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Comment by dkd903 | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled their account. It has a weird policy of deleting backups from hard drives that have not been connected within the last 3 months. Very weird policy.

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It’s one month, not three, but the policy is totally reasonable since they charge one flat rate to back up your whole computer (not everything your computer has ever seen). If they didn’t delete disconnected drives, they’d be offering unlimited storage for $50/year which is obviously unsystainable. The plan is already as impressive as it is considering how much data you can easily connect to one computer.

I also have plenty of complaints about the service (posted above), but there’s nothing weird about this policy as written.

What’s weird is when permanently connected drives get classified as disconnected (see my other post).

Whilst I agree the policy is reasonable given the amount they charge per month, it's something I've only learnt about from reading comments and not from their marketing.

In fact, their marketing claims "Never lose a file again. Get unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC. Just $5/month."

Only on reading the help does it seem that if the client doesn't connect with the server within 6 months, then all your backups are gone. I'm not saying this is unreasonable, but it seems a bit counterintuitive given you are still paying for the service. I just still haven't found the bit about disconnected drives.

I really like Backblaze's articles on HDDs and they really seem to be customer focused, but I had to dig in the help to find this.

I don't use Backblaze, but I suspect from the above comments that the client does not even display some kind of warning saying, "Hey, you haven't connected this drive for X months. We just wanted to let you know that this data will be deleted from our systems in Y days. Please connect the drive to make sure we retain the data." and then proceed to display this warning periodically a few times, like a countdown (but not annoying enough to be shown on every run of the client). This kind of warning would be my suggestion to the Backblaze team. This becomes more important with SSD based machines that generally have a lot lesser storage than before while people are taking a lot more pictures and videos and resorting to storing them in cheaper (per GB) external HDDs (at least the people who do like to have a local copy).

Yev from Backblaze here -> If we detect a missing drive we send a warning email at the 14-day, 21-day, and 28-day mark to remind folks to plug them in - or create a restore if they no longer have the drives. If they still don't plug in the drive after those days, then the backup does get removed, but we do try to warn them ahead of time!

I _Believe_ the client displays this information, buy I could be wrong about that. I know I get a few helpful emails, starting with a couple weeks notice though.

Slightly tangential. I usually don't trust any company that offers something "unlimited" for a limited amount of money. I usually suspect, and believe, that they're overselling their capacity and then have the low volume users subsidize the high volume ones (so the former are paying a lot more than they should be). Such companies also tend to have undocumented limits that you'd know only when they tell you that you've hit them (and that limit would be dynamic).

For something as critical as data backups, I prefer that those companies stay in business and charge something that's a bit more proportional to their underlying costs. That's honesty and fairness, in my view.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We've been running on the unlimited model for a long time now and it's working well for us. It's like a buffet, some folks eat more, some folks eat less, but as long as the average is below our costs to provide the service we'll keep doing it. We DO have a cloud storage offering (similar to S3) which allows folks to store data indefinitely (or as long as they want it) and that one costs $0.005/GB!

Yev from Backblaze here -> We do have a 30-day retention window. So if the data is on your computer, or the externals are connected we'll keep a copy of it, but if the drives are removed and/or the data is removed from your computer, the 30-day timer starts. For an archive solution that keeps data for as long as you want we built out Backblaze B2, which is $0.005/GB!

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