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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze is awesome. Anyone not using it should give it a try.

But I have a question - why do they share this info? Is it to show they’re reliable or just for curiosity? Or some other reason?

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Yev from Backblaze here! We do it because it's interesting! Initially, since we're pretty transparent, we were hoping that others would join in the fun and share their stats so we'd know how our environment and hard drive stacked up against others - but no one at our scale has really done that yet. We do have a lot of off-the-record confirmation that our experience is somewhat similar to others, which is neat - but we were just trying to be transparent and share something interesting from our infrastructure. A lot of folks jumped on it and found it interesting so we keep it going!

Plus along the way some folks find out about us and sign up for the services we offer (B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup) and that's nice too! Plus we also like these conversations and at the end of the day, it's fun!

The consistent transparency has guided many of my acquisition decisions personally and professionally. It also drove me to seriously examine B2, which is used personally and professionally as well.

Would like to encourage your organization to keep publishing these works, and the works like your POD. It’s really spurned on a lot of innovation and sharing.

Hey Yev thanks for the info! Yet more transparency from Backblaze!

Thanks for a great product. I've signed up so many people.

It's marketing (and effective, too). I became a Backblaze customer after reading one of these reports (many years ago!).

Me too!

Me three. I appreciate knowing the way they operate.

Loved the service so far, too. Have had a few times over the years where I needed to recover data from the backup, and it worked perfectly every time.

> why do they share this info? Is it to show they’re reliable or just for curiosity? Or some other reason?

It has many facets. It's attractive for us, nerds. It also helps their providers to spot problematic models. They also show their technical prowess, and lastly I always take a look to the most failing models and try to avoid them in the data center, if I can.

Is it, have you had good experiences loading the backups? I was on the lookout recently for some offsite backup solution and came across this blog post that didn’t inspire confidence in backblaze.

https://messengergeek.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/backblaze-rev...

They've added a separate backup client that is supposed to be better than the web interface.

Gives valuable insight on drive stats at a scale that individuals can't ever reach as well.

In addition to the other mentioned reasons, I guess it's valuable feedback for their providers, and if that feedback is acted upon, it's beneficial for them.

"Transparency breeds trust. We’re in the business of asking customers to trust us with their data. It seems reasonable to demonstrate why we’re worthy of your trust." - Blackblaze

If it only would also backup attached USB sticks.

But it does that. Any locally mounted file system is included in the backup.

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