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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

> I still won't trust SpiderOak with my data. Their service is unreliable and slow, their client is horrible to work with and their support is disgraceful.

Unreliable and slow completely describes my experience with both Backblaze (lost the data for one of my drives which unfortunately I learned after the drive failed) and Crashplan (the Java client brings my rMBP to a crawl when it runs). There has got to be a decent online backup service that's reliable, reasonably priced, and respectful of resources out there somewhere.

Two that have been recommended to me recently that I haven't tried yet but would like to are Arq Backup [1] and Tarsnap [2].

[1]: https://www.arqbackup.com/

[2]: http://www.tarsnap.com/

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As a counter point my experience with Backblaze has been perfect. Been using it since it first came out I think, backs data up relatively fast, and when my drive failed they shipped me a USB drive with all of my data in a day or two (and I believe it came from US > UK so that's pretty impressive). At $5 a month for unlimited I haven't even thought of switching. I believe - although I could be wrong - they also encrypt the dat and give you the option of managing the keys so they don't have access.

Just clarifying on that encryption bit - they do indeed encrypt the data, but when restoring (e.g. logging into the web view & selecting files to restore) you're handing over your passphrase in plain text, as the decryption is done on their side.

Also if you need to do an "extreme" restore beyond what's available in the web app, Backblaze requires you to give them your password in plaintext via email and if you use a private key to additionally either share that in plain text via email or disable it. Of course, I changed to a temporary password but nonetheless this was an extremely concerning experience to me as a security-conscious person. Backblaze is great until you actually have to do a restore. They are a huge company and could use secure channels if they wanted to.

Most of the issues with Backblaze revolve around having multiple drives / external drives. Also, they give a very incomplete backup (examine the excluded files closely), for example, overall across my drives Backblaze only actually attempts to back up a little over half of my data.

That you can change in preferences, right? And it usually excludes, by default - changeable, system files and the sort.

(Used Backblaze for one month happily during trial period, decided not to switch because of their, imho ridiculous, file/version retention/deletion policy. And an unhappy Crashplan customer for ~5 years actively looking around for similar feature set but sanely usable client and and to switch to. Arq doesn't fit the bill. I wish Backblaze wouldn't delete the files/versions/disconnected drives that soon if not not ever. And also website only restore actually is funny)

Most of the excluded defaults cannot be changed / are read-only in the preferences. System files are some of it, but it includes others as well, such as all Applications. By default it also includes all ISOs and DMGs (this one can be changed but IMO is an insane default) — I store quite a bit of important info in encrypted DMGs.

Using a private key and 2FA should IMHO be the default setting.

(I of course understand that Backblaze wants to make its service as easy as possible, to they have other defaults.)

I use arq, and I can highly recommend it. It's definitely fast, but more importantly, it has an agent that works in the background, has a great UI, is highly configurable, unintrusive and light on the CPU load. I use arq with Amazon S3/Glacier, and the monthly bill is in the cents.

Since you're comfortable with looking into Tarsnap, I'll recommend Borg:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

A GUI, even a dead simple one - in fact preferably a dead simple one, that comes with some cron job or other ways to make it run all the time (file watching?) or as an optional feature would help a lot of people (including me) to switch to such excellent open source options.

I chose to replace duplicity with borg backup because I needed to backup a headless server and I found borg pruning to be much simpler to script than duplicity.

`borg prune -v --list $REPOSITORY --prefix '{hostname}-' --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6`

Now, if I just had laptops to backup I would have chose deja-dup over borg because I could have configured it in seconds.

A nice project would be to code a TUI front-end to borg init/create/prune/check commands that is as quick to setup as deja-dup and automatically adds systemd units or cron jobs to the system, with an alert triggered when something fails.

Yes I tried backupninja with borg but encountered some problems with it.

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