Good to see Seagate has improved the quality of its product significantly, but a 3.5% failure rate still seems rather high. How old are the drives in question?
When the FCC started doing reports on internet speeds, ISPs took notice and in the second report, an ISP's actual speeds better matched advertised speeds. It would be awesome if these Backblaze reports were likewise improving hard drives.
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...
DISCLAIMER: I have not run my brilliant idea past any lawyers, so it may not be legal. We have not done this (yet).
Are you talking about some kind of burn-in at Backblaze for units sold to get past the infantile failure region? Or just Backblaze-as-drive-retailer but they specifically endorse this model because they have good experience with it?
I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. That said, one of my drives has been acting up in the last few days so that moment may be at hand (though I also have it backed up to a second local drive).
Yev from Backblaze. Please test a restore. We have that as part of our best practices. Why? Hopefully you won't but if you DO need a restore, it's likely that you'll be in a heightened state of panic, so familiarizing yourself with the process before hand make it go more smoothly! It's pretty easy, though we are currently working on ways to streamline it even further :)
When customers are doing a restore, almost by definition they are not having a good day. For example, this could be somebody who just had a $1,200 laptop stolen, and now they might lose every photo they have of their child who died last year. Real example. :-( So they show up to the Backblaze website freaked out of their minds, and they FORGET THEIR PASSWORD or something silly and minor like that, and after guessing a few times our support guys get a flaming hot chat session with a person using more four letter words than not accusing Backblaze of not having their restore.
When we resolve it all (help them with the "recover password" feature) then we usually get a happy customer for life who apologizes for losing their temper earlier. I always find it amusing when they think they are the FIRST customer to ever lose their temper under such a stressful situation. Usually it isn't even the first one THAT DAY.
TL;DR - you only restore when you are freaking out. And that's Ok - your worst day is the day when Backblaze has to be the best.
A lot of our customers also restore just for fun or out of convenience. But yea, if you're one of the ones that's doing it out of necessity after a crash or theft, knowing how it works makes everything go a lot smoother.
You don't have backups, unless you can do restores. So you have to practice doing restores.
For my servers at work, we're using btrfs snapshots and send/receive to the backup host. So restoring files is just going into the appropriate snapshot directory, and copying out the files of interest.
If your backup scheme is any more complicated than that, you need to practice it at least a few times per year so that it is completely familiar.
Hilarious story from the old days...
We were doing backups to QIC tape drives. At one point, there was a lightning storm. The servers were plugged into UPSs with power protection though.
However, when running a backup, I noticed that the tape drive sounded a little different. So I check one of the backup tapes... the tape drive would no longer switch over the tracks on the tape. So it was just overwriting the same track again and again. Corrupted backups. Worse yet: silently corrupted backups. No messages from the OS about a hardware problem.
That could have been bad news if it wasn't caught quickly.
I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff).
So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business.
At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds.
Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs.
Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.
100% - I worked hard to make sure that was in the Best Practices sent out to every person that signs up with Backblaze. Restoring is the most important part. So far we have over 200PB of backups, but the stat that I like even more is that we have restored over 10 Billion files.
Bingo, I was just explaining this to someone yesterday. Testing the restores MUST be part of the backup strategy. If your db data is small enough to have it all in your test environment, I often try to test the restores by restoring to the test db and then using that db for the test environment until the next test restore.
I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. In case of a literal blaze and/or high water, even the local drive should be fine. If all drives are gone from a single catastrophe, I figure I (and everyone else) have more serious things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
How often can you swap them?
https://secure.backblaze.com/user_signin.htm type your username, password, and click "Sign In", then....
Look on the left nave for "View/Restore Files", browse to one file you know you changed recently, and check the checkbox by it (and maybe a few other files) and click "Continue With Restore". Done!
Within a few seconds you can go to "My Restores" (on the left side of the web browser) to download the restore!
You logon or use their app, choose the folders/files you want to restore and await an email from them letting you know when the folders/files are available for download.
I also keep a periodic backup in my office as well as various less systematic backups in various ways. I'd recommend anyone keep at least a couple of backups made with different methods. You never feel more exposed than when you need to use a backup and realize you only have one copy of all your data. Hope nothing else fails or you do something boneheaded with the restore.
Brian from Backblaze here. Our new B2 product is priced at half a penny per GByte per month which accurately reflects how much it costs for us to store your data including a small profit for us.
So the $5/month is profitable for us up to a 1 TByte backup. We have about 25 customers with more than 50 TBytes in a $5/month backup, and yes, we lose money on them (which is FINE - they often recommend us to friends with less data). On the opposite end, we have about 20,000 customers with less than 20 GBytes backed up where we are massively profitable on those particular customers. Interestingly enough, my 84 year old father is in that demographic - no digital music, no digital movies, a few digital photos and a Quicken file. Last year he lost a hard drive, we restored his files from Backblaze. :-)
In between the 50 TByte and 10 GByte customers is a big bell curve with the bulk of our customers basically paying for their own backups.
A different way to think about it is the vast majority of people store files inside their laptops and are happy. The maximum size hard drive you can configure in a laptop today is probably about 1 TByte (the 2 TByte laptop size drives are just starting to appear), so by definition we're profitable on people like this. Technical people think everybody is like them and has a 16 TByte RAID array filled with all the Linux ISOs and movies. :-) But really most people have less than a TByte of personal data.