5 ms·

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using s

by moe 12y ago

This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.). With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

sp332 12y ago
Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.
- pbsk 12y ago
  Yes, but would you spend weeks uploading your 4TB?
  - sp332 12y ago
    Well... yeah. But it doesn't cost me any money to restore either, so it's much cheaper. I don't think they're going to feel threatened by this.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Backblaze can probably afford to be $5/mo per computer because the average computer using it has less than 4TB; OTOH, if there is a more cost effective option for the low end, it won't make sense to use Backblaze on the low end, which will drive up Backblaze's sustainable per computer price.
  - atYevP 12y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> Fair point! Our costs keep decreasing as well -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/150-petabytes-of-cloud-storage/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/150-petabytes-of-cloud-storag... and we're able to grow quickly (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... ), so even if avg. user size goes up, decreasing costs make up for it overall.
- moe 12y ago
  Well, I would guess the number of people who need to backup 4T is rather small. My thinking is that most people likely max out well below the 0.5T that the same $5 buys you on Google now, making that variant actually cheaper for them than Backblaze. For those people it means paying less per month and getting privacy and better control (data retention!) in return. Should be a no-brainer.
  - berberous 12y ago
    Backblaze lets you add a personal encryption key. I guess they could log that key when you try to decrypt and restore, although I trust they don't. I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted, but I don't really care. Am I missing something here? If Backblaze's encryption implementation is substantially worse, I may switch.
    - moe 12y ago
      I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted [...] Am I missing something here? I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. ;) Anyway, if you don't care who has access to your backups then obviously my argument has no relevance to you.
      - berberous 12y ago
        "Well, what do I have to hide?" is a bad argument with respect to whether the NSA should be doing the things it does, but with respect to whether I am going to spend money and effort to hide my photos and documents from them, I think it's a fair argument. I care very much, however, whether hackers will have access to my files, as they can cause havoc with things like tax returns that the NSA won't (I mean, the government already has my tax returns....). So I was mainly curious if there was some significant flaw in Backblaze's encryption that should worry me from the perspective of a non-nation state adversary.
    - pbowyer 12y ago
      Can anyone comment how Crashplan stacks up vs Backblaze here? I'm leaning towards it as it'll save the data for more than 30 days after deletion, and security's another factor in my choice.
- rsync 12y ago
  "Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo." Beware flat rate service providers - it's not a consumer-friendly model: http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora... Your interests and the interests of your provider should be aligned, not opposed.
wongarsu 12y ago
For disaster recovery Nearline's speed restriction can be prohibitive. Not everyone can afford to wait 3 days for their backups to download.
mankyd 12y ago
> the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. Hardly. I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call. A number that's not software developer/ sys admin who has no idea why I'm calling about my mom's missing holiday photos.
- devopsproject 12y ago
  "I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call" Google "{service} lost all of my data" and see what kind of support these people got. I get that it gives you warm fuzzies but when these companies loose all of your data, you have almost no recourse.
  - mankyd 12y ago
    Sort of. I've called DropBox about missing data before. They actually were quite helpful and even helped recover most of it, despite the fact that I wasn't even a paying customer at the time. A more likely scenario is that the data is not lost, but my mother (or whoever is calling them) simply has things misconfigured. These companies _do_ provide useful support. Support that they're not going to get if they backup to a developer oriented service directly.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    The free services have no warranty on anything. The services you pay for (eg: with money, not just data) have a warranty. If they lose any data, they're liable for that as well. All the way up to taking them to court on it.
berberous 12y ago
I'm considering switching from Backblaze to Arq to backup personal files (photos, etc.) from my rMBP. Anybody have any experience doing this and can recommend one vs. the other? I have a 500GB drive, probably only 300GB to backup. Backblaze is only $5/month, and let's you encrypt, so I'm wondering if it's even worth switching.
- moe 12y ago
  I'm using Arq with DreamObjects currently (hope Google support will be added soon), backing up two laptops and a desktop, total backup size ~3T. I can hardly recommend it high enough. The only minor niggles that I've run into were: - If you have a very large directory (hundreds of thousands of files) then opening the backup-catalog can give you the beachball for minutes. However this really only happens for ginormous directories and is easily resolved by splitting the job into a few smaller ones. - If you're low on diskspace then the temp files that Arq creates during a backup can drive you over the edge and into a disk-full situation. Other than that it has been rock-solid for me, the author really knows what he's doing.
sreitshamer 12y ago
I'm adding support for creating nearline buckets in Arq right now.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- StavrosK 12y ago
  This is exactly what I want for Linux (headless), but I haven't been able to find anything like it. The closest thing I've found is attic, which, while amazing, requires a daemon to be running on the remote end (which is what makes checking, deduplication and deltas fast). Does anyone know an Arq alternative for linux?
  - rsync 12y ago
    duplicity ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(software)
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      Unfortunately duplicity is very inefficient, it needs to reupload the full set every so often, which takes up a lot of bandwidth. I guess attic is my best bet in the foreseeable future.
      - insaneirish 12y ago
        Haven't used it, but Duplicati is another one: http://www.duplicati.com/ http://www.duplicati.com/
        StavrosK 12y ago
        Looks very interesting, thanks! I'm investigating it now.
- antr 12y ago
cpr 12y ago
As a former Arq user, I'm happy to pay BackBlaze $5/month for not ever thinking about the backup problem again, on a bunch of family machines (mostly Macs but a couple of Windows machines as well). No thinking about installing software (e.g., Arq, and finding something equivalent for Windows), keeping that software up to date, checking that it's up and running properly, etc. (BackBlaze tells me when it hasn't been able to reach a given machine after some period.) So, no, I think the SaaS backup industry has nothing to fear from cheap online storage, at least for ordinary folk. (Hackers are a vanishingly small segment of that market.)
pjc50 12y ago
Arq would be exactly what I wanted if it wasn't Mac-only, and preferably open source.
- sreitshamer 12y ago
  Windows version coming soon! (I'm the developer behind Arq)
  - kjeldsendk 12y ago
    Fantastic, also support for Windows servers? And how do you lots of files and 50tb of data?
- hobarrera 12y ago
  It's also extremely expensive. I can put some effort for 5 USD per month for storage, but 40 USD upfront is prohibitive for me.
  - acdha 12y ago
    The cost of one dinner out is prohibitive? Just testing a backup solution alone would cost more than that, much less rolling your own, unless your time is worth considerably less than $40/hour.
    - hobarrera 12y ago
      I spend ~1.5USD per meal (for two people). We don't all live in first world economies with high-paying jobs.
josefresco 12y ago
How is using Arq+Nearline better than Backlaze (client and storage)? Not really "self hosted" if you're still dumping the data to a cloud provider. Even if you configure Arq to use your own "cloud" (cost of that notwithstanding) I don't think it's an overall net improvement.
- sreitshamer 12y ago
  (I'm the developer behind Arq) With Arq you keep control of your stuff because it's encrypted before it leaves your computer. With Backblaze you can choose your own encryption key, but to restore your files you have to give them your key; they decrypt your files and leave them (unencrypted!) on their servers for you to download, which I think makes choosing your own encryption key pointless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169040 https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html
  - rsync 12y ago
    arq (which we love) + rsync.net = success. We have a "HN readers" discount which is fairly substantial.
    - moe 12y ago
      = success rsync.net is 20x more expensive than Google Nearline ($0.20/GB). Why would anyone choose to use it for Arq when Arq supports both?
      - smtddr 12y ago
        While I personally don't mind Google having all my backup data, we must appreciate the fact that in this post-Snowden world some people will justifiably refuse to go with the big USA-corp players like Amazon or Google. rsync.net just saying: "Hey, we're not Google or Amazon" is already a big selling point for some.
      - rsync 12y ago

by moe 12y ago

sp332 12y ago

Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo.

pbsk 12y ago
Yes, but would you spend weeks uploading your 4TB?
- sp332 12y ago
  Well... yeah. But it doesn't cost me any money to restore either, so it's much cheaper. I don't think they're going to feel threatened by this.
dragonwriter 12y ago
Backblaze can probably afford to be $5/mo per computer because the average computer using it has less than 4TB; OTOH, if there is a more cost effective option for the low end, it won't make sense to use Backblaze on the low end, which will drive up Backblaze's sustainable per computer price.
- atYevP 12y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Fair point! Our costs keep decreasing as well -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/150-petabytes-of-cloud-storage/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/150-petabytes-of-cloud-storag... and we're able to grow quickly (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... ), so even if avg. user size goes up, decreasing costs make up for it overall.
moe 12y ago
Well, I would guess the number of people who need to backup 4T is rather small. My thinking is that most people likely max out well below the 0.5T that the same $5 buys you on Google now, making that variant actually cheaper for them than Backblaze. For those people it means paying less per month and getting privacy and better control (data retention!) in return. Should be a no-brainer.
- berberous 12y ago
  Backblaze lets you add a personal encryption key. I guess they could log that key when you try to decrypt and restore, although I trust they don't. I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted, but I don't really care. Am I missing something here? If Backblaze's encryption implementation is substantially worse, I may switch.
  - moe 12y ago
    I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted [...] Am I missing something here? I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. ;) Anyway, if you don't care who has access to your backups then obviously my argument has no relevance to you.
    - berberous 12y ago
      "Well, what do I have to hide?" is a bad argument with respect to whether the NSA should be doing the things it does, but with respect to whether I am going to spend money and effort to hide my photos and documents from them, I think it's a fair argument. I care very much, however, whether hackers will have access to my files, as they can cause havoc with things like tax returns that the NSA won't (I mean, the government already has my tax returns....). So I was mainly curious if there was some significant flaw in Backblaze's encryption that should worry me from the perspective of a non-nation state adversary.
  - pbowyer 12y ago
    Can anyone comment how Crashplan stacks up vs Backblaze here? I'm leaning towards it as it'll save the data for more than 30 days after deletion, and security's another factor in my choice.
rsync 12y ago
"Backblaze is $5/mo per computer. If I have 4TB on a computer, it's still just $5/mo." Beware flat rate service providers - it's not a consumer-friendly model: http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora... Your interests and the interests of your provider should be aligned, not opposed.

wongarsu 12y ago

For disaster recovery Nearline's speed restriction can be prohibitive. Not everyone can afford to wait 3 days for their backups to download.

mankyd 12y ago

> the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears. Hardly. I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call. A number that's not software developer/ sys admin who has no idea why I'm calling about my mom's missing holiday photos.

devopsproject 12y ago
"I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call" Google "{service} lost all of my data" and see what kind of support these people got. I get that it gives you warm fuzzies but when these companies loose all of your data, you have almost no recourse.
- mankyd 12y ago
  Sort of. I've called DropBox about missing data before. They actually were quite helpful and even helped recover most of it, despite the fact that I wasn't even a paying customer at the time. A more likely scenario is that the data is not lost, but my mother (or whoever is calling them) simply has things misconfigured. These companies _do_ provide useful support. Support that they're not going to get if they backup to a developer oriented service directly.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  The free services have no warranty on anything. The services you pay for (eg: with money, not just data) have a warranty. If they lose any data, they're liable for that as well. All the way up to taking them to court on it.

berberous 12y ago

I'm considering switching from Backblaze to Arq to backup personal files (photos, etc.) from my rMBP. Anybody have any experience doing this and can recommend one vs. the other? I have a 500GB drive, probably only 300GB to backup. Backblaze is only $5/month, and let's you encrypt, so I'm wondering if it's even worth switching.

moe 12y ago
I'm using Arq with DreamObjects currently (hope Google support will be added soon), backing up two laptops and a desktop, total backup size ~3T. I can hardly recommend it high enough. The only minor niggles that I've run into were: - If you have a very large directory (hundreds of thousands of files) then opening the backup-catalog can give you the beachball for minutes. However this really only happens for ginormous directories and is easily resolved by splitting the job into a few smaller ones. - If you're low on diskspace then the temp files that Arq creates during a backup can drive you over the edge and into a disk-full situation. Other than that it has been rock-solid for me, the author really knows what he's doing.

sreitshamer 12y ago

I'm adding support for creating nearline buckets in Arq right now.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
StavrosK 12y ago
This is exactly what I want for Linux (headless), but I haven't been able to find anything like it. The closest thing I've found is attic, which, while amazing, requires a daemon to be running on the remote end (which is what makes checking, deduplication and deltas fast). Does anyone know an Arq alternative for linux?
- rsync 12y ago
  duplicity ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicity_(software)
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Unfortunately duplicity is very inefficient, it needs to reupload the full set every so often, which takes up a lot of bandwidth. I guess attic is my best bet in the foreseeable future.
    - insaneirish 12y ago
      Haven't used it, but Duplicati is another one: http://www.duplicati.com/ http://www.duplicati.com/
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        Looks very interesting, thanks! I'm investigating it now.
antr 12y ago

cpr 12y ago

As a former Arq user, I'm happy to pay BackBlaze $5/month for not ever thinking about the backup problem again, on a bunch of family machines (mostly Macs but a couple of Windows machines as well). No thinking about installing software (e.g., Arq, and finding something equivalent for Windows), keeping that software up to date, checking that it's up and running properly, etc. (BackBlaze tells me when it hasn't been able to reach a given machine after some period.) So, no, I think the SaaS backup industry has nothing to fear from cheap online storage, at least for ordinary folk. (Hackers are a vanishingly small segment of that market.)

pjc50 12y ago

Arq would be exactly what I wanted if it wasn't Mac-only, and preferably open source.

sreitshamer 12y ago
Windows version coming soon! (I'm the developer behind Arq)
- kjeldsendk 12y ago
  Fantastic, also support for Windows servers? And how do you lots of files and 50tb of data?
hobarrera 12y ago
It's also extremely expensive. I can put some effort for 5 USD per month for storage, but 40 USD upfront is prohibitive for me.
- acdha 12y ago
  The cost of one dinner out is prohibitive? Just testing a backup solution alone would cost more than that, much less rolling your own, unless your time is worth considerably less than $40/hour.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    I spend ~1.5USD per meal (for two people). We don't all live in first world economies with high-paying jobs.

josefresco 12y ago

How is using Arq+Nearline better than Backlaze (client and storage)? Not really "self hosted" if you're still dumping the data to a cloud provider. Even if you configure Arq to use your own "cloud" (cost of that notwithstanding) I don't think it's an overall net improvement.

sreitshamer 12y ago
(I'm the developer behind Arq) With Arq you keep control of your stuff because it's encrypted before it leaves your computer. With Backblaze you can choose your own encryption key, but to restore your files you have to give them your key; they decrypt your files and leave them (unencrypted!) on their servers for you to download, which I think makes choosing your own encryption key pointless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8169040 https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html
- rsync 12y ago
  arq (which we love) + rsync.net = success. We have a "HN readers" discount which is fairly substantial.
  - moe 12y ago
    = success rsync.net is 20x more expensive than Google Nearline ($0.20/GB). Why would anyone choose to use it for Arq when Arq supports both?
    - smtddr 12y ago
      While I personally don't mind Google having all my backup data, we must appreciate the fact that in this post-Snowden world some people will justifiably refuse to go with the big USA-corp players like Amazon or Google. rsync.net just saying: "Hey, we're not Google or Amazon" is already a big selling point for some.
    - rsync 12y ago