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Why do they need hard drives when they don't even back up data? Seriously, you can find reports of this all over the internet. It's on reddit, twitter and else
by tedivm 13y ago
Why do they need hard drives when they don't even back up data?
Seriously, you can find reports of this all over the internet. It's on reddit, twitter and elsewhere- these guys do not back files up properly, and their systems are so shoddy that they'll report they have files even when they don't.
My girlfriend brought her computer in for repair and they changed the hard drive. She specifically checked before she left that the backups were set, and the dashboard said they were. When we went to restore, however, none of the files could be.
We contacted support and they kept insisting we did something wrong. Finally they admitted that they had erased the files (yes, actually erased them). Due to a "bug" their dashboard reported we still had the files, even though they were gone.
They did everything they could to hide their mistake. They lied to people on twitter about what I was saying (since the only way to get real support was to hound their twitter account). They lied about all sorts of things. I had to take screen shots of everything and post it online before they'd even admit to screwing up. Even at that point their dashboard was still saying it had all of these files, when it in fact had nothing.
Backblaze is a completely untrustworthy company. If they spent half as much effort on backing up files as they do on marketing that may be a different case. Anyone who uses them for backups might as well not have backups at all.
- kalleboo 13y agoThe second rule of backups is, always test your backups. Never trust a cloud service, backup software or tape drive status. Test a restore periodically, or you can't be sure you're backed up at all.
- bruceboughton 13y agoVery true, but victim blaming gets us nowhere.
- kalleboo 13y agoAbsolutely, Backblaze are at fault here. Having a dashboard lie about files being there is a really, really serious bug. But computers always lie. Your disk says the file is there, you double click it, and it starts making noises and the file doesn't open. Backup systems are the same. It says the files are safe, but unless you test it, they may not be. In the end, all I want to say is, I wish ZFS was free software :(
- atYevP 13y agoHey Tedivm! Yev from Backblaze here -> It's true that the data was removed from your account. After your trial lapsed and was not paid for, we removed the data after 7 days as is our standard practice. Unfortunately in your case the overview page did not update to show that you had no data associated with your computer, so when you purchased the license, there was no data on the machine that it attached too, so when you erased data from the machine while performing maintenance, you assumed the data was on Backblaze, when it was in fact purged from our system a few weeks prior. We've since fixed that visual glitch (if you have a trial that expires and is not paid for, once the data has been deleted, that will be reflected on the overview page) AND we're currently working on some other notification systems to help people avoid losing data. As always, I apologize that you had this problem, but I'm happy to inform you that we've since fixed that visual bug on our end.
- tedivm 13y agoSo everyone else is clear, we did pay for the account after the trial ended. So we were paying customers, this wasn't an incident where a trial expired and we tried to get our data back. Also, to be clear, the customer service experience was horrible. The support team repeatedly ignored what we were saying and send us form responses back which were just not relevant. The twitter team claimed we misread the retention policy. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous. Even more to the point, and the main reason why I tell this story, is that people should know how this company operates. People should know that they don't have backups of backups, that there is no margin for error should your account lapse, and that their systems in general are not robustly programmed in the sense that there are ways that your data could be lost and you wouldn't know it. From my perspective Backblaze only has one thing going for it over competing companies, and that's it's marketing department.