4 ms·

So 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 t

by tedivm 13y ago

So 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.

novaleaf 13y ago
well, at least you should be comforted by the fact that your problem (or at least, re-reporting it here on HN) will cause them to fix the bug that got you into this mess.
graeme 13y ago
Can anyone else comment on their experience with Backblaze's systems, and how competitors compare?
TwoBit 13y ago
If I understand it right, you purchased a license after your trial expired and the backup was purged. And you didn't backup anything new upon getting the new license. So the GUI status bug was a real and unfortunate bug on Backblaze's side, but it was only a GUI bug and in fact they didn't lose your data in any unexpected way. This situation seems to be about 2/3rds BackBlaze's fault and 1/3rd your fault. You also have bonus fault on your side for not testing the BackBlaze backup. Never ever trust a backup, even if it's right in front of you on your own disk, unless you can successfully restore it.
- atYevP 13y ago
  We do recommend having a 3-2-1 backup (3 total copies, 2 local (1 original, 1 local external), and 1 offsite (where Backblaze comes in). In Tedivm's defense though, he did find an actual glitch in our UI that occurred in edge cases, and we've since fixed it. The unfortunate part is that he lost data when we no longer had a copy, and we're actively working on additional ways to avoid that in the future.
- tedivm 13y ago
  Yup, there were serious flaws in our backup plans here. In my defense, we hadn't been dating long enough at the time for me to really get things set and we were on our way to burning man ;-) I am not claiming to be without fault, but I do think that Backblaze is on the lower end of the reliability spectrum when it comes companies that do this, which is why I bring up these issues. I've switched over to Crashplan and have external harddrives doing local backups. I should also point out that this isn't the only issue that's come up with this company. Apparently their client side GUI is also not completely truthful about when it's backed things up, and will claim to have backed up files when it's really only backed up the indexes. It then spreads the real backups out in order to increase performance. Although this is a cool feature, it's one people should be aware of and not hidden. I have less knowledge of this though, as I only saw it in a few blog posts (google around instead of taking my word for it).
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    "Lower end of spectrum" - of precisely two companies that I know of, CrashPlan and BackBlaze, that do "Whole Disk Backups at a fixed rate". I'm a big fan of using a combination of Arq (Love It), Dropbox, BackBlaze, and SuperDuper, but - crashplan/backblaze are both pretty similar, and both have their pros/cons, and, likewise, hundreds of anecdotes from the user community of each. For what it's worth, I'm in my fifth year of Backblaze, and I've always been able to recover all my files - but I've also kept my subscription paid up. And, I don't believe I've ever seen your "real backups happening spread over" claim - I am frequently in the field, so I am very aware of exactly when backblaze is sending data (frequently over my iPhone using Roaming Data) - and when backblaze says it's done backing up - that's pretty much exactly when data is no longer sent out.

by tedivm 13y ago

novaleaf 13y ago

well, at least you should be comforted by the fact that your problem (or at least, re-reporting it here on HN) will cause them to fix the bug that got you into this mess.

graeme 13y ago

Can anyone else comment on their experience with Backblaze's systems, and how competitors compare?

TwoBit 13y ago

If I understand it right, you purchased a license after your trial expired and the backup was purged. And you didn't backup anything new upon getting the new license. So the GUI status bug was a real and unfortunate bug on Backblaze's side, but it was only a GUI bug and in fact they didn't lose your data in any unexpected way. This situation seems to be about 2/3rds BackBlaze's fault and 1/3rd your fault. You also have bonus fault on your side for not testing the BackBlaze backup. Never ever trust a backup, even if it's right in front of you on your own disk, unless you can successfully restore it.

atYevP 13y ago
We do recommend having a 3-2-1 backup (3 total copies, 2 local (1 original, 1 local external), and 1 offsite (where Backblaze comes in). In Tedivm's defense though, he did find an actual glitch in our UI that occurred in edge cases, and we've since fixed it. The unfortunate part is that he lost data when we no longer had a copy, and we're actively working on additional ways to avoid that in the future.
tedivm 13y ago
Yup, there were serious flaws in our backup plans here. In my defense, we hadn't been dating long enough at the time for me to really get things set and we were on our way to burning man ;-) I am not claiming to be without fault, but I do think that Backblaze is on the lower end of the reliability spectrum when it comes companies that do this, which is why I bring up these issues. I've switched over to Crashplan and have external harddrives doing local backups. I should also point out that this isn't the only issue that's come up with this company. Apparently their client side GUI is also not completely truthful about when it's backed things up, and will claim to have backed up files when it's really only backed up the indexes. It then spreads the real backups out in order to increase performance. Although this is a cool feature, it's one people should be aware of and not hidden. I have less knowledge of this though, as I only saw it in a few blog posts (google around instead of taking my word for it).
- ghshephard 13y ago
  "Lower end of spectrum" - of precisely two companies that I know of, CrashPlan and BackBlaze, that do "Whole Disk Backups at a fixed rate". I'm a big fan of using a combination of Arq (Love It), Dropbox, BackBlaze, and SuperDuper, but - crashplan/backblaze are both pretty similar, and both have their pros/cons, and, likewise, hundreds of anecdotes from the user community of each. For what it's worth, I'm in my fifth year of Backblaze, and I've always been able to recover all my files - but I've also kept my subscription paid up. And, I don't believe I've ever seen your "real backups happening spread over" claim - I am frequently in the field, so I am very aware of exactly when backblaze is sending data (frequently over my iPhone using Roaming Data) - and when backblaze says it's done backing up - that's pretty much exactly when data is no longer sent out.