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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

I just went with Backblaze Personal. It's pretty much fire and forget.

Doesn't provide a perfect full disk image, but it does store everything I need. I've done one full restore from them (fried motherboard from a power surge) and it went as smoothly as I could expect.

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This is not a great choice. The Backblaze client is extremely insecure—like, arbitrary remote root code execution insecure—and they seem to me to either not care or are too incompetent (or both) to be trusted.[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/zetafleet/status/1304664097989054464

I like BackBlaze, but their client has always been absolutely terrible. Pretty shocked to hear that it's this bad, I and just paid for another two years in advance.

Last I checked BackBlaze only kept deleted files for a max of 30 days, making it a non-starter for my needs. I'm not sure if that's still the case.

That's what they say in their offerings/docs, but in fact I had data kept far longer than the 30 days (after the laptop registered for Backblaze was already scrapped and not been running for months).

You can pay more for year long retention now

Unencrypted?

There's the option to set a password to encrypt it.

Well I should perhaps elaborate: does it offer end to end authenticated encryption with keys that never leave user’s device in an open source program?

Another point, I suppose that backblaze comes with dedup and compression?

Re: encryption, long-story short, the keys used to decrypt your data are stored in their data centers, but you can also encrypt those keys with a symmetric key which only you know. [0]

Re dedup/compression, it's a bit irrelevant because their plans are unmetered.

[0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664688-Can-y...

regarding unmetered, i gave up on backblaze as their network connection seems incredibly slow. i think asking for compression and dedup is very relevant with them

Yeah, their stock answer is "use more threads" but I could never use more than 30-50% of my upstream bandwidth. It doesn't help that the client is slow itself and seems to sometimes just stop backing up.

> [...] but you can also encrypt those keys with a symmetric key which only you know

...until you need to restore from backup. You then have to sign in on the Backblaze website and enter that key, the files you are trying to restore are then decrypted on their end, and bundled up and sent to you.

They say that the key is only ever in RAM, and only then briefly.

As someone else commented - you can set a personal key. It's encrypted at rest (and in flight), but obviously Backblaze have that key.

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