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Comment by dstorrs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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