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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I am very confused by the email, especially the second point. I've never used Backblaze so maybe I'm missing some critical information. To me, it sounds like Backblaze was happily keeping a backup for a paying customer until said customer booted their laptop. They then threaten to delete the backup if customer doesn't update their software. I understand about warning that the software no longer works but why threaten to delete the backup?

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I'm with you , that email does not in any way make me feel like Backblaze has my best interest in mind , sounds like they were knowingly charging you for a defunct account then threatened to delete all your data in 7 days ?!

I want to like Backblaze I love their harddrive report but this is not helping.

Likely some sort of encryption/privacy issues.

Since the software version no longer works, they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway. Keeping their old data on the live servers longer could be a liability.

(just a guess, but i imagine it's something along these lines)

> they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway.

The Backblaze software doesn't handle restores, it just backs things up. To restore, you download zip files of selected folders from the website.

They also offer a separate app for performing downloads/restores https://www.backblaze.com/help-backblaze-downloader-win.html

My guess is that this one installation was causing a broader production issue.

I agree that a better solution would have been to remove the backup to a secondary system that the client could later access if needed.

Deleting in 7 days is unreasonable.

There's might be some ancillary issue on the backend. Something like that they changed backup formats, but can't reformat the customer's existing backups because of E2EE, so they need the customer to power up their laptop so the client can reformat the backups. That would explain why the client doesn't work, and why they're so keen to have them do a new backup.

It wouldn't have been unreasonable to move away from SHA1 in that time period, for example. They may have needed the original files to get a SHA256 hash.

I think it must have been blocking some organizational objective. I can't think of any reason why they would bother to send that email, much less to go all the way to the CTO to send that email.

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