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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I debated switching to Backblaze after CrashPlan's home plan was removed, but they don't appear to have an option to let me send them an external HDD to "seed" the backup, and that's a deal-breaker for me.

I have 4TB of media to backup. My ISP will throttle/penalize me if I download/upload more than 1 TB per month, assuming I do absolutely nothing else with my internet connection. Even assuming I devote 80% of bandwidth to just the backup, it will take me 4-6 months of metered transfers, while paying for their service, before I actually have a "complete" backup with them.

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Yev from Backblaze -> We don't currently have a seeding open for Backblaze Online Backup (we do for B2, it's called Fireball, but is quite expensive for just that little bit of data). If you think you can actually upload all 4TBs in one month (might be able to w/ Maximum Throttle + some threading), we've had some of our users contact their ISP and received a "pardon" for a month. Not saying that's the norm, but some folks did manage to get their data caps lifted for a short time!

Hello, Yev,

Thanks for your reply. I can certainly investigate that route, but the kinds of ISPs that implement these caps aren't exactly known for their magnanimity to begin with, so I'm not optimistic. Assuming they don't, I would get charged about $10 / 50GB overage, which would work out to 3000 / 50 = $60, which is the yearly cost of your service. So my dilemma is that I'm either paying for about half a year before I get a complete backup set with BB, or I'm effectively paying double the service price just to make sure the data all gets to you guys in a timely manner. For that price, I could just as well just shell out the extra dough to stay with an upgraded Crashplan Small Business account.

I hope you guys will reconsider or re-examine your position on seeded backups. I don't think I am being unreasonable in wanting that to be an option, nor do I think I'm alone in having somewhere north of a terabyte of media--any amateur photographer or video editor probably has a similarly-sized dataset. If unlimited bandwidth were available, this wouldn't be a concern, but, I don't have the luxury of being able to choose a different ISP. And with Chairman Verizon heading the FCC, I don't see that changing any time soon.

Definitely understand that mind-set. We review most of our decisions every year, but it's a tricky problem. Since Backblaze Online Backup is a flat-fee service, by definition most folks who have that much data would not be break-even customers for us, and adding in services that encourage those large customers wouldn't be a great long-term plan. That said, one thing you might be able to do is see how much more expensive an "unlimited" plan with your ISP would be for 1 month (hopefully less than the $60 extra). CrashPlan Small Business is a good service as well, so if you're happy with them and don't mind paying the extra few dollars a month, staying with them, from a bandwidth perspective isn't the worst.

And yea, I'm personally hoping that the ISP situation gets a bit more friendly towards consumers!

Not sure of your ISP, but some offer an unlimited option for an additional fee. For instance, Comcast offers this for an extra $50 per month: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/exp-unlimited-data While it sucks to have to pay extra, there is at least a cap (ironically!) on the price.

I'm quite curious. What is more important to you, is it not paying for 6 months while the initial backup is made, or having the initial backup made within 1 month?

Solving the first is definitely within Backblaze's capability if they are prepared to make an exception.

> $10 / 50GB overage, which would work out to 3000 / 50 = $60

You forgot to multiply by $10, so you're actually looking at $600 for 3 TB of overage

Thought it seemed on the low end, thanks for that!

I'm assuming the reason for not having seeding open is because you never know what's on the drive? Or is there some other technical reason?

Interesting question -> We just simply didn't build in that functionality. Right now the only way to get data in to Backblaze Online Backup is to have that data come from the client which resides on the machine. For Backblaze B2, we knew that organizations would have much larger data-sets, so we designed it with that functionality in mind.

Also, at the beginning the "no seeding" thing was kind of a gate to folks who had a lot of data but limited bandwidth. Our theory was that you should never be afraid of uploading your data, you should have the bandwidth to match. That was bout 10 years ago though, so things have changed - but it's still not a priority project for us - especially considering that since Online Backup is a flat-fee, by definition almost anyone that would use the "seeding" feature would not be a break-even customer for us.

Hi Yev,

This would be my sales pitch to your superiors:

1) My 4TB is not really expected to grow much beyond this point. It's the accumulation of a lifetime of hoarding, and the year-to-year addition beyond that will be in gigs, not TBs. So after the first year, it's basically just cold storage. If you guys can profitably store 4TB in cold storage for $50/yr, it should be profitable after the first year.

2) The guys who have enough media and are technical enough to want to seed it are also more than likely going to be the guys who make the backup service recommendations for their friends and families.

Case in point: http://nothingofvalue.org/backup.html

That's the website I created for friends, family, and coworkers to read, because I got tired of explaining the same stuff to them every Christmas. I very nearly bought the Crashplan Family plan at one point just to make it easier for them--I'm not glad I didn't. But I guess my point here is that the power-users, as irritating as we are, are going to be the ones who spread your product by word of mouth.

3) People with lots of data who take backing up seriously generally don't like switching vendors unless we have no other choice. I don't want a provider that I feel like I'll "outgrow" when I get too much data and be forced to switch to a more expensive plan or to another vendor. So while a user with 100 GB or less might be with you guys for a year, he will probably move to another vendor if they can do it cheaper, since he doesn't have much data. The hoarders, on the other hand, just want to know you'll keep their stuff safe and won't jack up the price on them at some point, and will otherwise be willing to stick with you forever.

Just my $0.02 as a potential customer.

You could rent a local AirBnb and use their wifi for a few days as a workaround?

This is a hilariously good suggestion.

Or simply search fast open wifi networks. A Starbuck I know had excellent wifi for the area: 60/60Mbps.

Another good option, I believe Google manages these and I have always had good speed in Starbucks.

There's maps but wework has open and gigabit

Maybe Yev can comment, as they have a service like this for their B2 Cloud product.

EDIT: @admiralasshat: If you want to send me a drive, I'll put it on a GB connection for you until it's backed up.

EDIT: @Yev: Fair point :) Was trying to be helpful.

Yev here after seeing Bat-signal, I'll respond in-line.

EDIT -> I can't recommend the above for security reasons :P

EDIT -> Hey, if they're up for it...have at it :P

I'm curious to know your use case for backing up that much data.

I have this idea in my head that some people are digital pack rats and want to save every movie and series they pirate off the internet in case the apocalypse happens and they desperately need to re-watch an episode of Friends.

Is it uncompressed video? (Why would you back that up to the cloud?) Is it family media? (How many baby pictures did you take???). I honestly have no idea how someone collects 4 TB of data that is worthy enough to back up.

>>I honestly have no idea how someone collects 4 TB of data that is worthy enough to back up.

All data is worthy of Backup. I have about 40TB of Home Storage that is backup;ed on a set of encrypted disks offline. (Total RAW Capacity of all my storage in my home lab last a checked was about 150TB)

I do not go Full 3-2-1 with it, but I do have a duplicate copy of all my data with about 2TB in a Full 3-2-1 Backup, I would say about 750GB to 1TB has 1 copy of the 3-2-1 in a "cloud" vendor of some kind

I am certainly a digital pack rat. Luckily, unlike physical pack rats, our data doesn't take up a lot of room, and since storage capacity keeps increasing so rapidly, I have never had to delete anything.

Here are some of the things that I have that add up to my multiple TBs of data I want to keep around.

First, I have every single school assignment from growing up (30+ years ago, so it doesn't take up much space). These are kind of fun to have. I can show my kids the papers I wrote when I was their age.

A lot of old converted 8mm tapes from when I was a kid. I used to be really into making claymation videos, so I have hours of videos that I converted around 15 years ago into digital formats. I could probably reconvert them to a more modern codec that would take up less space, but they are still multiple hours. Currently takes up around 100 gigs.

Every digital photo I have ever taken. Over 20 years, this is a lot of photos. A few hundred gigs there.

Tons of videos of my daughter. A hundred gigs there, growing all the time. Maybe I take too many, but it is really fun looking back and remembering when she was little.

Every programming project I ever created, going back 25 years. Fun to see my progression. Not a ton of space, but many gigs worth.

A ton of old games that don't exist to download. Old shareware, commercial games, etc. I created CD images for the all the ones I had on physical media, so I don't have to lug around the CDs anymore. I like to be able to play games I played years ago every now and then. This takes up a good chunk, and is probably a few hundred gigs.

Ripped DVD movies and TV shows. Bought many over the years, and don't want to have to find and/or rip them again if I lose the data. This is hundreds of gigs.

Countless other minor things (saved games, documents, etc).

I like all of these things. If I have a house fire, I like knowing I wouldn't lose all of that. Since it is so cheap to maintain a backup of it, why not? Yeah, I wouldn't be DEVASTATED if I lost all my old DVD rips, but for 60 bucks a year (and that is the same cost whether I back those up or not), why not keep them backed up?

Thank you for sharing! I probably have the same thing split over a few hard drives, it was a bit hypocritical of me to criticize, I apologize.

You're right, the private data that I choose to preserve is objectively worthless. I shall relay your findings to my family.

"Sorry, Mom, I can't help you watch that Mork and Mindy collection on your bedroom-TV Roku. Someone On the Internet informed me that my digital collections are not worthy of keeping, and I dutifully deleted them."

"No, sweetie, we absolutely cannot share your childhood with our daughter and watch my digital rip of Fraggle Rock. Good parents delete their abhorrent digital media and pay HBO Go $15/month for the privilege of viewing it!"

"What are you thinking, keeping those hundreds of CD's and Vinyl's we ripped together on your iPhone, Dad? You can chuck all that crap that we actually own and pay a monthly fee to Spotify for the privilege of streaming it! Unless, of course, the publisher decides to pull their collection off of Spotify, for whatever reason."

"Hey, guys, now that we're all moved out of the house, we need to talk about the Nintendo 64. Mom and Dad bought it for all of us, so I think it's only fair that we keep the physical console at their place so that no one of us will have exclusive access to it. As for the games, I think each of us should be allowed to take the cartridges with us that we individually paid for and/or receives as gifts. So that'll be me taking Super Mario 64, Majora's Mask, Super Smash Bros, Star Fox 64, and NBA: Hangtime; Steve takes Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Perfect Dark, and Donkey Kong 64; and Fred takes Mario Party, Pokemon Stadium, Mario Kart, and Banjo Kazooie. Yeah, I know, I do wish there were some kind of legal backup method that might let us all enjoy the games we collectively owned. Oh well. Maybe Nintendo will release an N64 Classic and we can each pay $80 to play the games we already paid for. Assuming the games we own appear on the collection."

I think the idea is that if it is possible / easy to re-obtain the media, then you don't need to back it up (i.e., if it was obtained via bittorrent).

A second classification is data that isn't changing -- you can create a couple backups of that media, store one in a bank safe deposit box, maybe ship another backup to a family member across the country.

Then you have recent acquisitions and ongoing projects -- those are what you would sync daily to an online backup service. So you still have offsite backup of everything, but by splitting up the categories, you end up not needing to sync that much online.

Username checks out.

I'm a hobbyist photographer who gets to shoot significantly about 4-5 weeks per year. In each such week, I typically shoot 2,500 - 3,500 images. My current DSLR camera produces images that are in the range of 50MB each. That means about 125 - 175 GB / week of shooting. I currently have about 1.5TB of image data backed up in the cloud. And I don't shoot video at all.

By comparison to some of the more serious amateur photographers that I often travel with, I don't shoot a lot. They may shoot 10,000 images in a week.

I know a person who has 6 TB of own photo and video. This accumulated through 8 years of documenting various activism-related events. And the photos take a substantial part of that. On a good camera high-quality JPEG is 10MB or more, so just by taking 100 pictures (normal amount if one wants to seriously document an event, not own perception of it) one needs 1GB to store them.

Is it possible to spin up a VPS then restore crashplan to that then seed Backblaze?

Should be able to get max throughput and cost will be minimal if only have the VPN for the time it takes to seed.

As I'm in a similar situation with Crashplan I've researched this a bit more (have just under 2TB so was originally just going to pay up for the business plan so cost wasn't to high).

VPS's are probably a no go as they have all moved to SSD's with low sized volumes. Even with Digital Ocean where you can add block storage you are looking at $100 for a week for 4TB + compute and bandwidth. AWS you are looking at $368+ just on data egress.

hetzner.com server auctions look the best option. Current cheapest is €31.93 per month for a Intel Core i7-3770 (CPU-B 9445) with 2x 3 TB drives and 16 GB. Probably simple enough to use lvm and jbod on the drives to give a single 6tb volume. No egress charges but reading they throttle if you go over 20,000GB a month so a non issue.

No setup fees/contract on the auctions although reading I think it's 30 days/1 month notice to cancel so would need to cancel as soon as ordered.

My plan is to probably move to Git Annex https://git-annex.branchable.com/, use my local NAS as the main backup, maintain a copy of media / photos / docs in Backblaze and duplicate files I can't afford to lose to S3 also. Looks simple enough with Git-annex and lets me maintain multiple copies based on cost / importance.

use aws to send your disk then upload elsewhere

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Last I checked, AWS outbound bandwidth is about $.15/GB. That is $600 worth of bandwidth to send it Backblaze.

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