The NSA might want some Backblaze pods | Hacker News Reader

The NSA might want some Backblaze pods

blog.backblaze.com

19 pointsmightybyte8 comments

I'm saving that (very nice) picture to show my kids. I hope we can look back and say "look how primitive this is, an exabyte needs an entire city block"

Anyhow, as we discussed when the NSA news came out, they're looking to buy 1 million square feet of datacenter space and to spend about a billion dollars. 2015 is probably far too soon to get to the yottabyte level with those constraints.

Might be easier to create a gigantic botnet and use citizens harddrives for storage. The government could force everyone to install the client.

awesome, i'd love to hack that and see what the government is really looking at :)

If you are so good that you can break current encryption, go for it :-)

I've been using Backblaze for a few months now. I'm very pleased with the "continuous" upload option, and it doesn't degrade my machine performance noticeably. I have not, however, gotten around to testing the restore process, which means I don't really know how useful it is as a backup service. Yeah, that's a failing on my part.

I've also been using it for a few months and I tried a restore. What I found out is that the large zip files they create don't work. They warn you about creating zip files over a certain size, but I tried it anyway. I couldn't get it to unzip successfully on Mac OS X or Solaris using a variety of programs.

I'm also skeptical of their data integrity. From reading about there setup it seems that they have no checksumming and their only redundancy is RAID. So bad blocks or multiple disk failure could cause data loss. It's still worth it for my because it's so cheap, but I wouldn't make it my only backup.

Thanks for the discussion here. I wanted to just clarify - we take data integrity very seriously and actually checksum EVERYTHING. We assume that data might get mangled over the Internet, in memory, on disk, etc. Thus, we checksum each file on your computer and ensure that it is returned to you upon restore identically.

Our system also does self-healing: monitoring every file in the datacenter and if a checksum ever doesn't match (due to a cosmic ray flipping a bit on a harddrive), it automatically contacts your computer to request that bit of a file be backed up again.

Gleb Budman CEO, Backblaze

It's a shame they don't have a Linux client or an API or i'd be quite tempted to give them a spin.

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