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Comment by vaughan | Hacker News Reader

I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart.

I have never got it to backup my files ever.

Their settings dialog integrates with macOS preferences and freezes while it scans for files to backup without giving me any status update. It uploads so damn slowly it’s pretty useless. If I was to move/rename things around it would take weeks more to reupload. Every time I try to ignore some files so it’s actually useful, it blocks my system prefs again and takes forever to rescan.

I honestly don’t know how anyone uses it.

Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.

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> I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart.

> I have never got it to backup my files ever.

Why are you signing up for a two-year plan twice if you can't get it to work? They offer a free trial, so it's not like they're forcing you to pay before figuring out if it works.

Not to mention with a paid plan you can write to support and expect a fairly quick response. I also had some initial issues backing up with tons of files (during the trial) and support sorted me out after a couple back-and-forths over several days.

I also bet if they couldn't figure out the issue, a refund wouldn't have been out of the question.

I had the opposite. Their support couldn't help me at all. Big reason I switched, along with the constant price increases.

Weird. I'm backing up on macOS and it works pretty seamlessly for me. Their website was a little (OK, very!) slow when I had to restore, but I ended up just having them send me a drive. I think I've touched the preferences maybe twice in the 5 or so years I've been using them, so maybe that's why I don't hit this issue? Just looking through the prefs right now, it seems to work fine.

> Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.

That's not the same thing. That's a local backup. Of course a local backup will seem blazingly fast compared to a network backup.

I'm sorry if I missed something, but you twice paid for long subscriptions for a service that did not work for you? What made you choose the two year plan when trying it the second time? Why did you pick the two year option at all the first time before trying it?

I forgot it didn't work the last time, and I needed an offsite backup solution. I was optimistic that I could configure the right excludes so it would work, but the sys pref change made this impossible.

It takes a few weeks to upload everything, and by that time the trial has expired.

Upload time is very dependent on your ISP, not to mention your hardware. On the rare occasions that I generate 100+ GB of data that gets backed up, it takes Backblaze less than a day, but I have a 750/500Mbps connection, which certainly helps.

I'm stuck on 50mbps up.

> Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins

This drive must be mostly empty, otherwise 4TB/(20*60) yields on the order of 3GBps. That's B as in Bytes.

Incremental backup + file watching = very fast. See: https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/19/carbon-copy-cloner-for-mac-ov....

I use it. I store stuff on my Synology NAS and have a backup policy to B2 configured from the NAS. This gives me both local and offsite backups.

I guess from a business perspective you are the ideal costumer. Doesn't know how to use the service, won't contact support, paying long term subscription and is even renewing this long term subscription!

Not a BB user, but 100% agreed that CCC is fantastic, reliable, fast, etc.

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