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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 li

by 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.
  - tedivm 13y ago
    Yev, the same dev who is commenting here, has admitted to the claims about back up times. You should read through this reddit thread, it shows that Backblaze does not do things as you'd think- http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1q14ca/ysk_that_backblaze_may_not_be_backing_up_your/ http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1q14ca/ysk_th... > If you boot up real quickly and want to do a scan one thing you can do is open up the control panel and hit "Alt" + "Restore Options", we'll do a small-file rescan immediately and schedule a large-file scan. >Small is files under 30MB or so, it's a quick index, the larger files take a bit longer and we try to spread those out over the course of a few hours so as not to be too heavy on your system.
    - atYevP 13y ago
      Yes, that's accurate. The program was designed to be light on systems so we are not constantly scanning and indexing your hard drives. In our best practices we tell people to leave their machines on for a few hours. We cannot run when the machine is off, so if the machine is constantly being turned on and off it'll disrupt our scans. The "Alt + Restore Options" method forces a scan, but you'll still need the machine to be turned on/connected to the internet in order for us to transmit the data. Just pressing "backup now" will start pushing the data that has already been queued for upload during a previous scan (if there was anything left over), but will not necessarily initiate a scan (unless there was nothing left over from the previous uploads).

by TwoBit 13y ago

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.
- tedivm 13y ago
  Yev, the same dev who is commenting here, has admitted to the claims about back up times. You should read through this reddit thread, it shows that Backblaze does not do things as you'd think- http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1q14ca/ysk_that_backblaze_may_not_be_backing_up_your/ http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1q14ca/ysk_th... > If you boot up real quickly and want to do a scan one thing you can do is open up the control panel and hit "Alt" + "Restore Options", we'll do a small-file rescan immediately and schedule a large-file scan. >Small is files under 30MB or so, it's a quick index, the larger files take a bit longer and we try to spread those out over the course of a few hours so as not to be too heavy on your system.
  - atYevP 13y ago
    Yes, that's accurate. The program was designed to be light on systems so we are not constantly scanning and indexing your hard drives. In our best practices we tell people to leave their machines on for a few hours. We cannot run when the machine is off, so if the machine is constantly being turned on and off it'll disrupt our scans. The "Alt + Restore Options" method forces a scan, but you'll still need the machine to be turned on/connected to the internet in order for us to transmit the data. Just pressing "backup now" will start pushing the data that has already been queued for upload during a previous scan (if there was anything left over), but will not necessarily initiate a scan (unless there was nothing left over from the previous uploads).