Save Data Directly to B2 with Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0 | Hacker News Reader

Save Data Directly to B2 with Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0

backblaze.com

71 pointsjhack42 comments

> No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days

Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we disconnect a drive.

I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the trip, I'd have been shit out of luck.

Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies:

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v...

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...

None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days" bullshit.

Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.

Just this week logged on to Backblaze to restore my external disk which kind of died. Was a little late and no backup there :(

I still hope that the HDD is alive but perhaps USB controller is dead and will try to revive it.

You can try a product called SpinRite (grc.com) - it can help revive the drive to get your data out of it.

My computer doesn't see that drive. Once I connected it saw it for a moment, files were there.

It's not the USB cable - same with different cable. Data recovery software (like photorec) wouldn't be problem. I'll try to hook it directly to a desktop PC

it's not meant to be data recovery, it's positioned as a harddrive maintenance software. The drive may be failing and this will help fix some of the problematic things to get the drive working.

I'm not sure if it'll apply in your case, but I contacted support and they actually showed me that the backups were still available up to 30 days ~after~ the backup was supposedly deleted from the servers. I managed to recover my files with one day to spare (29 days after Backblaze supposedly deleted them). So it actually gave me 59 days since I last plugged the drive in. If you're within that window it might work for you.

This is what they said to me:

When you are viewing the contents of your backup, keep the "From" field at "Beginning of time" and change the "To" to a time when the data you need was still available. Please note that this can only be done up to the last 30 days since the last update on the backup.

Here is an article that describes the process https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002936953-Ho...

This is so annoying.

I have a computer dedicated to photography and sometimes I just don't take pictures for many weeks. Still I have to remember to turn on the computer from time to time so that Backblaze can know that I'm not cheating the system.

> Now, with the ability to save a restore to B2, these customers can take a Snapshot of the data already backed up from these drives and save it to a B2 account.

Which reads as: we've created an artificial limitation on the product you pay for so that you can buy a second product from us.

Works for airlines. Til it doesn't.

What I would like to see is a simple surcharge for any external drives connected after 30 days. If the restriction is because it's capped at $5 a month and they don't want abuse, then rather than delete, make some money.

I can choose to discard the data after 30 days (if I no longer have a use), or continue to trust that it's securely backed up.

If I had to guess it's probably not the $5/month as much as that it's an incremental offsite backup service designed and marketed for ease of use and high availability... not an Amazon Glacier competitor.

If you didn't plug a removable drive in for a month then this really isn't the market they're looking for.

I could be wrong but it seems at least as likely as the suggestion that they're just out to get you somehow.

That's one big reason why we made Arq Cloud Backup not delete anything. It's 1 TB of storage and unlimited computers, vs 1 computer and unlimited storage with Backblaze. But we won't drop the backups of your external drives, ever.

And it is still very much Desktop based, I wonder if Blackblaze will one day have a Consumer No Fuss NAS along with B2 Subscription model. ( Something I wish Apple had done with Time Capsule and iCloud )

So I just set, forget and pay monthly knowingly the Data should be safe.

Synology and FreeNAS support backing up to Backblaze B2, both easily configurable in their respective GUIs. Many other popular NAS solutions allow you to install Duplicati, which will allow you to do the same.

Will the nas connecting count for the 30 days?

I've been thinking about having an external backup of about 5 TB of images, video and documents in an encrypted form but I have issues finding someone who can do it properly.

For now I just have a 2nd nas at my fathers house that mirrors my data.

I've always backed up my NAS to B2 since its early days, and honestly have forgotten about the 30 day deletion limit. I've never encountered the limit in various NAS setups, even when I backed up using cronjobs using the B2 Python client library.

Is this a sync or a proper versioned backup (à la Hyper Backup)?

So will it protect me against ransomware and accidental mass file deletion?

Not out of the box, no. The FreeNAS implementation (and I assume many others) depends on rclone [1], which describes it as rsync for cloud providers.

For protection against that you would have to implement periodic snapshots (which many NAS products also support) and sync the snapshots. Or you could probably use B2's built in snapshot feature. Both require additional manual work, though.

[1]: https://rclone.org/

I am going to try Arq Backup (www.arqbackup.com) with B2 or maybe Onedrive (I have an O365 subscription)

I have less 1 TB of data, so I will save money and get rid of the external drive headache with BackBlaze Consumer.

Arq only works with consumer OneDrive accounts right now (I work on Arq). But we're modifying it right now to work with O365 accounts. Email me at support@arqbackup.com and I'll let you know when it's ready.

Any plans for Azure Storage support? They seem to have much cheaper archival storage than the competition, offering $0.002/GB, amounting to $2 per TB, which is half the price of Glacier.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/bl...

We're looking at it. Looks like it takes up to 15 hours to get your data "rehydrated" so you can download it. Also it's $5 to rehydrate 10,000 blobs so depending on how Arq chunked your data it could cost quite a bit of money to restore.

We just shipped Arq 5.15 with support for backing up to Office 365 and SharePoint accounts. https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/onedrive-office365-sharepoint...

Thanks!

(I had assumed it was already supported based on this chart: https://www.arqbackup.com/docs/pages/strategy.html )

It was only consumer OneDrive before. Now it uses the Microsoft Graph API so you can use OneDrive business accounts too.

You could try our new Arq Cloud Backup offering. It doesn't delete backups of your external drive.

I'm having trouble finding supported operating systems for the tool - does Backblaze support Linux yet?

I'd recommend using Restic (https://restic.net/), it supports backing up to Backblaze B2 and generally is the best and most innovative backup tool I've ever used.

Backblaze has a Restic howto: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002880514-Ho...

And if you'd like something more accessible for regular desktop usage, check out Relica which makes use of restic under the hood. Author is Matt Holt, the guy behind Caddy server.

https://relicabackup.com

Big restic fan here, will check this out. Thanks.

Look at the B2 integrations, several support linux.

The reason why Backblaze and Crashplan have various restrictions is due to being all-you-can-eat. At some point, they have to create an arbitrary cap. So, the snapshot is a curious feature, but seems to be implemented poorly.

It doesn't seem to be snapshot system, but an archive system. A snapshot is usually a point in time represented by a series of changes. By being a series of change, it would deduplicate redundant files between snapshots. It appears that this is a full archive backup, which is fine but have some limitations:

* Need to upload the whole archive every time. * No deduplication. * Need to have double the space to restore (download then unzip). * No partial restores. * No encryption of personal files.

If you have any technical willingness, consider restic. It is a command line utility that has the ability to backup to many backends, including B2. Being a CLI, it can be scripted. Files can be arbitrarily backed up and restored. It has encryption that the servers can never see. I also hear Duplicati is similar, but have never used it.

If you want an easy way to just make archives locally and store it on B2 for cheap, consider a cloud mounter, like Mountain Duck. You can treat B2 as a drive and upload/download files as needed. Note: B2 is a _very_ simple store, so simple that it doesn't support renaming files (must download, rename, and upload). But, it is fast and inexpensive.

I see BB pushing B2 more and more and it makes me sad. Instead of a Linux client (which I can’t imagine would be that difficult, ultimately, after this many years) they’re putting all resources on the pay-for-utilization model. Good for them, bad for us waiting for a Linux client.

CrashPlan is garbage. Bloated client, keeps breaking down and I get reports my devices aren’t backed up but then they say they are, after backing up 30+ TB (it took years) it says my original backup had to be reset so I had to restart the entire thing, just not a lot of confidence with them. But it is the only unlimited Linux option out there.

Also, they just removed their personal plan and do business only and per device now. If they could make their client not suck, and give better confidence in their platform, I wouldn’t complain.

I use duplicati with AES-256 for exactly this on backplaze (and another different SFTP target)

Duplicati is still very much in beta, and from personal experience I would not recommend it for larger or critical backups. It does seem really promising though.

This is a pretty useful feature. It goes some way towards solving the problem of keeping a backup of my photos. Rather than having to keep buying more physical storage I can archive off photos in batches to B2 from my regular Backblaze backup.

Wouldn't that remove an additional layer of protection?

When you move from physical storage + backblaze backup to B2 storage, B2 becomes a single source failure, right?

Yes, that would be correct. I guess a better idea would be to fill the drive up, lock the physical drive away in a fireproof safe, then archive the files from that drive's Backblaze backup to B2. Buy a new drive and repeat.

Very cool feature release. Is it possible to generate a public link to a snapshot?

Yev from Backblaze here -> There is no way to give a public link to a Snapshot. But you can "share" a single file from your Backup with a public link!

Yev, can I use the Backblaze Cloud Backup to just do selective backup with B2, without requiring a full computer backup subscription? I know numerous clients already support writing to B2, but would be great if there was an official client to do just that, again, without a backup subscription.

No this feature requites the data to already have been sent to Backblaze via the Backblaze computer backup application - so it's not quite a 1st party app for B2 (still requires the subscription to get the data uploaded). We vet all the integrations listed on our site and there's some really simple ones that do a good job of sending the data over to B2.

I wonder how this works with encrypted Backblaze backups.

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