This is a common mistake. It is true that during the initial backup this is (close to) the case. Then for the 10 additional years you backup, Backblaze is responsible for a small percentage of total writes after the initial backup. Some journalists make this same mistake so you aren't alone. Backblaze shines when you evaluate it over the 10 year timeframe, it can look kind of heavy weight in the initial backup when we have to backup literally all of your data files.
> if you are concerned about data consistency, you’d be using file copies to create snapshots instead of something like VSS which is explicitly designed for this purpose.
VSS is only available on NTFS file systems. Backblaze works on NTFS, FAT32, XFS, Macintosh APFS, Macintosh OS Extended Journaled, etc, etc. As such, we write general code that works on all of those systems. We're a small outfit, with no VC funding, we survive ENTIRELY on our small staff programming funded ONLY by sales of our products, and therefore we have to be efficient with our programming time. Maybe as the years go by and we can hire more programmers we can optimize for specific filesystems as you suggest. NTFS results in close to 35% of our sales so it is an important sub-set of our customer base.
> the Backblaze client writes logs to disk constantly
Yes, we want to be able to debug any issues in the field. We extensively log what is going on. These logs have been very useful to helping debug customer issues when thing don't go perfectly right.
You seem to have some grudge against Backblaze and frankly seem a little angry. You follow all Backblaze posts, and throw shade on our solution at every opportunity, and you never accept any of the technical answers we post, you just ignore the answers. You post the same (really PROFOUNDLY incorrect) mis-information over and over again, no matter how many times we answer and explain what is going on. Yet you always use the same user id, so I honestly don't think you are a paid shill or anything like that. Is there something I can do to help you? Do you think we wronged you in some way? I'm honestly curious why you do this?
It is totally Ok if you don't want to answer.