25 ms·

Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Backblaze

236 points by bimbashrestha 5y ago

Creator here. I was looking for something as simple as Backblaze Personal [1] but privacy focused and open source. This is my attempt to build that. Uses PyQt6 [2] for the GUI and Pyinstaller [3] for creating the platform specific binaries. The backup engine under the hood is Restic [4]. The server code is written in Laravel [5]. All the code is on GitHub [6]. I actually really like Backblaze (even use B2 for this offering behind the scenes) so this isn't meant to throw shade their way. Just wanted a private open source alternative. Something like Bitwarden but for backups. [1] https://backblaze.com https://backblaze.com [2] https://pypi.org/project/PyQt6 https://pypi.org/project/PyQt6 [3] https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable [4] https://github.com/restic https://github.com/restic [5] https://laravel.com https://laravel.com [6] https://github.com/blobbackup/blobbackup https://github.com/blobbackup/blobbackup

wormer 5y ago
Speaking of this, does anyone know about any local backups for Linux with a nice GUI? I turned into a GNOMie and don't want to spend time with commandline options to figure it out. I tried APTIK but it flat out didn't work.
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  I've always liked the vorta project (https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- infinityio 5y ago
  It probably isn't quite what you are looking for, but have you ever tried Syncthing? It doesn't have enough features to be an actual backup solution, but it is nice if you just want another copy of your files somewhere else
  - wormer 5y ago
    I actually use Syncthing for everything, but I was looking for a one click and I'm back where I started when I have to reset my PC
- phaer 5y ago
  [Pika Backup](https://apps.gnome.org/app/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup/ https://apps.gnome.org/app/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup/) is a simple and well-designed GTK frontend for borg IMO
- frenkel 5y ago
  deja-dup. I even believe this is installed by default on distros.
- dosenbrot 5y ago
  I've been using BackInTime (https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Back_In_Time/ https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Back_In_Time/) since 6 years and happy with it. - it's using rsync and hardlinks, the files on the backupdrive are just normal files - it got "smart delete" of old backups (e.g. keep 1 backup per year older 1 year, 1 per month older 1 month and 1 per week older 1 week) - starts an backup automatic in background if you attach the external drive (with udev, if you want it) - has a nice simple ui (i like it)
- doublepg23 5y ago
  I’ve been using Deja Dupe for 4 years now for a local backup on my NAS. It’s extremely slow though, and I’d prefer fs level like ZFS or even btrfs at this point.
  - aborsy 5y ago
    Deja Dup has recently offered Restic backend.
    - doublepg23 5y ago
      That's great! Couple questions, is this on a recently released version, will it be in the next Fedora? Is it best just to grab the Flatpak?
- deanc 5y ago
  Crash plan pro is still around. About ten bucks a month for unlimited backup per machine.
- MikusR 5y ago
  https://kopia.io/ https://kopia.io/
wanderingmind 5y ago
Not to throw shades, but I think we have restic which is awesome for backup across multiple backends (through rclone). What is needed is a user friendly GUI to use restic for regular folks. I hope some one can use this framework to create a simple GUI for restic for windows/Mac users afraid of the terminal.
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Idk if you caught this but Blobbackup uses restic under the hood and I'm planning on adding support for other storages in the future.
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    Sorry missed it. I'm gonna use it soon then. It would also be useful to get the blessing of restic community by posting it in their forum.
- evulhotdog 5y ago
  Check out Kopia. It’s very similar to restic in how it uses repos, and they’ve put some effort into a GUI too!
  - guerby 5y ago
    Second this. Just switched from borg to kopia, using a kopia repository server for my family computers backup (890 GB currently).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mattl 5y ago
What operating systems does this support?
- dividuum 5y ago
  Right on the landing page it says Mac & Windows.
  - mattl 5y ago
    It’s very small, pale grey text.
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  It's just Mac and Windows right now. Technically, it isn't that hard to get things working on Linux (since the desktop app is Qt) but I need to get around to it. There is a github issue for it btw: https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/92 https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/92
tonymet 5y ago
i love seeing more innovation with backups . can you talk about the agent ? many of them drain the battery and overload cpu .
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  It uses restic (github.com/blobbackup) to create backups every hour by default. After the initial backup, the load on battery and cpu should be pretty minimal since the agent is idle most of the time (because incremental backups are fairly quick).
TheIronYuppie 5y ago
Is there an option for IPFS instead of B2?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jrwr 5y ago
  IPFS is not for long term data storage, and once you get about the 100k file mark your tables are so damn slow you can't add anything new
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Not right now. I'd like to allow the self-hosted version to support other storage backends eventually (will probably start with generic S3 and SFTP first though).
fennecfoxen 5y ago
My problem: I just want to back up 5 terabytes. It's on an external SSD, used for photos. Backblaze has forgotten how to count terabytes at all, preferring to play games about how I need to have it attached and for how long, so people don't play games with their "unlimited" offering. "Did you plug in the external drive to a computer, and leave the computer on for 24 hours without it going to sleep, and reattach the drive regularly every 30 days? I'm sorry, it looks like we'll be erasing your backup. You can make another one and it will take several days to upload despite your very fast connection." I don't want to play these games either way, I just want to back up 5 terabytes. I don't even necessarily need an agent. You offer a similar pricing scheme to Backblaze ($N/mo/computer). Does your service support my use case, or should I keep looking?
- hickimsedenolan 5y ago
  >We charge you $9 / month per computer. Each computer is allowed to backup up to 5 TB of data. Seems to be exactly how much you want to backup.
- philjohn 5y ago
  Jottacloud offers unlimited (in reality after 5TB they start slowing your upload speed to them) with a cli, or rclone + restic support.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    It's worth noting that for most uses the throttling doesn't matter up to about 16TB, where you hit a harsh inflection point.
    - philjohn 5y ago
      And really, at that point, don't be a cheapskate, it's already super cheap (and reliable), so buy another account (or two, or three).
- pieterhg 5y ago
  You can make a snapshot of a Backblaze Personal and then store it in Backblaze B2. Works fine.
sandgiant 5y ago
This looks really great! I love restic but miss a simple UI to keep track of my backups. Will definitely keep an eye on this.
busymom0 5y ago
Could this be used for something like S3 for uploading images and serving them in an app or website? Like are there options for signed url uploads?
bethecloud 5y ago
Would be cool to back this to decentralized cloud storage (should be pretty easy to do via Storj S3 integration): https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-aws-sdk-and-hosted-gateway-mt/ https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-aws-sdk... Or even Restic directly: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/backup-with-restic/ https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/backup-with-restic/
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  I think decentralized storage + Blobbackup could make for an interesting pairing. I'll make time to look into it.
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    So as of now I can use it your app and to b2? Because that’s where my restic backups go to (natively).
    - crossroadsguy 5y ago
      I tried the app and I did notice the first screen is "Select Storage Location" after you try to add a new backup and it lists: local dir, aws, gc, azure, b2, s3, sftp. So I indeed guess it can as well be used as restic frontend (but I am not really sure to what extent it uses restic and whether blobbackup is just a gui/skin for restic)
      - rsync 5y ago
        Ahhh … sftp is a choice. Great job!
      - bimbashrestha 5y ago
        Hey! Thanks for trying the app. I think you may have tried our original app (the original folder in the github repo). I need to clean up the Releases page. That version used a custom backup engine and allowed backups to a number of storage providers (S3, B2, SFTP, etc). The new app uses restic as the backup engine and only supports backups to B2 right now. Sorry for the confusion.
agucova 5y ago
If this would allow me to check my files in a simple web UI (no need for collaboration or anything), and create share links for low-volume downloads I could just leave Google Drive permanently.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  You could, but would you, really.
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Ah sadly that probably won't happen soon. All the data is encrypted with your master password (password manager style) and that master password isn't transfered to the server. So you'd have to use the desktop client to access your files.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    You could create a sharing mechanism, though; let the desktop client encrypt a copy of the file with a randomly generated key and share that key in the download URL like Mega does it. Requires extra data transfers and extra storage, but for small files that seems doable without invalidating the master password setup. You do end with two separate encryption systems, though. A more scalable solution would be to encrypt every file with a different key and encrypt the key store with the master password (but that would obviously require a relatively extensive rewrite). You'd be able to get more fine-grained file access without sacrificing the single master password setup. That way, you can simply share the file key when you want to generate a share link.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Consider using https://wetransfer.com https://wetransfer.com for one off transfers.
  - adenner 5y ago
    I have had great luck using https://www.wesendit.com/ https://www.wesendit.com/ for this use case.
mendelmaleh 5y ago
> I actually really like Backblaze (even use B2 for this offering behind the scenes) B2 is $5/tb, you are charging $9 for 5tb? How does that work? Do the old versions count towards the quota?
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  It's $9/computer so if you have another computer, you can't use the same 5 TB quota. I'm banking on most people having less than 5 tb per computer to backup. It's kind of like what Backblaze Personal does for their unlimited plan but slightly lower tier I suppose (since there is no way I could do unlimited).
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    You probably will want to have something to discourage the data hoarders. They might not be many in numbers, but they can rack up quite the TB count.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - brianwski 5y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. Here is a histogram of backup sizes of our Backblaze Personal Backup Customers if it is useful: https://i.imgur.com/GiHhrDo.gif https://i.imgur.com/GiHhrDo.gif You have to zoom in to see the meaningful information. It can be super surprising to developers and IT people (like us) to see a lot of customers have less data than you might think. When we started we had no idea what might come of all of this, so it was "stressful". :-) So I welcome another backup client developer to our club, and hope this can help them out.
      - magicalhippo 5y ago
        They aren't that many, but I'm assuming he's starting up so not sure how many he can handle. I recall Crashplan having enough >10TB guys that they decided "unlimited" wasn't, and that was many years ago. Personally I have 3TB of essential data, and about 10TB if I wanted to backup most of my computer. Interesting graph though, thanks for sharing!
oceankid 5y ago
Nicely done. Any plans for allowing to pick a US/EU/Asia data center?
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  I'm planning on adding an Amsterdam storage location in a month or so!
yewenjie 5y ago
Off topic but what is the cheapest object storage service for less than 1 TB of data?
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Probably B2 (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html). Half a penny per GB.
- sreitshamer 5y ago
  Google Cloud's Archive tier is cheapest to store at about $1.23/TB per month, but downloading is very expensive.
- bityard 5y ago
  Minio on a raspberry pi at a friends house.
- Gasp0de 5y ago
  https://storj.io https://storj.io
- guerby 5y ago
  https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box 3.45 EUR/month for 1 TB, plenty of protocols (including borg and rsync), no bandwidth limit, 10 snapshots.
gingerlime 5y ago
looks great! I have a question about backing up my mac. Let’s say my mac is stolen/dropped from a bridge. Can I actually restore everything on a new mac, or still need to install and configure from scratch and “just” have a backup of documents, images etc?
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  It's a file level backup (as opposed to an image or disk backup). So anything related to the operating system is not backed up but all your "data" (documents, photos, music, movies, etc) is. Here is a support page that explains what is backed up by default (which you can ofc change) [1]. [1] https://blobbackup.com/support/what-is-being-backed-up/ https://blobbackup.com/support/what-is-being-backed-up/
thesimon 5y ago
Was looking quite long for the company behind this and expected a B2B offering to be located at "Company", not an about us. Stating your company name and an address would greatly increase my trust.
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Ah good point. I've made a github issue for it (you'll find the company name and address there btw) [1]. We are actually working on a B2B offering right now (see the banner on the top of the home page for more info) [2][3]. [1] https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/93 https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/93 [2] https://blobbackup.com https://blobbackup.com [3] https://forms.gle/euPCbhZaf1CMN8LbA https://forms.gle/euPCbhZaf1CMN8LbA
lobochrome 5y ago
I like Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ They were only an app back in the day, which backed up to any object store you chose. Although now they are trying the saas way of things too.
- sreitshamer 5y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "trying the saas way of things". We still sell Arq 7 as a standalone app. It comes with a year of updates. You can choose to renew, or not and keep using the app you bought forever. Similar licensing to Panic's Nova app https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/arq7Pricing.html https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/a...
  - lobochrome 5y ago
    Well - you changed from a pure Mac App to a SaaS style offering with a reasonable licensing for people who don't want to subscribe. That's fine - and I am a subscriber. Seeing you adding storage directly makes me slightly afraid that you will join the VC money train at some stage (like 1password did). No shame in doing it but things change then. I like single-purpose crafted apps, and Arq has been this for me for a long time. I hope it stays this way & Thank You for your good work ^^
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jfkimmes 5y ago
Interesting. I had not heard of restic, yet. My default backup choice has been borg[1] for a long time, so borgbase.com was a natural choice for off-site backups for me. They make Vorta a decent GUI client for borg - that's how I found out about them. Can someone here give a comparison of borg and restic by any chance? [1]: https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  Borg supports local and SFTP backups while Restic supports more (a lot more). S3, Google Cloud, B2, etc. In fact, they integrate with rclone so anything you can access using rclone, you can backup to using Restic. Borg uses compression while Restic does not. Restic just uses deduplication so your backups with Restic will likely be larger in size. Anyway, that's what jumps to mind. They're both pretty great honestly (in terms of community support and reliability). There are a lot of other options too btw. The Restic repo has a pretty good list [1] [1] https://github.com/restic/others https://github.com/restic/others
  - philjohn 5y ago
    The rclone backend is a killer feature of Restic - using it in my home setup which is: 6 computers backing up using UrBackup client to a 6 drive 2U NAS running Raid Z2 and UrBackup server (which is nice as it stores incremental backups as ZFS child datasets). I then have a post backup script which creates a snapshot of the latest backup, mounts it, backs up using Restic using the JottaCloud rclone backend.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Do you know if Restic supports block-level deduplication? I am backing up some database dumps and the backup filesystem has ballooned in size, even though the dumps are 99% identical every day. This makes me suspect that they only deduplicate on the file level, and that I would have some very significant savings if I zipped the dumps before backing up. EDIT: Some details on deduplication are here, and I'm puzzled as to why my backups are so big: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/100_references.html?highlight=deduplication#backups-and-deduplication https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/100_references.html?...
clement12 5y ago
slyall 5y ago
Need some proofreading: "We only offer montly biling at this time"
- lpellis 5y ago
  A few more minor ones ('juristiction'): https://app.pagewatch.dev/5ebf46bce58c44dd7cf0dafdb78fbb48df3b6196/spelling/issues https://app.pagewatch.dev/5ebf46bce58c44dd7cf0dafdb78fbb48df...
- bimbashrestha 5y ago
  That's embarrassing... Thanks, I'll fix it:)
leetrout 5y ago
My goto tool for secure backups is tarsnap. He only supports S3 as far as I know so using B2 could be a good differentiator. Wonder if either of you will add support for cloudflares R2? https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
- asojfdowgh 5y ago
  backblaze supports s3 protocol
- xupybd 5y ago
  The lack of direct support for Windows prevented me from using tarsnap. Restic allows me to use shadow volumes.
- throwthere 5y ago
  I think price is the main differentiator here. TarSnap is 50x as expensive.
- corobo 5y ago
  Does Cloudflare’s R2 exist? I saw the announcement but nothing else other than folks like me wondering; has anyone at all got access yet?
  - jve 5y ago
    Seems its still in closed beta: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cloudflares-r2-storage-service-takes-100s-of-pbyte-of-business-in-closed-beta/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cloudflares-r2-st... But yeah, comment sounds so weird for a non released product.
    - corobo 5y ago
      Ah good so it actually does exist in a way that's more than a spec, that's good enough for me. I'm in no rush with that slurp mode or whatever they called it, just hadn't heard of anything more since the announcement :)
    - 5y ago
xiphias2 5y ago
Is there a Google Drive clone with encrypted backups? I love the usability of Google Drive (being able to access / make files offline whenever I want), but the Mac update started to force me to upload all my files, which I don't want to do, as the files are not encrypted.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Google Drive with rclone and the crypt layer (https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/)?
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    It looks like a command line application, I'm looking for something with a great OS X, iOS, Android and web GUI (and happy to pay for it). Dropbox looks similar to Google Drive with the same problem (No E2E encryption)
    - vanc_cefepime 5y ago
      Maybe https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ works for you? Has E2EE. As far as I know, it’s not open source, but the format is open. I use them to back up files from my Mac to Dropbox. I also use Cryptomator but that’s just for regular files that I pull from different iOS device to Dropbox.
    - allisdust 5y ago
      Try Duplicati. Cross platform, free and supports several backends (google drive, s3 and s3 compatible providers etc). Supports encryption so you have data security.
    - tedmiston 5y ago
      You can use Cryptomator with the various cloud storage backends. https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
- jbc1 5y ago
aborsy 5y ago
Another upvote for restic!
pappeyrome 5y ago
Could you please add a Postal address to your https://blobbackup.com/company/ https://blobbackup.com/company/ ?
mhdhn 5y ago
Do you have a warrant canary?

236 points by bimbashrestha 5y ago

wormer 5y ago

Speaking of this, does anyone know about any local backups for Linux with a nice GUI? I turned into a GNOMie and don't want to spend time with commandline options to figure it out. I tried APTIK but it flat out didn't work.

bimbashrestha 5y ago
I've always liked the vorta project (https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
infinityio 5y ago
It probably isn't quite what you are looking for, but have you ever tried Syncthing? It doesn't have enough features to be an actual backup solution, but it is nice if you just want another copy of your files somewhere else
- wormer 5y ago
  I actually use Syncthing for everything, but I was looking for a one click and I'm back where I started when I have to reset my PC
phaer 5y ago
[Pika Backup](https://apps.gnome.org/app/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup/ https://apps.gnome.org/app/org.gnome.World.PikaBackup/) is a simple and well-designed GTK frontend for borg IMO
frenkel 5y ago
deja-dup. I even believe this is installed by default on distros.
dosenbrot 5y ago
I've been using BackInTime (https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Back_In_Time/ https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Back_In_Time/) since 6 years and happy with it. - it's using rsync and hardlinks, the files on the backupdrive are just normal files - it got "smart delete" of old backups (e.g. keep 1 backup per year older 1 year, 1 per month older 1 month and 1 per week older 1 week) - starts an backup automatic in background if you attach the external drive (with udev, if you want it) - has a nice simple ui (i like it)
doublepg23 5y ago
I’ve been using Deja Dupe for 4 years now for a local backup on my NAS. It’s extremely slow though, and I’d prefer fs level like ZFS or even btrfs at this point.
- aborsy 5y ago
  Deja Dup has recently offered Restic backend.
  - doublepg23 5y ago
    That's great! Couple questions, is this on a recently released version, will it be in the next Fedora? Is it best just to grab the Flatpak?
deanc 5y ago
Crash plan pro is still around. About ten bucks a month for unlimited backup per machine.
MikusR 5y ago
https://kopia.io/ https://kopia.io/

wanderingmind 5y ago

Not to throw shades, but I think we have restic which is awesome for backup across multiple backends (through rclone). What is needed is a user friendly GUI to use restic for regular folks. I hope some one can use this framework to create a simple GUI for restic for windows/Mac users afraid of the terminal.

bimbashrestha 5y ago
Idk if you caught this but Blobbackup uses restic under the hood and I'm planning on adding support for other storages in the future.
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  Sorry missed it. I'm gonna use it soon then. It would also be useful to get the blessing of restic community by posting it in their forum.
evulhotdog 5y ago
Check out Kopia. It’s very similar to restic in how it uses repos, and they’ve put some effort into a GUI too!
- guerby 5y ago
  Second this. Just switched from borg to kopia, using a kopia repository server for my family computers backup (890 GB currently).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mattl 5y ago

What operating systems does this support?

dividuum 5y ago
Right on the landing page it says Mac & Windows.
- mattl 5y ago
  It’s very small, pale grey text.
bimbashrestha 5y ago
It's just Mac and Windows right now. Technically, it isn't that hard to get things working on Linux (since the desktop app is Qt) but I need to get around to it. There is a github issue for it btw: https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/92 https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/92

tonymet 5y ago

i love seeing more innovation with backups . can you talk about the agent ? many of them drain the battery and overload cpu .

bimbashrestha 5y ago
It uses restic (github.com/blobbackup) to create backups every hour by default. After the initial backup, the load on battery and cpu should be pretty minimal since the agent is idle most of the time (because incremental backups are fairly quick).

TheIronYuppie 5y ago

Is there an option for IPFS instead of B2?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jrwr 5y ago
IPFS is not for long term data storage, and once you get about the 100k file mark your tables are so damn slow you can't add anything new
bimbashrestha 5y ago
Not right now. I'd like to allow the self-hosted version to support other storage backends eventually (will probably start with generic S3 and SFTP first though).

fennecfoxen 5y ago

My problem: I just want to back up 5 terabytes. It's on an external SSD, used for photos. Backblaze has forgotten how to count terabytes at all, preferring to play games about how I need to have it attached and for how long, so people don't play games with their "unlimited" offering. "Did you plug in the external drive to a computer, and leave the computer on for 24 hours without it going to sleep, and reattach the drive regularly every 30 days? I'm sorry, it looks like we'll be erasing your backup. You can make another one and it will take several days to upload despite your very fast connection." I don't want to play these games either way, I just want to back up 5 terabytes. I don't even necessarily need an agent. You offer a similar pricing scheme to Backblaze ($N/mo/computer). Does your service support my use case, or should I keep looking?

hickimsedenolan 5y ago
>We charge you $9 / month per computer. Each computer is allowed to backup up to 5 TB of data. Seems to be exactly how much you want to backup.
philjohn 5y ago
Jottacloud offers unlimited (in reality after 5TB they start slowing your upload speed to them) with a cli, or rclone + restic support.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  It's worth noting that for most uses the throttling doesn't matter up to about 16TB, where you hit a harsh inflection point.
  - philjohn 5y ago
    And really, at that point, don't be a cheapskate, it's already super cheap (and reliable), so buy another account (or two, or three).
pieterhg 5y ago
You can make a snapshot of a Backblaze Personal and then store it in Backblaze B2. Works fine.

sandgiant 5y ago

This looks really great! I love restic but miss a simple UI to keep track of my backups. Will definitely keep an eye on this.

busymom0 5y ago

Could this be used for something like S3 for uploading images and serving them in an app or website? Like are there options for signed url uploads?

bethecloud 5y ago

Would be cool to back this to decentralized cloud storage (should be pretty easy to do via Storj S3 integration): https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-aws-sdk-and-hosted-gateway-mt/ https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-aws-sdk... Or even Restic directly: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/backup-with-restic/ https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/backup-with-restic/

bimbashrestha 5y ago
I think decentralized storage + Blobbackup could make for an interesting pairing. I'll make time to look into it.
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  So as of now I can use it your app and to b2? Because that’s where my restic backups go to (natively).
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    I tried the app and I did notice the first screen is "Select Storage Location" after you try to add a new backup and it lists: local dir, aws, gc, azure, b2, s3, sftp. So I indeed guess it can as well be used as restic frontend (but I am not really sure to what extent it uses restic and whether blobbackup is just a gui/skin for restic)
    - rsync 5y ago
      Ahhh … sftp is a choice. Great job!
    - bimbashrestha 5y ago
      Hey! Thanks for trying the app. I think you may have tried our original app (the original folder in the github repo). I need to clean up the Releases page. That version used a custom backup engine and allowed backups to a number of storage providers (S3, B2, SFTP, etc). The new app uses restic as the backup engine and only supports backups to B2 right now. Sorry for the confusion.

agucova 5y ago

If this would allow me to check my files in a simple web UI (no need for collaboration or anything), and create share links for low-volume downloads I could just leave Google Drive permanently.

jstummbillig 5y ago
You could, but would you, really.
bimbashrestha 5y ago
Ah sadly that probably won't happen soon. All the data is encrypted with your master password (password manager style) and that master password isn't transfered to the server. So you'd have to use the desktop client to access your files.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  You could create a sharing mechanism, though; let the desktop client encrypt a copy of the file with a randomly generated key and share that key in the download URL like Mega does it. Requires extra data transfers and extra storage, but for small files that seems doable without invalidating the master password setup. You do end with two separate encryption systems, though. A more scalable solution would be to encrypt every file with a different key and encrypt the key store with the master password (but that would obviously require a relatively extensive rewrite). You'd be able to get more fine-grained file access without sacrificing the single master password setup. That way, you can simply share the file key when you want to generate a share link.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Consider using https://wetransfer.com https://wetransfer.com for one off transfers.
- adenner 5y ago
  I have had great luck using https://www.wesendit.com/ https://www.wesendit.com/ for this use case.

mendelmaleh 5y ago

> I actually really like Backblaze (even use B2 for this offering behind the scenes) B2 is $5/tb, you are charging $9 for 5tb? How does that work? Do the old versions count towards the quota?

bimbashrestha 5y ago
It's $9/computer so if you have another computer, you can't use the same 5 TB quota. I'm banking on most people having less than 5 tb per computer to backup. It's kind of like what Backblaze Personal does for their unlimited plan but slightly lower tier I suppose (since there is no way I could do unlimited).
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  You probably will want to have something to discourage the data hoarders. They might not be many in numbers, but they can rack up quite the TB count.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - brianwski 5y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. Here is a histogram of backup sizes of our Backblaze Personal Backup Customers if it is useful: https://i.imgur.com/GiHhrDo.gif https://i.imgur.com/GiHhrDo.gif You have to zoom in to see the meaningful information. It can be super surprising to developers and IT people (like us) to see a lot of customers have less data than you might think. When we started we had no idea what might come of all of this, so it was "stressful". :-) So I welcome another backup client developer to our club, and hope this can help them out.
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      They aren't that many, but I'm assuming he's starting up so not sure how many he can handle. I recall Crashplan having enough >10TB guys that they decided "unlimited" wasn't, and that was many years ago. Personally I have 3TB of essential data, and about 10TB if I wanted to backup most of my computer. Interesting graph though, thanks for sharing!

oceankid 5y ago

Nicely done. Any plans for allowing to pick a US/EU/Asia data center?

bimbashrestha 5y ago
I'm planning on adding an Amsterdam storage location in a month or so!

yewenjie 5y ago

Off topic but what is the cheapest object storage service for less than 1 TB of data?

bimbashrestha 5y ago
Probably B2 (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html). Half a penny per GB.
sreitshamer 5y ago
Google Cloud's Archive tier is cheapest to store at about $1.23/TB per month, but downloading is very expensive.
bityard 5y ago
Minio on a raspberry pi at a friends house.
Gasp0de 5y ago
https://storj.io https://storj.io
guerby 5y ago
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box 3.45 EUR/month for 1 TB, plenty of protocols (including borg and rsync), no bandwidth limit, 10 snapshots.

gingerlime 5y ago

looks great! I have a question about backing up my mac. Let’s say my mac is stolen/dropped from a bridge. Can I actually restore everything on a new mac, or still need to install and configure from scratch and “just” have a backup of documents, images etc?

bimbashrestha 5y ago
It's a file level backup (as opposed to an image or disk backup). So anything related to the operating system is not backed up but all your "data" (documents, photos, music, movies, etc) is. Here is a support page that explains what is backed up by default (which you can ofc change) [1]. [1] https://blobbackup.com/support/what-is-being-backed-up/ https://blobbackup.com/support/what-is-being-backed-up/

thesimon 5y ago

Was looking quite long for the company behind this and expected a B2B offering to be located at "Company", not an about us. Stating your company name and an address would greatly increase my trust.

bimbashrestha 5y ago
Ah good point. I've made a github issue for it (you'll find the company name and address there btw) [1]. We are actually working on a B2B offering right now (see the banner on the top of the home page for more info) [2][3]. [1] https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/93 https://github.com/Blobbackup/Blobbackup/issues/93 [2] https://blobbackup.com https://blobbackup.com [3] https://forms.gle/euPCbhZaf1CMN8LbA https://forms.gle/euPCbhZaf1CMN8LbA

lobochrome 5y ago

I like Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ They were only an app back in the day, which backed up to any object store you chose. Although now they are trying the saas way of things too.

sreitshamer 5y ago
Not sure what you mean by "trying the saas way of things". We still sell Arq 7 as a standalone app. It comes with a year of updates. You can choose to renew, or not and keep using the app you bought forever. Similar licensing to Panic's Nova app https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/arq7Pricing.html https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/a...
- lobochrome 5y ago
  Well - you changed from a pure Mac App to a SaaS style offering with a reasonable licensing for people who don't want to subscribe. That's fine - and I am a subscriber. Seeing you adding storage directly makes me slightly afraid that you will join the VC money train at some stage (like 1password did). No shame in doing it but things change then. I like single-purpose crafted apps, and Arq has been this for me for a long time. I hope it stays this way & Thank You for your good work ^^
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jfkimmes 5y ago

Interesting. I had not heard of restic, yet. My default backup choice has been borg[1] for a long time, so borgbase.com was a natural choice for off-site backups for me. They make Vorta a decent GUI client for borg - that's how I found out about them. Can someone here give a comparison of borg and restic by any chance? [1]: https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/

bimbashrestha 5y ago
Borg supports local and SFTP backups while Restic supports more (a lot more). S3, Google Cloud, B2, etc. In fact, they integrate with rclone so anything you can access using rclone, you can backup to using Restic. Borg uses compression while Restic does not. Restic just uses deduplication so your backups with Restic will likely be larger in size. Anyway, that's what jumps to mind. They're both pretty great honestly (in terms of community support and reliability). There are a lot of other options too btw. The Restic repo has a pretty good list [1] [1] https://github.com/restic/others https://github.com/restic/others
- philjohn 5y ago
  The rclone backend is a killer feature of Restic - using it in my home setup which is: 6 computers backing up using UrBackup client to a 6 drive 2U NAS running Raid Z2 and UrBackup server (which is nice as it stores incremental backups as ZFS child datasets). I then have a post backup script which creates a snapshot of the latest backup, mounts it, backs up using Restic using the JottaCloud rclone backend.
- stavros 5y ago
  Do you know if Restic supports block-level deduplication? I am backing up some database dumps and the backup filesystem has ballooned in size, even though the dumps are 99% identical every day. This makes me suspect that they only deduplicate on the file level, and that I would have some very significant savings if I zipped the dumps before backing up. EDIT: Some details on deduplication are here, and I'm puzzled as to why my backups are so big: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/100_references.html?highlight=deduplication#backups-and-deduplication https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/100_references.html?...

clement12 5y ago

slyall 5y ago

Need some proofreading: "We only offer montly biling at this time"

lpellis 5y ago
A few more minor ones ('juristiction'): https://app.pagewatch.dev/5ebf46bce58c44dd7cf0dafdb78fbb48df3b6196/spelling/issues https://app.pagewatch.dev/5ebf46bce58c44dd7cf0dafdb78fbb48df...
bimbashrestha 5y ago
That's embarrassing... Thanks, I'll fix it:)

leetrout 5y ago

My goto tool for secure backups is tarsnap. He only supports S3 as far as I know so using B2 could be a good differentiator. Wonder if either of you will add support for cloudflares R2? https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/

asojfdowgh 5y ago
backblaze supports s3 protocol
xupybd 5y ago
The lack of direct support for Windows prevented me from using tarsnap. Restic allows me to use shadow volumes.
throwthere 5y ago
I think price is the main differentiator here. TarSnap is 50x as expensive.
corobo 5y ago
Does Cloudflare’s R2 exist? I saw the announcement but nothing else other than folks like me wondering; has anyone at all got access yet?
- jve 5y ago
  Seems its still in closed beta: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cloudflares-r2-storage-service-takes-100s-of-pbyte-of-business-in-closed-beta/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cloudflares-r2-st... But yeah, comment sounds so weird for a non released product.
  - corobo 5y ago
    Ah good so it actually does exist in a way that's more than a spec, that's good enough for me. I'm in no rush with that slurp mode or whatever they called it, just hadn't heard of anything more since the announcement :)
  - 5y ago

xiphias2 5y ago

Is there a Google Drive clone with encrypted backups? I love the usability of Google Drive (being able to access / make files offline whenever I want), but the Mac update started to force me to upload all my files, which I don't want to do, as the files are not encrypted.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Google Drive with rclone and the crypt layer (https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/)?
- xiphias2 5y ago
  It looks like a command line application, I'm looking for something with a great OS X, iOS, Android and web GUI (and happy to pay for it). Dropbox looks similar to Google Drive with the same problem (No E2E encryption)
  - vanc_cefepime 5y ago
    Maybe https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ works for you? Has E2EE. As far as I know, it’s not open source, but the format is open. I use them to back up files from my Mac to Dropbox. I also use Cryptomator but that’s just for regular files that I pull from different iOS device to Dropbox.
  - allisdust 5y ago
    Try Duplicati. Cross platform, free and supports several backends (google drive, s3 and s3 compatible providers etc). Supports encryption so you have data security.
  - tedmiston 5y ago
    You can use Cryptomator with the various cloud storage backends. https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
jbc1 5y ago

aborsy 5y ago

Another upvote for restic!

pappeyrome 5y ago

Could you please add a Postal address to your https://blobbackup.com/company/ https://blobbackup.com/company/ ?

mhdhn 5y ago

Do you have a warrant canary?