308dbd9b8083f4dc1c31bfe6a28da
  • dataflow 5y ago
    Eh, even Clang does this. Install it on Windows and you'll get clang-cl.exe, clang++.exe, clang-cpp.exe, and clang.exe, all 90 MB executables, and almost entirely the same executables, but not bit-for-bit identical, so you can't hardlink them. I actually hate this too, but my point is it doesn't necessarily say much about software quality.
    • rgovostes 5y ago
      This makes slightly more sense if it's the case that they are statically linking the Clang and LLVM libraries into each tool. Each one has a slightly different main() (e.g., one parses gcc-style args) but ends up using the same library functionality.
      • vchuravy 5y ago
        They are the same binary and on on Linux they are just soft-links.
        • dataflow 5y ago
          Interestingly they're also the same binary on Windows in MSYS2. But not if you install through whatever installer Visual Studio uses (probably the native one).
• juancn 5y ago
  I was unable to recover backed up files on backblaze. It just doesn’t work. They don’t seem to do any periodic integrity checks on the cold data. I lost most of my files, they were able to recover maybe 20% of the data. Use anything else, but not backblaze.
  • mabbo 5y ago
    This reminds me of the xkcd comic "TornadoGuard"[0]. Whatever else the company is doing, if their core functionality doesn't fundamentally work when it needs to, then what is everyone paying for? [0]https://m.xkcd.com/937/ https://m.xkcd.com/937/
  • zebraflask 5y ago
    I've never had a problem with BackBlaze - wasn't it at some point one the gold standards for backups?
    • manicdee 5y ago
      Only by virtue of being the most recognised name in this space.
      • crossroadsguy 5y ago
        But they publish hard disk reports and their PR person talks to people on HN; sometimes founder as well. They must be the best.
• MichaelBurge 5y ago
  Personally I bought a used tape machine and some $20 2.5TB tapes. It supports hardware encryption and the backup process is pretty much "tar cvf /dev/st0 /some/files". Downside is you don't actually save money doing this, because the drive costs ~$800. Upside is you're not relying on anybody else for worst-case scenario recovery of your important data. The actual read/write speed are about as fast as HDD, but if you're compressing it's easy to get blocked on CPU and get a fraction of that. Mine supports hardware encryption with AES, newer ones have hardware compression and better read/write/storage per tape. Actually, Backblaze already supports shipping an HDD, so if they supported shipping cheap tapes they might be usable for archival backups too.
  • gruez 5y ago
    What's the upside to using tape? You mentioned that you don't save money doing this, at least with your scale. Why not just back up to a few hard drives?
    • MichaelBurge 5y ago
      Hard drives go bad more frequently than tape, and don't actually save you any work if you're making multiple redundant encrypted copies. I have 26 terabytes on my NAS, so with 2 copies I'd probably use $800 in HDDs? I could swap to a new 10TB HDD every few hours just like a tape, attach group labels just like a tape, it'd have similar speed, and I'd probably write new images to the same HDDs every so often. The word "just" sounds like you think it's less work, but it sounds the same to me. FWIW, I did roll from HDD to HDD for years, so I'm familiar with the concept.
  • tomnipotent 5y ago
    Are you not concerned with having the backups in the same location as your source? It's rare, but it doesn't protect against fire, flood, and theft.
    • MichaelBurge 5y ago
      They're tapes with encrypted data, and they're $20 each. You can write many copies, check the hash, and distribute them in many places. Put them in safety deposit boxes at the bank, give copies to a friend, bury them in your backyard, and - yes - store a set or two in the closet. Because they're encrypted, there is the issue of the encryption key needing to be managed. But that's the only issue.
• rubatuga 5y ago
  I recommend using ZFS encrypted snapshots send with rsync.net ZFS plan.
• elfchief 5y ago
  I love Backblaze, I really do, but holy hell is the user experience bad if you ever need to actually interact with any part of their software -- client or website. And it's been that way forever, and it's super frustrating that it seems like they've put zero effort into improving any of it. Though reading some of the "backup got frozen, compare everything by hand" stories from here, I'm starting to wonder if maybe I shouldn't put my data somewhere else. Problem is, I've yet to find another "fire and forget" type of wolution for windows that works anywhere near as well.
  • bberenberg 5y ago
    Absolutely agree. I have had it save my butt a few times when I damaged an important file and was able to pull an older version, but every single time I have done this, it made me trust their tooling for whole system recovery less and less. I do wish there was a better option. Currently considering Arq for the next computer.
    • philistine 5y ago
      I use Arq on a Mac Mini to have last resort offsite copies of my Time Machine backups on AWS Glacier. I must be breaking some proper backup practices, but I know nothing about nothing. Being the guy who knows nothing, I can say Arq is great. It allows you to dissociate the backup software from the backup service, which means I get to have a piece of software I know runs well, and is financed by my 50$ purchase price.
  • iJohnDoe 5y ago
    There doesn’t seem much reason to “love Backblaze” based on what you said. You might as well be transferring your files into a volcano and then have to trek into the volcano in the hopes you might get lucky and everything hasn’t burned up if you ever have to recover something.
• digianarchist 5y ago
  Arc Backup and B2 is a much better and cheaper solution.
  • bogomipz 5y ago
    Is B2 the other offering from Backblaze? I would be interested in hearing why this plus Arq is better than the product the OP is having difficulty with.
• causality0 5y ago
  Backblaze is handy for being able to get at your files from any device or location regardless of whether your computer is online. I wouldn't rely on it for anything else. A backup service that can't do differential comparisons on your data is not a backup service, it's an upload service.
• jfrunyon 5y ago
  Per their support, there are known issues which can cause the client and their servers to become "out of sync". If this happens, your backups will stop occurring (even though the app will indicate that the all files are backed up successfully through the current date). The only notice you will receive that this has occurred is after 14 days when they send you an email to warn you that they'll delete your backups if you don't fix it. They don't seem to recognize why backups silently failing is a very bad thing. I stopped using Backblaze after that revelation.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    incredible business answer..
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    I think this is exactly what happened here. Or at least extremely similar.
    • oso2k 5y ago
      You know what, I had Backblaze tell me that I had a drive missing on Friday that had been disconnected for 14 days. My external USB drive failed to startup up correctly after a power outage. However, I had 3 or 4 notices from Backblaze in that time of successfully completed back ups. I think the default is to warn after not successfully backing up for 5 days. I set that to 2 instead. Some of the checks seem disconnected from each other. I’ve also had issues with downloading my 2TB of data the Backblaze has. Takes about 3 or 4 days, if you’re successful. With retries and failures, wall time was about a week. And I have a 1G/1G internet connection. And doing the work to break it into 500GB chunks sucks. I’d like to back up more of my files but I worry I would not be able to get it back.
      • dsr_ 5y ago
        Do you have a local friend who would like to swap backup services with you? Each of you buys and configures a Raspberry Pi with a 2TB disk. Encrypt a storage filesystem. Load up your first backup, then swap boxes. Now you each have remote rsync/rsnapshot/rclone/ZFS/whatever targets, and if you run into big trouble, you can go get the box back for a really fast restore.
• ogazitt 5y ago
  So frustrating. Backup is like an insurance policy - your only interaction with the product is the "front-end" (e.g. "how easy is it to configure and buy what I need"), as opposed to what you're really paying for (the provider's ability to deliver in your time of need). I worked at a backup company [1] (acquired by Quantum in 2014 [2]) where we built a peer-to-peer storage network. We ran "restore" drills early and often :) [1] https://www.linkedin.com/company/symform/about/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/symform/about/ [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/quantum-corp-acquires-symform--9097c5b4 https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/quantum-corp-acquires...
  • Dracophoenix 5y ago
    Seeing as you're an expert, what's your current online backup solution?
• outworlder 5y ago
  Hardware companies are seldom good at software. The ones that are really stand out.
  • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    BackBlaze professes to be a software company that isn't good at hardware.
• slavboj 5y ago
  IME it is vastly more robust to use your backup client of choice (eg Duplicati) wrapping Backblaze B2, their S3 competitor. As a bonus it becomes much easier to migrate to or from them once your data is accessible in an open API, particularly when you have limited local upload bandwidth like a lot of US cable internet customers.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    Can highly recommend this method. And you can just use B2/S3 to store other stuff too.
  • rmoriz 5y ago
    The personal backup plan is extremely cheap and almost unlimited. Maybe they will think about the product (and cost) and phase it out ("Migrate to B2 our professional industry leading offering and save 10% of your first bill" [of $2865]) .
    • slavboj 5y ago
      If I did my calculation right, based on my usage, including miscellaneous egress and API fees, I could store about 1.25 TB on B2 for 7 bucks a month. I would bet their median personal backup customer is under that.
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    I want to like Duplicati so much, but it breaks if you even think about looking at it. It's like the P&R Jail meme. "Interrupt the initial backup? We corrupt the backups." "Relocate the backup files and update the backup destination? We corrupt your backups." "Update to a new version? Believe it or not, we corrupt your backups." The eight hundred open github issues is also pretty frightening for a now many-years-old piece of backup software. They really, really need to spend 6 months or more just nailing as many issues as possible, starting first and foremost with bugs relating to restores.
    • seized 5y ago
      Take a look at Duplicacy as an alternative then. Similar core idea (takes a folder, chunks it up, tracks revisions, etc) but is faster than Duplicati and Restic. Has some other nice features like deduplication, multi client, etc. Kopia is another up and coming option too.
• rsync 5y ago
  " ... wouldn't be a way to compare hashes the way you describe ..." Hashing files shouldn't be hard ... ssh user@rsync.net sha256 some/dir/some/file ssh user@rsync.net sha512t256 some/dir/some/file [1] ... or if you like it quick and dirty: ssh user@rsync.net cksum some/dir/some/file [2] [1] SHA-512t256 is a version of SHA-512 truncated to only 256 bits. On 64-bit hardware, this algorithm is approximately 50% faster than SHA-256 but with the same level of security. [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  Backblaze is an awful piece of software when you look at it from “a backup software” point of view. It’s made pretty, simple, native (or is it Electron now?) - yes. But then it stops there. On top of that if you read the ifs, buts, and gotchas you’d want to stay far away from them. They’ve downright absurd data deletion/retention and versioning rules. Besides I do not trust any service that promises to give anything “unlimited” for a fixed cost. As I usually mention in comments on this topic - I’d strongly urge people to use and support backup tools like borgbackup.org (Vorta is an excellent GUI), restic.net (a GUI is glaringly missing), kopia.io (up and coming; comes with a GUI), for smaller datasets there’s very good but more expansive Tarsnap (not FOSS). And then there are others - https://github.com/restic/others#list-of-backup-software https://github.com/restic/others#list-of-backup-software
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > They’ve downright absurd data deletion/retention and versioning rules. laughs in Code42 Code 42, makers of Crashplan, who shut down their consumer backup service and deleted the private keys needed to decrypt backups on your own drives... ...followed that up by recently announcing that they were changing file retention rules to purge all files older than 90 days. They lied and said it would be effective in a week or so, but it turns out that it was effective upon your archives being run through the periodic compact process after the announcement, and of course some people were at the head of that line. Crashplan Pro Enterprise was a brilliant backup system and they drove it into the ground through staggering sales and support incompetence. Now they sell some buzzword-box-ticking "stop your employees from COPYING THAT FLOPPY!" big-brother-esque profiling/monitoring software. Thank you for mentioning those other backup programs, by the way. Hadn't heard of one or two.
• bogomipz 5y ago
  This is really awful. I'm curious what solution people recommend who have had to do restores. I'm curious too if anyone has any thoughts on Tarsnap; https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
• aborsy 5y ago
  Backblaze doesn’t seem to be profitable. How could they provide resources required to improve their products? Such issues remain unless prices are increased.