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Comment by tiemand | Hacker News Reader

Reading the comments, is anyone else bothered by this reply from a Blackblaze representative:

"Right now, Backblaze has only one datacenter, so the short answer is "no". :-)

The longer answer is that for online backup, there is one copy of your data on your laptop, and another copy in the Backblaze datacenter in Sacramento. If a meteor hits our datacenter in Sacramento pulverizing it into atoms, you STILL would not lose one single file, not one - because your laptop is still running just fine where ever you are with your copy of the data. In the case that occurs, we will alert our users they should make another backup of their data."

There are a million one things other than a comet strike that can go wrong in a data centre. I would not trust a backup provider that does not replicate my data across at least two data centers.

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Yev from Backblaze here -> It's true, we just have the one. Backblaze was bootstrapped, so we cannot over-expand and maintain profitability, which allows us to stay in business. We're pretty up-front about having the one datacenter. We'd LOVE to add more in the future, but truthfully, it would at least double our costs, and we'd need to raise prices. We're thinking of ways of avoiding that while maintaining our current business-model. If you are looking for something more geo-redundant, take a look at services like Amazon S3, they are great, but the downside there is they charge per GB to make up for the extra costs, so depending on the amount of data, it can get pricey. Either way, we recommend a 3-2-1 backup policy (3 copies of your data, 2 onsite but on different mediums and 1 offsite) as a good start to a backup strat. We're just one solution of many, though, we like to think we're the easiest one!

How about an add-on cost/service that tags your data as needing datacenter redundancy, and only replicating that to a new datacenter. It has the benefit of not requiring as much up-front investment, as it's used it pays for itself, and you have a bunch of current customers you can upsell to. The architecture to segregate redundant from non-redundant backup customers could be a pain, but as long as you have tools to migrate data between systems (I imagine you do), then it could just be running two separate backblaze clusters in the first datacenter, one which supports redundancy and one which doesn't, and then just migrate customer data between the clusters as the add/drop the redundancy service. That saves you from having to cherry-pick specific files/customers from the the cluster to duplicate in the other datacenter, you just make sure one cluster is always redundant.

We're definitely looking at options like this, but the engineering work that it would take to implement solutions like that are not insignificant, and a lot of our engineering muscle has been working to roll out the Vaults over the past year and change! It could certainly be another revenue stream for us, but building out a new datacenter is expensive, especially if you don't buy/guarantee build-out ahead of time, so we'd have to forecast how many people would want that service to prepare accordingly, again not insignificant stuff, but is definitely possible in the future!

The nice thing about using separate clusters is that you can build them out in chunks. Build X new capacity in your main datacenter as a new cluster, and X new capacity in a different datacenter, and replicate. Need more redundant capacity? Build Y new capacity in your main datacenter, and Y new capacity in a different datacenter, not even necessarily the same backup datacenter as before. You end up with one main non-redundant cluster, and a bunch of smaller redundant clusters spread over one or more additional datacenters.

If you're really lucky, you siphon off customers from the non-redundant service for this at the same or faster rate as they are signing up for the non-redundant service, allowing you to not have to build that out much for a short while.

As an existing customer, I'd pay for geo-site redundancy at double the current pricing.

Brian from Backblaze here, I wrote that comment so if anybody has any questions, fire away!

I think the MOST IMPORTANT THING is that an online backup provider like Backblaze is totally transparent to their customers about their architecture and what we do and do NOT do. If our design is not reliable enough for your particular needs, then you are then able to make the choice not to use us. I never want to mis-lead customers and hide exactly how durable their backup really is.

Finally - what I recommend to my very closest family members and trusted friends is that for data you feel would be catastrophic to lose, I recommend you have at least three copies including the primary copy. That is two separate backups with TWO SEPARATE VENDORS who did not share any code, hopefully managed by two separate UIs. For bonus points, one backup should be "offsite". For example, many Backblaze customers use Time Machine on the Macintosh for a local backup, and Backblaze for their remote backup, and that is what EVERYBODY should be doing. I can show you many support cases where Time Machine failed to restore a file and Backblaze saved the day, and vice versa. The fact is that users make mistakes, UIs are hard to use, your 14 year old son decided to unplug the Time Machine USB hard drive to free up a USB port, or your 14 year old daughter decided to uninstall the Backblaze agent - in other words, stuff happens!!

No I'm not bothered by it as I wouldn't expect replication across multiple data centers at a "$5/mo for unlimited" price point.

I routinely recommend BackBlaze as a quick and easy cloud backup solution to family and friends. I view the risk of partial or complete data loss with BackBlaze extremely low compared to the local backup solutions that some people rely on (i.e. periodic backups to an external USB drive)

For myself and my own work files, I don't put complete trust in any single backup provider, regardless of what their replication policy is.

I really feel this is the correct answer.

You get what you pay for. This product is very squarely aimed at people that want backup cheap (and there's nothing wrong with that). Should you be backing up your enterprise with this (and only this)? Probably not. Is it good enough as a backup of your family photos and videos? Probably, but it depends on your risk aversion level. Additionally, you can always throw another backup service into the mix and get the redundancy you want, at the appropriate cost.

Time Machine + SuperDuper! clone + Backblaze + Arq (to S3 Glacier). I'm ready for meteors, bring it on.

Data Backup 3 [1] + SuperDuper! clone + Crashplan + Arq (to S3 Glacier) + DropBox + Tarsnap (Subset) + Aperture Vaults.

But I would still prefer not to be hit by any Meteors.

I have a fondness for Tarsnap and Arq, but I find Data Backup 3 from ProsoftEngineering to be one of the best for doing local backups. At the end of a day, I just toss in a 64 GB USB Key (with FileVault Encryption), and no matter how much data I've created, it usually is less than 10 seconds for a full versioned backup. SuperDuper Clone about once every couple weeks.

I originally quit BackBlaze because it fired up my CPU to 100%, no matter how much time I spent trying to tweak it, but now I'm running into the same issue with CrashPlan which, after a couple years, has started constantly scanning my filesystem, forcing me to sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist, and then remembering to sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist before I go to bed to let it run overnight.

What is it about Crashplan not letting you just shutdown everything from within the application.

[1] http://www.prosofteng.com/databackup3/

I like your style!

If you are the type of customer for whom this is actually an issue, you are not backing up your data on BackBlaze. You are going (and paying) for someone like http://www.zetta.net/architecture.php.

This type of service starts at around $175 for 500 GB of SSAE16-audited datacenters, but you get all the things that consumer based backup systems don't - such as Plugins for SQL, Exchange, Hyper-V, NetApp, as well as Backup & DR software licenses for an unlimited number of servers - and, most importantly, 24 x 7 US-based engineer-level support.

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