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Man, I keep seeing awesome posts about Backblaze, and really would like to use them. However I run exclusively on linux these days, and they don't seem to have

by vamega 12y ago

Man, I keep seeing awesome posts about Backblaze, and really would like to use them. However I run exclusively on linux these days, and they don't seem to have a Linux client. Public pledge, if backblaze releases a linux client, even if it's command line only and requires that I manually edit an XML file, I'll purchase a 1 year subscription.

epaladin 12y ago
The only issue I have with them is the removal of deleted files from backup archives after 30 days. Crashplan doesn't have that restriction (and also has a Linux client) although the Java-based engine is pretty clunky, and it eats memory like crazy to do client-side dedupe if you have it enabled. They've been promising native clients for a long time, and a sales guy earlier this year said v4.0 was going to be out Q1 this year, which the engineering team later denied ever saying... So I still don't know when the non-Java version is coming with its improved memory efficiency.
- deno 12y ago
  I really wish at some point JVM will stop being synonymous with memory–hog on desktop. It’s certainly possible, e.g. http://hiroshiyamauchi.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-jvm-release-memory.html http://hiroshiyamauchi.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-jvm-relea...
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Public pledge, if backblaze releases a linux client, even if it's command line only and requires that I manually edit an XML file, I'll purchase a 1 year subscription. Consider how many Linux users would need to do this to a) pay for the developer time to write/maintain the client and b) pay for the support time for Linux issues
- pyre 12y ago
  There are other things to consider too: developer community goodwill, people that may not be on Linux now, but only use systems that are cross-platform (to curb lock-in to a particular OS), etc. How much revenue is Atom for Linux expected to generate for Github?
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Developer/Linux community goodwill for a user-friendly backup services isn't as valuable as you'd think. IT support staff? Those are the people you want to enamor yourself with. And they're either on Apple or Windows gear.
    - ars 12y ago
      Yes it is. Assuming your IT guy at work runs linux, then when you ask him: What backup should I get, if his answer is backblaze that brings a lot of business to you. Personally I assume they don't release a linux client because then people would backup their server to it.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Those IT guys don't need to use Backblaze on Linux to recommend it; they're going to recommend whatever "just works" so they don't have to "go down the rabbit hole". When I still used Android, I would recommend iPhones all the time to people. Why? Because it just works, and I don't want to be stuck troubleshooting their Android issues for the life of their phone.
        StavrosK 12y ago
        What about server backups?
- nathanstitt 12y ago
  I suspect that a larger issue might be that Linux users tend to run servers with multi-terabyte collections of stuff. It'd be difficult for them to make money at $5 a month off a guy who wants to backup 20TB of usenet archives or whatever. Right now those kind of collections are weeded out since they don't backup network shares.
- brianwski 12y ago
  I'm a Backblaze engineer, and we keep our one 'C' and 'C++' cross platform source tree building on three platforms every day: 1) Windows, 2) Macintosh, and 3) Debian Linux. (We also have iOS and some other future projects but I'm ommitting them from this discussion.) We use the Debian Linux binaries in our datacenter in production. The only parts that are missing are an installer and a GUI (or we could skip the GUI and let you hand edit the XML file you can already find on the Mac and Windows versions). There are a couple of technical problems I'd like to overcome in the next 12 months and get the Linux client out there. One technical problem is how many versions and flavors of Linux to support. For example, we're going to ship binaries for Debian simply because it's the flavor we use in our own datacenter, but after than we'll need CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, probably Gentoo, others? I'm not sure I understand the state of how others release shrink wrap Linux products in 2014? We could require customers to compile it, but that seems kind of horrid and very unlike Backblaze. If you aren't familiar with us, we are known as being friendly and easy to use. Backblaze is not a developer tool for scripting backups, you simply install Backblaze and it backs up your entire computer in order to be "easy". It was the only way we could be sure we had everything you needed. This is also why we charge a flat rate of $5/month. If we charged "per GByte" we would be accused of backing up everything to jack up our profits. :-)
linx 12y ago
Exactly. But all I see is since three years: "We would love to support Linux at some point, but unfortunately, we don't have anything to report on a timeframe"
makmanalp 12y ago
They could take the easy way out: publicize an API, and let people write their own opensource clients. Would work well with the linux prosumer group.
- fatrachet 12y ago
  But that would probably open them up to a lot of users using their service for online storage instead of just backups which they are trying to avoid I believe.
DanEdge 12y ago
Agreed on the awesome post front and one of the reasons I became a customer in the first place. I'm unlikely to renew my annual subscription this year, though, because they don't support external drives/NAS. I don't like cluttering up my laptop with photos so have to transfer everything I need backing up to my rarely used desktop PC, which is a pain. I can understand there's a risk people might abuse networked storage by backing up multiple devices but in my case I wouldn't mind paying more for that service or simply based on actual GBs stored. Edit: They do support external drives but not NAS. My bad.
- mrchucklepants 12y ago
  They do support external drives but not network drives. I have a 3 TB external drive attached to my MBA that backs up just fine.
  - DanEdge 12y ago
    Ugh, sorry. Not sure if that was always the case and I've mis-remembered or there's been a change but my NAS point remains. Personally, I'd rather not faff around with an external drive plugged directly into my laptop. Edit: typo
    - mrchucklepants 12y ago
      Makes sense. Mine is connected through a thunderbolt display so I only have to make/break one connection.
- magikid 12y ago
  Here's their page on external drives: https://www.backblaze.com/edrive.html https://www.backblaze.com/edrive.html
goblin89 12y ago
I'm a Backblaze user, became one right after another post from their blog hit HN front page about 8 months ago. Backblaze almost saved me once when my external HDD died due to dropping—the reason it didn't actually save me is because initial backup wasn't yet completed (not their fault). Otherwise I could easily order from them a new HDD with restored data, which is a very nice feature. Sadly their OS X client is kind of quirky—I'd rather have a command-line one that required hand-editing configuration files (I'd wish for something other than XML though), but which would run more reliably and transparently. (Currently it shows “Computer Missing” and says that I haven't backed up in more than 2 weeks, though I did actually press Backup Now quite a few times in past few days. There're some other oddities in behavior. I suspect I'm back into “searching for decent online backup solution” mode lately…)
- bananabob 12y ago
  I have the same problems as well with the OS X client. It definitely has issues handling external drives. It somehow doesn't display my exclusions of files on external drives anymore, but somehow is still following them. I'm really happy with their service (had it for ~2 years now), but would love to have a tool similar to how you describe with reduced bugginess and more tweaking ability.
  - bananabob 12y ago
    To follow up on this, it actually turns out the configuration for backblaze on OS X is in XML and tweakable. It can be found in /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzinfo.xml
- atYevP 12y ago
  Hi! @YevP from Backblaze here -> Have you tried to write in to support? They can take a look at the account and see if they can figure out why that oddness is occurring? https://www.backblaze.com/help.html https://www.backblaze.com/help.html.
IgorPartola 12y ago
I second this. I would love to be able to run a tool a la rsnapshot to store about 500 GB's worth of locally encrypted backups on a cloud provider. I am willing to pay about $100/year for this service. Backblaze offers this service for $60/year. But the problem is my home NAS (the origin point of all of these backups) is Linux/UNIX-based.
- tekacs 12y ago
  There _is_ Google Drive and the likes of Insync? That's $120/yr for 1TB.
vamega 12y ago
Someone just pointed out that you can't download data from them without providing them your private key's password. That seems boneheaded to me, and I guess would prevent me from honoring the pledge I made.
- LukeLambert 12y ago
  It sounds like you want http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com

by vamega 12y ago

epaladin 12y ago

The only issue I have with them is the removal of deleted files from backup archives after 30 days. Crashplan doesn't have that restriction (and also has a Linux client) although the Java-based engine is pretty clunky, and it eats memory like crazy to do client-side dedupe if you have it enabled. They've been promising native clients for a long time, and a sales guy earlier this year said v4.0 was going to be out Q1 this year, which the engineering team later denied ever saying... So I still don't know when the non-Java version is coming with its improved memory efficiency.

deno 12y ago
I really wish at some point JVM will stop being synonymous with memory–hog on desktop. It’s certainly possible, e.g. http://hiroshiyamauchi.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-jvm-release-memory.html http://hiroshiyamauchi.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-jvm-relea...

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> Public pledge, if backblaze releases a linux client, even if it's command line only and requires that I manually edit an XML file, I'll purchase a 1 year subscription. Consider how many Linux users would need to do this to a) pay for the developer time to write/maintain the client and b) pay for the support time for Linux issues

pyre 12y ago
There are other things to consider too: developer community goodwill, people that may not be on Linux now, but only use systems that are cross-platform (to curb lock-in to a particular OS), etc. How much revenue is Atom for Linux expected to generate for Github?
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Developer/Linux community goodwill for a user-friendly backup services isn't as valuable as you'd think. IT support staff? Those are the people you want to enamor yourself with. And they're either on Apple or Windows gear.
  - ars 12y ago
    Yes it is. Assuming your IT guy at work runs linux, then when you ask him: What backup should I get, if his answer is backblaze that brings a lot of business to you. Personally I assume they don't release a linux client because then people would backup their server to it.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Those IT guys don't need to use Backblaze on Linux to recommend it; they're going to recommend whatever "just works" so they don't have to "go down the rabbit hole". When I still used Android, I would recommend iPhones all the time to people. Why? Because it just works, and I don't want to be stuck troubleshooting their Android issues for the life of their phone.
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        What about server backups?
nathanstitt 12y ago
I suspect that a larger issue might be that Linux users tend to run servers with multi-terabyte collections of stuff. It'd be difficult for them to make money at $5 a month off a guy who wants to backup 20TB of usenet archives or whatever. Right now those kind of collections are weeded out since they don't backup network shares.
brianwski 12y ago
I'm a Backblaze engineer, and we keep our one 'C' and 'C++' cross platform source tree building on three platforms every day: 1) Windows, 2) Macintosh, and 3) Debian Linux. (We also have iOS and some other future projects but I'm ommitting them from this discussion.) We use the Debian Linux binaries in our datacenter in production. The only parts that are missing are an installer and a GUI (or we could skip the GUI and let you hand edit the XML file you can already find on the Mac and Windows versions). There are a couple of technical problems I'd like to overcome in the next 12 months and get the Linux client out there. One technical problem is how many versions and flavors of Linux to support. For example, we're going to ship binaries for Debian simply because it's the flavor we use in our own datacenter, but after than we'll need CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, probably Gentoo, others? I'm not sure I understand the state of how others release shrink wrap Linux products in 2014? We could require customers to compile it, but that seems kind of horrid and very unlike Backblaze. If you aren't familiar with us, we are known as being friendly and easy to use. Backblaze is not a developer tool for scripting backups, you simply install Backblaze and it backs up your entire computer in order to be "easy". It was the only way we could be sure we had everything you needed. This is also why we charge a flat rate of $5/month. If we charged "per GByte" we would be accused of backing up everything to jack up our profits. :-)

linx 12y ago

Exactly. But all I see is since three years: "We would love to support Linux at some point, but unfortunately, we don't have anything to report on a timeframe"

makmanalp 12y ago

They could take the easy way out: publicize an API, and let people write their own opensource clients. Would work well with the linux prosumer group.

fatrachet 12y ago
But that would probably open them up to a lot of users using their service for online storage instead of just backups which they are trying to avoid I believe.

DanEdge 12y ago

Agreed on the awesome post front and one of the reasons I became a customer in the first place. I'm unlikely to renew my annual subscription this year, though, because they don't support external drives/NAS. I don't like cluttering up my laptop with photos so have to transfer everything I need backing up to my rarely used desktop PC, which is a pain. I can understand there's a risk people might abuse networked storage by backing up multiple devices but in my case I wouldn't mind paying more for that service or simply based on actual GBs stored. Edit: They do support external drives but not NAS. My bad.

mrchucklepants 12y ago
They do support external drives but not network drives. I have a 3 TB external drive attached to my MBA that backs up just fine.
- DanEdge 12y ago
  Ugh, sorry. Not sure if that was always the case and I've mis-remembered or there's been a change but my NAS point remains. Personally, I'd rather not faff around with an external drive plugged directly into my laptop. Edit: typo
  - mrchucklepants 12y ago
    Makes sense. Mine is connected through a thunderbolt display so I only have to make/break one connection.
magikid 12y ago
Here's their page on external drives: https://www.backblaze.com/edrive.html https://www.backblaze.com/edrive.html

goblin89 12y ago

I'm a Backblaze user, became one right after another post from their blog hit HN front page about 8 months ago. Backblaze almost saved me once when my external HDD died due to dropping—the reason it didn't actually save me is because initial backup wasn't yet completed (not their fault). Otherwise I could easily order from them a new HDD with restored data, which is a very nice feature. Sadly their OS X client is kind of quirky—I'd rather have a command-line one that required hand-editing configuration files (I'd wish for something other than XML though), but which would run more reliably and transparently. (Currently it shows “Computer Missing” and says that I haven't backed up in more than 2 weeks, though I did actually press Backup Now quite a few times in past few days. There're some other oddities in behavior. I suspect I'm back into “searching for decent online backup solution” mode lately…)

bananabob 12y ago
I have the same problems as well with the OS X client. It definitely has issues handling external drives. It somehow doesn't display my exclusions of files on external drives anymore, but somehow is still following them. I'm really happy with their service (had it for ~2 years now), but would love to have a tool similar to how you describe with reduced bugginess and more tweaking ability.
- bananabob 12y ago
  To follow up on this, it actually turns out the configuration for backblaze on OS X is in XML and tweakable. It can be found in /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzinfo.xml
atYevP 12y ago
Hi! @YevP from Backblaze here -> Have you tried to write in to support? They can take a look at the account and see if they can figure out why that oddness is occurring? https://www.backblaze.com/help.html https://www.backblaze.com/help.html.

IgorPartola 12y ago

I second this. I would love to be able to run a tool a la rsnapshot to store about 500 GB's worth of locally encrypted backups on a cloud provider. I am willing to pay about $100/year for this service. Backblaze offers this service for $60/year. But the problem is my home NAS (the origin point of all of these backups) is Linux/UNIX-based.

tekacs 12y ago
There _is_ Google Drive and the likes of Insync? That's $120/yr for 1TB.

vamega 12y ago

Someone just pointed out that you can't download data from them without providing them your private key's password. That seems boneheaded to me, and I guess would prevent me from honoring the pledge I made.

LukeLambert 12y ago
It sounds like you want http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com