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Comment by slavboj | Hacker News Reader

IME it is vastly more robust to use your backup client of choice (eg Duplicati) wrapping Backblaze B2, their S3 competitor. As a bonus it becomes much easier to migrate to or from them once your data is accessible in an open API, particularly when you have limited local upload bandwidth like a lot of US cable internet customers.

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I want to like Duplicati so much, but it breaks if you even think about looking at it. It's like the P&R Jail meme.

"Interrupt the initial backup? We corrupt the backups."

"Relocate the backup files and update the backup destination? We corrupt your backups."

"Update to a new version? Believe it or not, we corrupt your backups."

The eight hundred open github issues is also pretty frightening for a now many-years-old piece of backup software. They really, really need to spend 6 months or more just nailing as many issues as possible, starting first and foremost with bugs relating to restores.

Take a look at Duplicacy as an alternative then. Similar core idea (takes a folder, chunks it up, tracks revisions, etc) but is faster than Duplicati and Restic. Has some other nice features like deduplication, multi client, etc.

Kopia is another up and coming option too.

I went and looked back at Duplicacy and tried to remember why I never went with it, and after 30 minutes of head scratching, realized there was a "buy" button and it all came back:

Only one computer for personal use, no GUI. Otherwise, annual licensing.

Fuck that.

This entitled attitude irks me to no end. I'm curious, how much of your work do you donate to others?

I would like to benefit from some of your free work, for personal use.

The personal backup plan is extremely cheap and almost unlimited.

Maybe they will think about the product (and cost) and phase it out ("Migrate to B2 our professional industry leading offering and save 10% of your first bill" [of $2865]) .

If I did my calculation right, based on my usage, including miscellaneous egress and API fees, I could store about 1.25 TB on B2 for 7 bucks a month. I would bet their median personal backup customer is under that.

Can highly recommend this method. And you can just use B2/S3 to store other stuff too.

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