Comment by gck1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gck1 | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze is such a weird case. On one hand, it became the most trusted personal backup provider on reddit and HN, on another - their software is absolute junk, and as some comments in this thread are highlighting - even their restore can't be trusted.

I've never needed to restore anything, so can't say anything about this, but once, one of my devices deleted a file in Syncthing, and I went into Backblaze to see if they have any logs of deletions/file modifications (had it disabled in syncthing).

I don't remember the exact details, but I remember clearly that I felt like the entire thing was done by a junior engineer straight out of college. Trying to understand the names of some variables used there, I stumbled upon a reddit thread where the person who worked on the client was trying to explain why things were done the way they were - and I felt like it was me in my first 3 months of software engineering.

How did Backblaze gain this trust in the first place? Is it because nobody is offering "unlimited" storage at the same price point?

> How did Backblaze gain this trust in the first place? Is it because nobody is offering "unlimited" storage at the same price point?

Yes, the unlimited storage is one factor. Their detailed write ups about hard drive reliability and transparency on how they build their racks (I think they essentially opened sourced the design) established a lot of credibility as well. Plus in my experience they just worked.

I paid for Backblaze for years but finally cancelled when I junked my last desktop and never got around to installing it on my laptop. I did use their restore functionality a couple of times and it was slow and kind of clunky but it worked.

I’m sad to hear they’ve started dropping stuff from the backup like this. I’ve been contemplating signing back up but most of the stuff I care about is in iCloud or OneDrive so if they aren’t backing that up, it’s pretty useless to me.

I was very surprised when I gave them a go after hearing good stuff about them here and on other techy parts of the internet:

After using their website and their app for a few hours I pretty much immediately decided to not proceed with them as the software was clearly not built by a team that has great competency in software development. This was a year ago so they've had plenty of time to polish it.

You sort of let that kind of stuff pass for a hardware company, but backblaze is not a hardware company. There's more to backup than just ensuring the disks at the data centre are replaced in a timely manner.

When I first started using Backblaze, I also tested several of the competitors at the time (Carbonite, CrashPlan etc) and as bad as Backblazes software was, it was still by far the best out of the options.

And from comments here I don't see any other user-friendly options being proposed, it's all just suggestions to glue together some open source software with object storage and be your own sysadmin.

That's the CTO. And yes, it has been evident for years that backblaze doesn't actually know how to write software, they are unfamiliar with many basic things.

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