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Comment by brianwski | Hacker News Reader

Correct.

> if any datacenter is completely wiped out

Correct. When all of our datacenters were in Sacramento, California, some customers told us they were concerned because they were ALSO in Sacramento and a meteor could wipe out both their computer, the local backup, and Backblaze's cloud backup, all in one meteor strike.

While by default we put your data where it is convenient for Backblaze, we CAN work with customers (and have done so) to place their data in our Phoenix Arizona datacenter or one of our Sacramento datacenters if it is important. As we add our European region (coming soon) this will become a pull down menu for all customers. For now, we only work with larger customers to make sure the customer data lands in the correct location for them.

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Thanks, once more, for the nice reply :)

Interesting about the new European region, for sure at least from the point of view of "locality" (I assume that from the point of view of "data ownership" the US will still consider itself "owner" of the data as the holding/legal entity (don't know what kind of company it is, but your website mentions San Mateo US) has its headquarters in the US.

> US consider itself “owner”

Well, I work most days in San Mateo, California, but 15% of the data we store for customers ALREADY comes from the EU, and more from other countries. Backblaze fully complies with all EU laws already, such as collecting VAT and passing that money through to EU countries.

Philosophically, we feel the data belongs to the customer, but we comply with all laws in that customer’s country. For the Backblaze Personal Backup product this was easiest, since it is encrypted on the customer machine before being sent. For B2 (our object storage product like Amazon S3) it got much more complicated because for the first time customers can configure it to be a publically accessible web host, so Backblaze sometimes gets served with takedown notices due to illegal content hosting.

We ABSOLUTELY comply with standard procedures the same as Amazon S3 must. Backblaze is not some crazy safe harbor for criminals hosting stolen movies. With that said, if you encrypt the data before it leaves your computer and store it in a private bucket, Backblaze has no possible way to know your file contents and we do not want to know. And we would have no way of handing that over to the US government (or the EU) even if they demanded it.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Thanks for mentioning this! I’ve always (begrudgingly) had to tell people that while I love Backblaze you have to understand the geographic risk. I always suspected you had a “yeah, we can put you here if we edit this config file” but the drop down will be much better for everyone. Looking forward to it!

Yev from Backblaze here -> We look forward to you hosting GCS in B2 :P Seriously though - it IS something we've done if a customer had legitimate concerns but having it be more streamlined will be a much cleaner process!

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