This is a nail in the coffin of the SaaS backup industry (Backblaze, RescuePlan, etc.).
With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears.
With storage becoming essentially free the last excuse for not using self-hosted, secure backup tools like Arq[1] disappears.
No thinking about installing software (e.g., Arq, and finding something equivalent for Windows), keeping that software up to date, checking that it's up and running properly, etc. (BackBlaze tells me when it hasn't been able to reach a given machine after some period.)
So, no, I think the SaaS backup industry has nothing to fear from cheap online storage, at least for ordinary folk. (Hackers are a vanishingly small segment of that market.)
It's really great. I'm using it instead of Glacier for all my personal backups.
Does anyone know an Arq alternative for linux?
Hardly. I pay for support. I pay for liability. If something goes haywire with my backups, I have a phone number I can call. A number that's not software developer/ sys admin who has no idea why I'm calling about my mom's missing holiday photos.
Google "{service} lost all of my data" and see what kind of support these people got. I get that it gives you warm fuzzies but when these companies loose all of your data, you have almost no recourse.
If they lose any data, they're liable for that as well. All the way up to taking them to court on it.
A more likely scenario is that the data is not lost, but my mother (or whoever is calling them) simply has things misconfigured. These companies _do_ provide useful support. Support that they're not going to get if they backup to a developer oriented service directly.
Beware flat rate service providers - it's not a consumer-friendly model:
http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...
Your interests and the interests of your provider should be aligned, not opposed.
My thinking is that most people likely max out well below the 0.5T that the same $5 buys you on Google now, making that variant actually cheaper for them than Backblaze.
For those people it means paying less per month and getting privacy and better control (data retention!) in return. Should be a no-brainer.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. ;)
Anyway, if you don't care who has access to your backups then obviously my argument has no relevance to you.
I care very much, however, whether hackers will have access to my files, as they can cause havoc with things like tax returns that the NSA won't (I mean, the government already has my tax returns....).
So I was mainly curious if there was some significant flaw in Backblaze's encryption that should worry me from the perspective of a non-nation state adversary.
You can also set multiple backup locations, by sharing space on your other computers.
They have a proprietary Java client, but it runs cross platform. It's completely painless to add your own encryption key to all backups.
I can hardly recommend it high enough.
The only minor niggles that I've run into were:
- If you have a very large directory (hundreds of thousands of files) then opening the backup-catalog can give you the beachball for minutes. However this really only happens for ginormous directories and is easily resolved by splitting the job into a few smaller ones.
- If you're low on diskspace then the temp files that Arq creates during a backup can drive you over the edge and into a disk-full situation.
Other than that it has been rock-solid for me, the author really knows what he's doing.
We have a "HN readers" discount which is fairly substantial.
rsync.net is 20x more expensive than Google Nearline ($0.20/GB).
Why would anyone choose to use it for Arq when Arq supports both?
rsync.net just saying: "Hey, we're not Google or Amazon" is already a big selling point for some.
Further, Amazon S3 is a better comparison, as far as pricing goes - we're fully live, online, random access storage - not nearline or weirdline like google/glacier.