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Comment by cupofjoakim | Hacker News Reader

A friend in the music industry told me about a very cool backblaze moment.

They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not insane for a company) backblaze actually flew a guy with a physical hard drive to their location.

Saved ~5 gigs from being canceled, and my friend has been a die hard backblaze evangelist ever since.

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If you haven't heard the stevie wonder story check it out. I don't get why artists don't have backups (well, I do, but...).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_70th_Birthday_T...

Did he ever find the hard drive?

He hasn’t seen it since

As someone who lives in Kazakhstan, I can confirm, backups are basically useless here because speeds are so bad it's faster to fly a plane than download files…

A counter fact: Backblaze is also the company that has scheduled maintenance every Thursday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m. Pacific Time, when there may be disruptions to the services. [1]

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html

This is important to be aware of, but there is some nuance.

According to this BB blog post[0] certain functions are unavailable ("making a new purchase, installing new trials, signing in to your account, creating new accounts, enabling B2, and creating a master Key"), and two B2 API calls (b2_create_bucket, b2_delete_bucket).

If these are the only disrupted features, then impact depends on the details of the use case (perhaps get object and friends have to be on demand but other changes can be async).

Now, why these specifics are in their blog post and not in the Scheduled Maintenance page itself, that is a fair question, because it leaves room for doubt that only this exact set of functions are affected each and every window.

[0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/227807447-Backb...

It's amazing how many musicians today are dependent on data storage for live performances.

While the person in this story did have (remote) backups, it always amazes me how many people who rely so heavily on their main laptop for their trade/work/business in realtime (e.g. a touring DJ) don't a) carry around a second identical one that b) has everything (apps, data) preloaded on to it.

Yeah, I get ya. Much music is made directly on laptops, and if you figure the surrounding stuff as well (sound samples, animated backdrops, VST's etc) the assets required for a gig can be several GiBs big.

VSTs are lighter than pedals.

Why’d they send a person and not just the hard drives? Was it because they couldn’t get it there fast enough by normal air cargo so they used commercial passenger flights instead?

If I were on a 5 stop tour and my choice was between "hand-delivered by a Backblaze employee" and "left to fate with multiple countries' postal and customs services," I would choose the hand delivery every time. The nearest data center to Kazakhstan is in Amsterdam.

We're talking unreleased songs on that drive and high value assets surrounding the act. Both the sensitive nature of the data as well as the speed of delivery are better handled by having a person fly them in personally.

If it wasn't for the content and that they needed it ASAP I think regular air cargo would've sufficed.

Seriously impressive service. Thanks for sharing!

I get that backblaze is a cool business, but why would anyone invest in these companies that just lose massive amounts of money?

Mostly because they believe other investors will invest in these companies and hence their investment will pay off. Seems like 90%+ of tech companies religiously lose money, or maybe its just the 12 that I've worked for in my career? I remember a time when losing a billion/year would result in massive layoffs. Most don't even blink at a mention of a billion lost in a year as far as I can see.

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