Comment by balladeer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balladeer | Hacker News Reader

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After we are done talking about Backblaze as a snappy app (yes, it has always been many times faster than CrashPlan), cleaner and simpler interface (no doubt here), a lot faster speed (this has been my experience and seems to be the case with a lot of people), it really isn't much good as a backup service choice.

I have mentioned before, I think here on HN too, the data retention policy is just too bad and their reasoning for it, that "it's not an archiving tool", is beyond ridiculous.

And then their interface for restoring files is only from the website. Yes, even if you have to download a 15GB file you do it in the browser or ask them to ship the hard disk to you. I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether.

I will stick to CrashPlan for the time being and go for the 1 year Small Business plan (at 75% discount for existing Home customers) but beyond that or maybe even before that I am looking at something solid and self-hosted. I already backup my Dropbox folder to Tarsnap (which has a kind of okay GUI now), I will look at Glacier or a VPS and backup using something like Attic or Borg. Sad they have no GUI. I feel confident about backup apps with a GUI - I find it intuitive to customize and can see in one look (or maybe keep seeing) what's happening if I want to.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether.

Backblaze sends USB hard drive restores to other continents every day! Today we have one restore shipping to Finland and one to Great Britain. And to be clear, we absorb 100% of the cost: it is $189 USD deposit and we absolutely absorb 100% of the shipping cost whether it is Texas or Finland.

Also remember that the USB hard drive restores are "free" to customers if they return the USB hard drive to our office within 60 days. The only thing the customer has to pay for is "return shipping" and that can be on a super slow service and we're talking about 3.5" drives here that weigh just a few ounces. Of you can keep the 4 TByte drive for the $189 deposit (turns into "purchase price") which includes shipping and the hard drive and the service.

I've done this. Cost me like $15 to get all my data back in 2 days :D

Linux support please...

Hey Brian, so nice of you to be commenting here. Thank you.

I am sorry if I am sounding like an obstinate whiner but no, I don't want that. I mean I am glad if you offer that but I want:

1. A way to restore that is from the app and that can withstand disconnection, gap of hours, or maybe days - right inside your really awesome app (I mean it) with partial download and shit.

2. (I didn't know about international shipping, thank you for telling me) I don't want to rely on that and I honestly am not looking forward to cover whatever little (or more) cost that is and being out of USA it will be more and then the hassle of returning is even worse.

You know, I may just want 30GB out of my 3TB, or hell maybe even 5GB and even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad.

As a customer I would urge you to have a look at it and maybe listen to customers on it (or future customers :))

And data retention! You didn't even touch upon it. Kind of shows your/BB's stand is clear on it, right?

[edit]

And I forgot that you need my encryption password for sending me that hard disk. Now that's a design problem you shouldn't even have in the first place :(

It is a lot of valid feedback, we're doing a lot of emergency planning this week, but when the smoke clears we'll definitely start figuring out a "local restore".

> I may just want 5GB out of my 3TB, even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad.

I'm slightly confused by this one. I assumed that pixel-for-pixel the interface of local restore would match the pixels in "the browser restore interface"? Is there an assumption that if it is a local application, then there would not be a "tree view" you see in the web and instead you would get something that looks like a Macintosh Finder or a Windows native "Explorer" interface?

If that is the case, what if we built something that looks IDENTICAL to the local Finder or Explorer but in a web page would that make some people more happy?

> And data retention! You didn't even touch upon it.

Just an oversight. :-)

> Kind of shows your/BB's stand is clear on it, right?

No, I can ALMOST guarantee you the Backblaze data retention policy is about to change, and possibly within a week. We heard all of you loud and clear and we're just struggling to figure out exactly how much this is going to cost Backblaze, or exactly how much of that cost we plan on passing on to customers and what that looks like.

Thank you again.

No, what I meant by:

>> "I may just want 5GB out of my 3TB, even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad"

Browsers are usually (or maybe never) good for downloading very large files. For example I am downloading a 6GB file or ZIP from BB using my browser and it crashed when I was done downloading 5.6GB. In most cases those 5.6 GBs would be gone and I will have to start over. Where as in a desktop or some kind of download manager/helper (which will have my login state/credentials just like Backblaze app has) it can be done over a period of time and will withstand machine going to sleep, shutdown, network disconnection etc.

But since you mention:

> what if we built something that looks IDENTICAL to the local Finder or Explorer but in a web page would that make some people more happy?

As I've mentioned above - it was about the functionality and not the look and feel.

And, imho, it will really be good if you could move the "restore" functionality to the main BackBlaze app:

- where I can see my files and hopefully available versions too and select version > file at that version or version > then files at that version (some apps first let a time to be selected and then files at that time are available for restore - and some apps do the opposite)

- or, at the least I can do all that on the web and the BackBlaze app starts restoring when it connects to the Internet again in a folder designated by me (

- restores retain the same folder structure. e.g., I am restoring a.png which was at ~/MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png and restore function dumps it like this ~/<BackBlaze Restore Folder>/a.png. Ideally it should give me option to either dump just the file or give me the restore like this: ~/<BackBlaze Restore Folder>/MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png or at least recreate it where it was and if another copy with the same name exists, rename the other file but this (latter) option will be a mess in case of many files

> I can ALMOST guarantee you the Backblaze data retention policy is about to change

That's very good to hear. Probably the best thing I head since yesterday :-)

PS. Please make sure this retention is something really cool and preferably not something like "well, let's make it 2 or maybe 3 months from 1" :-)

Because, as you must be knowing, the point of backup is that if I am looking for an important Excel sheet file after 7 months and somehow it was corrupted or deleted I'll turn to my backup and with a short retention it would have been gone forever defeating the purpose of my backup.

While we are at it, here's another feedback: Maybe start warning users when Backblaze sees some files (it was backing up previously) deleted before actually deleting them from archive (mark for deletion in a month or so). Maybe let the user do some action like "yeah, go ahead get rid of them", or "Uhuh, didn't mean to delete them - please restore it or put it where it should have been".

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