Comment by brianwski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianwski | Hacker News Reader

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> What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool

I am so confused by your question? With Backblaze, you can get 100% of you data back in two ways: 1) you can get a free external USB hard drive sent to you with all your data on it, or 2) You can prepare a free ZIP file with all your data and download it. We provide a restartable native bzdownloader to help you download the recovered files.

> What good is a backup tool....

Isn't the goal to get all your data back? Backblaze does that. Maybe I'm mis-understanding your question?

> you can't restore files from more than 30 days.

With Backblaze, you can recover files for more than 30 days. You can ALWAYS get "the most recent version" even after 9 years. What you cannot do is get all the "intermediate versions" (like if you change a text document, we retain all versions for 30 days, then we only keep the most recent version forever). I do agree that would be a better product (retain infinite versions of every file). Unfortunately we would need to charge more for that, and many customers only want the most recent copy of all their documents.

I understand if Backblaze is not a good solution for you. I just want to be absolutely clear what we provide and what we do not provide.

Do consider a (paid?) add-on similar to Dropbox's Extended Version History [1]. It'll at least protect against ransomware and other mishaps.

It'll also be nice if you could provide an option to get alerts if a certain subset of files change. I have folders on my NAS (I know Backblaze doesn't back up servers) which are basically files from my old desktops that I'll sort through some day in the future, and which are highly unlikely to change, maybe ever.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/extended-version-histo...

I just posted a long reply to your original message, without first seeing that you'd replied to this comment (made by someone else).

If this is how the 30 day policy works, it is slightly more appealing than what I thought. However, it's still not enough peace-of-mind for me. This means that recent files are vulnerable to corruption during their first month of existence (through accidental overwriting, and some kinds of viruses and ransomware). The "most recent version" that is backed up may end up being a corrupted, useless version.

I agree that retaining infinite versions of every file would be cost-prohibitive. However, you may be able to find a healthy compromise. Maybe you could retain a ton of versions of small files and fewer versions of large files. Maybe you could provide users with a space allowance for versioning and allow them to decide which versions of which files to delete (if they reach the allowance limit) or to pay more to increase the allowance.

To summarize: You need versioning in order to be an awesome backup service (and an awesome backup service is the only thing I'll happily settle for!)

Without some form of versioning, there's always the risk that the only backed-up copy of a file is a corrupted, useless version. This is the best summary of everything else I've said here.

Indeed, I nearly lost my GPG key due to undetected corruption, because the corrupted file had been backed up for a long time. I only recovered it from a very old CD-R backup I made years earlier.

Keeping old snapshots (e.g. one or two per year) is an absolute must.

> if I delete a file will you retain it forever

No. We consider a file deletion as "the final version of the file you wish to retain". In that case you can get the deleted version for 30 days, then it is gone forever.

I'm sorry but this is a complete no-go. As much as I like Backblaze's attitude and pricing plans, this is unacceptable for a backup service. It's way too easy for files to be accidentally, unknowingly deleted, and for this to not be noticed for months or years. Any backup system that deletes missing files is not a backup but a mirror.

Wait, if I delete a file you will keep the latest version forever?

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