Public pledge, if backblaze releases a linux client, even if it's command line only and requires that I manually edit an XML file, I'll purchase a 1 year subscription.
Sadly their OS X client is kind of quirky—I'd rather have a command-line one that required hand-editing configuration files (I'd wish for something other than XML though), but which would run more reliably and transparently.
(Currently it shows “Computer Missing” and says that I haven't backed up in more than 2 weeks, though I did actually press Backup Now quite a few times in past few days. There're some other oddities in behavior. I suspect I'm back into “searching for decent online backup solution” mode lately…)
I'm really happy with their service (had it for ~2 years now), but would love to have a tool similar to how you describe with reduced bugginess and more tweaking ability.
Edit: They do support external drives but not NAS. My bad.
Edit: typo
Consider how many Linux users would need to do this to a) pay for the developer time to write/maintain the client and b) pay for the support time for Linux issues
There are a couple of technical problems I'd like to overcome in the next 12 months and get the Linux client out there. One technical problem is how many versions and flavors of Linux to support. For example, we're going to ship binaries for Debian simply because it's the flavor we use in our own datacenter, but after than we'll need CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, probably Gentoo, others?
I'm not sure I understand the state of how others release shrink wrap Linux products in 2014? We could require customers to compile it, but that seems kind of horrid and very unlike Backblaze. If you aren't familiar with us, we are known as being friendly and easy to use. Backblaze is not a developer tool for scripting backups, you simply install Backblaze and it backs up your entire computer in order to be "easy". It was the only way we could be sure we had everything you needed. This is also why we charge a flat rate of $5/month. If we charged "per GByte" we would be accused of backing up everything to jack up our profits. :-)
How much revenue is Atom for Linux expected to generate for Github?
IT support staff? Those are the people you want to enamor yourself with. And they're either on Apple or Windows gear.
Personally I assume they don't release a linux client because then people would backup their server to it.
When I still used Android, I would recommend iPhones all the time to people. Why? Because it just works, and I don't want to be stuck troubleshooting their Android issues for the life of their phone.
It'd be difficult for them to make money at $5 a month off a guy who wants to backup 20TB of usenet archives or whatever.
Right now those kind of collections are weeded out since they don't backup network shares.