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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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