Comment by andrewmunsell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmunsell | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Backblaze is great-- the product is fast and works well. But, there's one big issue that prevents me from using it-- they delete your backups of your external hard drives if they aren't plugged in for 30 days.

I have a drive that I may be away from (at least, my Macbook Air is) for weeks at a time, and I don't want to continually lose version history or have to reupload some of the larger files (home videos and my photos).

CrashPlan doesn't delete your backups after 30 days (they keep everything as long as you're subscribed), but the upload speed is so horrendously slow I couldn't upload the entire photo library plus videos (~300 GB or so) in the month I was subscribed. I'm on a gigabit network over Ethernet, so it's not my connection that's the issue (Backblaze, on the other hand, uploads this data very quickly).

I realize that they're trying to reduce costs by deleting data that doesn't seem to "be in use", but I'm sure a lot of people have "archival" data that they don't look at often, but really value.

Instead, I'm currently using Arq 4 (which is fantastic, by the way) with Amazon Glacier for the photos. It may cost something to retrieve them if my drive dies or is physically destroyed, but I'm not planning for that to happen. I have Arq set to use S3 for my other documents and such so I can restore versions whenever I need to, so it's really the best of both worlds.

Agreed that this was one of the issues I had with Backblaze - I constantly would lose all of my external drive backups when I went on a business trip, come back, and all my backups would be gone and I would have to start over again.

I finally ended up just purchasing multiple hard drives and using superduper to clone/backup.

Crashplan wasn't an option - would take 60 days to do a 1 Terabyte backup, and I don't leave my laptop connected to the externals that long.

I'd be willing to pay more money to backblaze to have them retain my external hard drivers for a longer period of time.

I have to agree that this is one of the biggest downside of Backblaze as I’m right now dealing with recovering data from an external drive that has failed. According to their support staff there’s no way for them to extend that period which makes me super nervous about getting the data and verifying it’s all good before they delete it (I did not notice the drive has failed until I got an email from Backblaze telling me that they will delete the backup in 15 days) Their 30-day retention policy on external drives defeats the purpose of having the backup.

The second problem with Backblaze is the recovery process: they decrypt the files on their servers and store unencrypted zip archive for 7 days or until you download it. I would much rather see them create a restore process where encrypted data is downloaded and then decrypted locally.

I’m evaluating Arq, and so far it looks very good. Upload to S3/Glacier is super fast.

To everybody considering Crashplan, you need to be careful with them too, during the two years I've used them they twice deleted the backup of a external hdd I don't mount too often, even though I had it set to never delete files. All I got from their support was excuses.

This was over a year ago, not sure if it's still the case, just be sure not to rely solely on them.

With CrashPlan, I use their 'cloud' storage as just one destination, which files get to eventually. Backing up to a few devices I control is cheap and easy - and much faster.

"CrashPlan doesn't delete your backups after 30 days (they keep everything as long as you're subscribed), but the upload speed is so horrendously slow I couldn't upload the entire photo library plus videos (~300 GB or so) in the month I was subscribed."

That problem, at least, seems to have improved. I backed up ~250GB a couple of months back and while I don't recall the exact time - might have been several days - it was certainly well under a month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com