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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

These stats are wonderful and make me really appreciate the culture of the company. I've been considering becoming a customer because of these posts, since they reflect a lot of pride in the craft and care for the community.

But I'm stuck on one thing. Does Backblaze offer a solution for Linux backup? I've got an NFS server running that I use for home storage that I want to back up - but looks like Backblaze is only offering a Windows or Mac client.

Maybe the business version would work, since it claims to support NAS backup. But then the pricing seems lower than the personal edition (60$/computer/year = 5$/month < 6$/month) - unless that's implying that every computer that accesses the NAS is part of the fee?

So I guess: is there a reasonable Linux offering for home users from Backblaze? If not, what service do folks suggest?

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Yev here from Backblaze -> the Computer Backup service does not offer an unlimited Linux backup service. We do have support for Linux with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and our integration partners (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... - I filtered the list by Linux for you). On the business side the NAS backup is also done via our parnterships and B2. On the consumer end, we haven't found a way to make unlimited backup sustainable with NAS/Linux since those devices/platforms typically have WAY more data than the average user.

How do you suspect that CrashPlan is making it sustainable?

The answer is likely "They're not".

Gotta decide between taking the hit on adding another "except for" to your unlimited marketing claim...versus taking the hit on people pushing their multi-terabyte torrent collection into your service.

It's a lesser of two evils & the two providers picked different ones.

So then why doesn't Backblaze have a Linux client again and just have like a 1TB limit or something? I mean, CrashPlan has both a Linux client and has unlimited storage. The great thing about CrashPlan as well is that it can be ran in a Docker container and the data is versioned as well.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze on the "Personal Backup" client.

> So then why doesn't Backblaze have a Linux client

There are several choices for Linux including: Duplicacy, Duplicati, GoodSync, HashBackup. All of those will backup your Linux data to the Backblaze datacenter. Is there some feature those are missing? Are those not good solutions for Linux?

> again and just have like a 1TB limit

I believe you can set a 1 TByte limit in all of the above, and then the cost will be a very reliable $5/month or less.

> just have like a 1TB limit or something?

Marketing. You can quantify/understand 1TB limit. Grandma can't.

That's what I meant by you want as few "except fors" on your unlimited claim as possible.

The second you do a tiered by GB model you destroyed your company principle / core selling point - "don't worry".

I've been using restic with the Backblaze B2 backend for a home server backup, which seems to be as close as Backblaze will ever get to having a Linux client.

My rough numbers are 450GB stored monthly, 4GB downloaded monthly, 90k stored files, 385,000 individual transactions, which ends up costing about $2.25 in storage fees, $0.25 for transactions, and $0.10 for download bandwidth.

I will at my two cents:

I've been very happily using Restic and B2 for a long time. It's cheaper than the unlimited service given I have ~600GB stored. Plus, it's a "real" backup: on-going series of snapshots, older files are not replaced when a new back up is made, I can restore from as many points in time that I want to store, and I don't have to worry about Backblaze deleting anything due to inactivity.

One underrated feature of Restic is tagging, which lets you identify a collection of snapshots. I can point multiple separate backups and devices to the same repository tracked with tags; thus, I de-dupe across all of them.

One thing that has been keeping from backing up more content to B2 has been finding an appropriate encryption strategy, and it looks like Restic manages encryption the remote backup repository automatically?

If I'm reading this correctly, Restic + B2 sounds like an absolutely godsend!

That's correct, restic operates under the assumption that you cannot trust where it's storing the data.

Some more (informal) analysis on restic's crypto was done here:

https://blog.filippo.io/restic-cryptography/

You can use backblaze B2 with duplicacy. I backup my machines to my NAS and the NAS itself to B2 using duplicacy. The free version is command line only (with text config files). It works really well and B2 prices are reasonable ! They have a billing estimator somewhere on their site.

I made a script to backup nested zfs volumes to B2 using duplicacy if anyone is interested : https://gist.github.com/icefo/07aab2789e5cfa71045343953aaf88... It makes a snapshot, backup that and handle unexpected network, power loss or backup that span longer than the cron interval gracefully.

If you're a Linux home user and you want a second copy of your data somewhere else in the event of a system failure / flood / fire I'd consider scripting something to B2 (Backblaze's object storage), AWS Glacier, or other archive priced cloud services.

If you're looking for a backup service to handle point in time recovery, differential deduplication, or other features of a backup service (vs. a second copy of your data archive) those also exist though I don't have a clear recommendation for home users.

On Backblaze's business pricing my understanding is they require minimum of 5 users so that's where you'll see the difference solved.

Yev here -> there's no minimum for our Groups feature (which Business Backup runs on) - so you can have Groups with 1 or 2 people in them, no minimum of 5.

They probably don't want using their "unlimited" 6$/month plan for terabytes of data. They also have B2 priced by stored amount, but they don't provide software: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?use-case=back...

I also use B2 even though I am on Mac. I bought Arq to backup to B2 and I will break even within the first year. I used to pay for the personal edition before realising that my new setup is far cheaper.

I have used restic and rclone with very crappy platforms (Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) for testing purposes and that worked fine enough so I can imagine it works even better on something like B2.

I also run Linux, and I use rclone[1] with Backblaze B2 (cloud storage). It works really well. I have it set on a nightly cron job locally. I also trigger it manually if I have something immediate (like photos transferred via adb from android that I want to ensure get backed up).

[1]: https://rclone.org/b2/

Excellent answers here. As can be surmised, the answer is for Linux, use b2.

But it just occurred to me, that for home use, if you're a special kind of masochist, you might expose your DAS to a vm running ReactOS and use the windows client?

I don't recommend it, and have no idea if it would work.. But would love to see a write-up if someone wanted to try it...

Use their B2. rclone supports B2 as target

No, but CrashPlan is $10 per month and has a Linux client that supports unlimited storage.

It's also a RAM hog (the client), slow restores and backups, restore problem stories online... Yes it's an option but has its own issues. And recent changes that make it unlimited except for (growing list of exceptions/exclusions).

I was on Crashplan for a long time, moved to RClone to Google and AWS and likely Duplicacy to those systems.

>If not, what service do folks suggest?

O365 comes with 5tb of space that can be addressed by a diff backup tool like duplicati.

Only gotcha I can see is that it's 5x1tb

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