7 ms·

Backblaze is such a great company. Not only do they offer almost unlimited backup for just $5 a month, they also publish extremely useful articles such as this

by pazra 10y ago

Backblaze is such a great company. Not only do they offer almost unlimited backup for just $5 a month, they also publish extremely useful articles such as this one. Good to see Seagate has improved the quality of its product significantly, but a 3.5% failure rate still seems rather high. How old are the drives in question?

saryant 10y ago
How's the restore process? I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. That said, one of my drives has been acting up in the last few days so that moment may be at hand (though I also have it backed up to a second local drive).
- atYevP 10y ago
  > I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. Yev from Backblaze. Please test a restore. We have that as part of our best practices. Why? Hopefully you won't but if you DO need a restore, it's likely that you'll be in a heightened state of panic, so familiarizing yourself with the process before hand make it go more smoothly! It's pretty easy, though we are currently working on ways to streamline it even further :)
  - brianwski 10y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Yev said. When customers are doing a restore, almost by definition they are not having a good day. For example, this could be somebody who just had a $1,200 laptop stolen, and now they might lose every photo they have of their child who died last year. Real example. :-( So they show up to the Backblaze website freaked out of their minds, and they FORGET THEIR PASSWORD or something silly and minor like that, and after guessing a few times our support guys get a flaming hot chat session with a person using more four letter words than not accusing Backblaze of not having their restore. When we resolve it all (help them with the "recover password" feature) then we usually get a happy customer for life who apologizes for losing their temper earlier. I always find it amusing when they think they are the FIRST customer to ever lose their temper under such a stressful situation. Usually it isn't even the first one THAT DAY. TL;DR - you only restore when you are freaking out. And that's Ok - your worst day is the day when Backblaze has to be the best.
    - atYevP 10y ago
      Yev from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Brian said. A lot of our customers also restore just for fun or out of convenience. But yea, if you're one of the ones that's doing it out of necessity after a crash or theft, knowing how it works makes everything go a lot smoother.
- ansible 10y ago
  In addition to what Yev has said, I'd say: You don't have backups, unless you can do restores. So you have to practice doing restores. For my servers at work, we're using btrfs snapshots and send/receive to the backup host. So restoring files is just going into the appropriate snapshot directory, and copying out the files of interest. If your backup scheme is any more complicated than that, you need to practice it at least a few times per year so that it is completely familiar. Hilarious story from the old days... We were doing backups to QIC tape drives. At one point, there was a lightning storm. The servers were plugged into UPSs with power protection though. However, when running a backup, I noticed that the tape drive sounded a little different. So I check one of the backup tapes... the tape drive would no longer switch over the tracks on the tape. So it was just overwriting the same track again and again. Corrupted backups. Worse yet: silently corrupted backups. No messages from the OS about a hardware problem. That could have been bad news if it wasn't caught quickly.
  - existencebox 10y ago
    I realize this is slightly off topic, but I want to nerd out for a moment re: your comment on hearing something wrong with the tape drive; a skill I always felt was under-recognized for how much of a "superpower" it gives you, that being how critical sound is for a good sysop. Broken AC belts, bad hard drive backplanes, boot cycles, all things I've run into where the sound was the cue; detecting an unalerted tape drive failure is the icing on the diagnostic case.
    - ansible 10y ago
      I had another incident like that earlier in my IT career. I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff). So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business. At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds. Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs. Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.
- rbritton 10y ago
  I had a drive fail last fall and used the restore portion for the first time. I actually opted to use it over my local time machine backup and am glad I did. It was just a matter of selecting the files online, waiting for it to create the download, and then doing so. Much more painless than my other options.
- roasm 10y ago
  I back up to a local external drive, and also to BackBlaze. External drives are so cheap these days that the ease of handling your restore yourself is worth it to me. BackBlaze is just an offsite back up so when the house is burning down, I can grab the kids instead of pictures of the kids.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    My alternative: buy 2+ external drives and a fire/water proof box. Keep one drive unplugged and in the box when not backing up. Keep other n-1 drives elsewhere and swap with the local occasionally. I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. In case of a literal blaze and/or high water, even the local drive should be fine. If all drives are gone from a single catastrophe, I figure I (and everyone else) have more serious things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      >> I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. How often can you swap them?
      - theandrewbailey 10y ago
        As much as I want. I usually swap the work one about every week or two; parent's house is a few months.
    - driverdan 10y ago
      Most fireproof boxes are not actually fireproof. In many fires they will just turn into an oven that bakes whatever is inside.
  - saryant 10y ago
    That's what I do. I've got local Time Machine backups (which I have restored from in the past). So far I just haven't had to use my Backblaze backups but I think I'll test that this weekend.
- pgrote 10y ago
  The restore process on their consumer process is simple, but takes some time. You logon or use their app, choose the folders/files you want to restore and await an email from them letting you know when the folders/files are available for download.
  - blacksmith_tb 10y ago
    Or they will send you a thumb drive (or a bigger external), with your files on it. Obviously the use cases are different, one is "oops, I deleted a folder" and the other is "my machine is a heap of slag".
- dexterdog 10y ago
  I just assume that anybody who uses backblaze and is serious about their backups just uses it as a true DR. They keep a local backup which will be used for 99% of restores. BB is just for the case where you lose the backup as well. I honestly don't know how they do it at $5/user/month. They must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    That describes me as well. I figure Backblaze is a cheap extra pair of suspenders which is both DR and gives me an additional backup made in an independent way. I have pulled older versions of files off Backblaze a couple times when I've needed to but, now, Time Machine pretty much takes care of that. I also keep a periodic backup in my office as well as various less systematic backups in various ways. I'd recommend anyone keep at least a couple of backups made with different methods. You never feel more exposed than when you need to use a backup and realize you only have one copy of all your data. Hope nothing else fails or you do something boneheaded with the restore.
  - brianwski 10y ago
    > must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales Brian from Backblaze here. Our new B2 product is priced at half a penny per GByte per month which accurately reflects how much it costs for us to store your data including a small profit for us. So the $5/month is profitable for us up to a 1 TByte backup. We have about 25 customers with more than 50 TBytes in a $5/month backup, and yes, we lose money on them (which is FINE - they often recommend us to friends with less data). On the opposite end, we have about 20,000 customers with less than 20 GBytes backed up where we are massively profitable on those particular customers. Interestingly enough, my 84 year old father is in that demographic - no digital music, no digital movies, a few digital photos and a Quicken file. Last year he lost a hard drive, we restored his files from Backblaze. :-) In between the 50 TByte and 10 GByte customers is a big bell curve with the bulk of our customers basically paying for their own backups. A different way to think about it is the vast majority of people store files inside their laptops and are happy. The maximum size hard drive you can configure in a laptop today is probably about 1 TByte (the 2 TByte laptop size drives are just starting to appear), so by definition we're profitable on people like this. Technical people think everybody is like them and has a 16 TByte RAID array filled with all the Linux ISOs and movies. :-) But really most people have less than a TByte of personal data.
theandrewbailey 10y ago
Does anyone think that these reports have shamed manufacturers into decreasing failure rates? When the FCC started doing reports on internet speeds, ISPs took notice and in the second report, an ISP's actual speeds better matched advertised speeds. It would be awesome if these Backblaze reports were likewise improving hard drives. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-broadband-america-july-2012#Year_By_Year https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...
- click170 10y ago
  I'm actually wondering if one of the reasons that they're having trouble buying WDC drives is because WDC keeps trying to add a clause into the purchase agreement saying BackBlaze can't release information about WDC drive failure rates. Anyone from BackBlaze able to comment on that?
  - qaq 10y ago
    WDC is likely not selling directly at such low qtys and if they do pricing would not be good.
  - brianwski 10y ago
    Brian from Backblaze here - so far none of the drive manufacturers have done anything like that. Part of it is the manufactures flatly refuse to let us purchase from them directly (based on we need an order of 10,000 of the same drive in one purchase to buy direct). So the manufacturers have zero control. We always go to one of the hundreds of resellers or distributers out there (like CDW or Ingram Micro). Since we buy from the resellers, the resellers just want to make money, the resellers don't care if we report drive stats.
    - jedberg 10y ago
      Have you guys thought about becoming a reseller as another line of business? In the post it says you need about 1200 drives a month (if read that right) so you could buy 10,000 from the manufacturer, and then sell the extra as Backblaze Approved(tm) or some such. I'd much rather buy a drive I know you guys have put through its paces, especially if I knew that purchase would help fund more data and research, by supporting your business.
krzyk 10y ago
The only problem with blackblaze is that they are on osx and Windows only. I'm using Linux so the only cheap backup is from crashplan, kudos to them that they support us.

by pazra 10y ago

saryant 10y ago

How's the restore process? I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. That said, one of my drives has been acting up in the last few days so that moment may be at hand (though I also have it backed up to a second local drive).

atYevP 10y ago
> I've actually been backing up to Backblaze for about a year now but (knock on wood) haven't had to restore any data. Yev from Backblaze. Please test a restore. We have that as part of our best practices. Why? Hopefully you won't but if you DO need a restore, it's likely that you'll be in a heightened state of panic, so familiarizing yourself with the process before hand make it go more smoothly! It's pretty easy, though we are currently working on ways to streamline it even further :)
- brianwski 10y ago
  Brian from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Yev said. When customers are doing a restore, almost by definition they are not having a good day. For example, this could be somebody who just had a $1,200 laptop stolen, and now they might lose every photo they have of their child who died last year. Real example. :-( So they show up to the Backblaze website freaked out of their minds, and they FORGET THEIR PASSWORD or something silly and minor like that, and after guessing a few times our support guys get a flaming hot chat session with a person using more four letter words than not accusing Backblaze of not having their restore. When we resolve it all (help them with the "recover password" feature) then we usually get a happy customer for life who apologizes for losing their temper earlier. I always find it amusing when they think they are the FIRST customer to ever lose their temper under such a stressful situation. Usually it isn't even the first one THAT DAY. TL;DR - you only restore when you are freaking out. And that's Ok - your worst day is the day when Backblaze has to be the best.
  - atYevP 10y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here. Let me elaborate on what Brian said. A lot of our customers also restore just for fun or out of convenience. But yea, if you're one of the ones that's doing it out of necessity after a crash or theft, knowing how it works makes everything go a lot smoother.
ansible 10y ago
In addition to what Yev has said, I'd say: You don't have backups, unless you can do restores. So you have to practice doing restores. For my servers at work, we're using btrfs snapshots and send/receive to the backup host. So restoring files is just going into the appropriate snapshot directory, and copying out the files of interest. If your backup scheme is any more complicated than that, you need to practice it at least a few times per year so that it is completely familiar. Hilarious story from the old days... We were doing backups to QIC tape drives. At one point, there was a lightning storm. The servers were plugged into UPSs with power protection though. However, when running a backup, I noticed that the tape drive sounded a little different. So I check one of the backup tapes... the tape drive would no longer switch over the tracks on the tape. So it was just overwriting the same track again and again. Corrupted backups. Worse yet: silently corrupted backups. No messages from the OS about a hardware problem. That could have been bad news if it wasn't caught quickly.
- existencebox 10y ago
  I realize this is slightly off topic, but I want to nerd out for a moment re: your comment on hearing something wrong with the tape drive; a skill I always felt was under-recognized for how much of a "superpower" it gives you, that being how critical sound is for a good sysop. Broken AC belts, bad hard drive backplanes, boot cycles, all things I've run into where the sound was the cue; detecting an unalerted tape drive failure is the icing on the diagnostic case.
  - ansible 10y ago
    I had another incident like that earlier in my IT career. I was a 'terminal room consultant' in college... back when we had serial terminals hooked to Unix systems. Part of the job was the care and feeding of a couple printers, a big ol' line printer (green bar paper) and a Printronix graphics printer (dot matrix, for printing out fancy lab reports you wrote up using troff). So over time, from loading paper and clearing jams, I had accumulated hours and hours of hearing these two guys chatter as they went about their business. At one point, I noticed that the Printronix printer sounded funny. Just off, in some way. So I call it in for maintenance, but they don't seem to care what an undergraduate punk thought about printer sounds. Sure enough, a week later, I see it is down and taken apart for repairs. Your ears, your nose, all your senses should be used for debugging and general investigation.
rbritton 10y ago
I had a drive fail last fall and used the restore portion for the first time. I actually opted to use it over my local time machine backup and am glad I did. It was just a matter of selecting the files online, waiting for it to create the download, and then doing so. Much more painless than my other options.
roasm 10y ago
I back up to a local external drive, and also to BackBlaze. External drives are so cheap these days that the ease of handling your restore yourself is worth it to me. BackBlaze is just an offsite back up so when the house is burning down, I can grab the kids instead of pictures of the kids.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  My alternative: buy 2+ external drives and a fire/water proof box. Keep one drive unplugged and in the box when not backing up. Keep other n-1 drives elsewhere and swap with the local occasionally. I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. In case of a literal blaze and/or high water, even the local drive should be fine. If all drives are gone from a single catastrophe, I figure I (and everyone else) have more serious things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> I have one at work, and another at my parent's house, more than 100 miles away. How often can you swap them?
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      As much as I want. I usually swap the work one about every week or two; parent's house is a few months.
  - driverdan 10y ago
    Most fireproof boxes are not actually fireproof. In many fires they will just turn into an oven that bakes whatever is inside.
- saryant 10y ago
  That's what I do. I've got local Time Machine backups (which I have restored from in the past). So far I just haven't had to use my Backblaze backups but I think I'll test that this weekend.
pgrote 10y ago
The restore process on their consumer process is simple, but takes some time. You logon or use their app, choose the folders/files you want to restore and await an email from them letting you know when the folders/files are available for download.
- blacksmith_tb 10y ago
  Or they will send you a thumb drive (or a bigger external), with your files on it. Obviously the use cases are different, one is "oops, I deleted a folder" and the other is "my machine is a heap of slag".
dexterdog 10y ago
I just assume that anybody who uses backblaze and is serious about their backups just uses it as a true DR. They keep a local backup which will be used for 99% of restores. BB is just for the case where you lose the backup as well. I honestly don't know how they do it at $5/user/month. They must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales.
- ghaff 10y ago
  That describes me as well. I figure Backblaze is a cheap extra pair of suspenders which is both DR and gives me an additional backup made in an independent way. I have pulled older versions of files off Backblaze a couple times when I've needed to but, now, Time Machine pretty much takes care of that. I also keep a periodic backup in my office as well as various less systematic backups in various ways. I'd recommend anyone keep at least a couple of backups made with different methods. You never feel more exposed than when you need to use a backup and realize you only have one copy of all your data. Hope nothing else fails or you do something boneheaded with the restore.
- brianwski 10y ago
  > must have a ton of very light users to offset the whales Brian from Backblaze here. Our new B2 product is priced at half a penny per GByte per month which accurately reflects how much it costs for us to store your data including a small profit for us. So the $5/month is profitable for us up to a 1 TByte backup. We have about 25 customers with more than 50 TBytes in a $5/month backup, and yes, we lose money on them (which is FINE - they often recommend us to friends with less data). On the opposite end, we have about 20,000 customers with less than 20 GBytes backed up where we are massively profitable on those particular customers. Interestingly enough, my 84 year old father is in that demographic - no digital music, no digital movies, a few digital photos and a Quicken file. Last year he lost a hard drive, we restored his files from Backblaze. :-) In between the 50 TByte and 10 GByte customers is a big bell curve with the bulk of our customers basically paying for their own backups. A different way to think about it is the vast majority of people store files inside their laptops and are happy. The maximum size hard drive you can configure in a laptop today is probably about 1 TByte (the 2 TByte laptop size drives are just starting to appear), so by definition we're profitable on people like this. Technical people think everybody is like them and has a 16 TByte RAID array filled with all the Linux ISOs and movies. :-) But really most people have less than a TByte of personal data.

theandrewbailey 10y ago

Does anyone think that these reports have shamed manufacturers into decreasing failure rates? When the FCC started doing reports on internet speeds, ISPs took notice and in the second report, an ISP's actual speeds better matched advertised speeds. It would be awesome if these Backblaze reports were likewise improving hard drives. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-broadband-america-july-2012#Year_By_Year https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broad...

click170 10y ago
I'm actually wondering if one of the reasons that they're having trouble buying WDC drives is because WDC keeps trying to add a clause into the purchase agreement saying BackBlaze can't release information about WDC drive failure rates. Anyone from BackBlaze able to comment on that?
- qaq 10y ago
  WDC is likely not selling directly at such low qtys and if they do pricing would not be good.
- brianwski 10y ago
  Brian from Backblaze here - so far none of the drive manufacturers have done anything like that. Part of it is the manufactures flatly refuse to let us purchase from them directly (based on we need an order of 10,000 of the same drive in one purchase to buy direct). So the manufacturers have zero control. We always go to one of the hundreds of resellers or distributers out there (like CDW or Ingram Micro). Since we buy from the resellers, the resellers just want to make money, the resellers don't care if we report drive stats.
  - jedberg 10y ago
    Have you guys thought about becoming a reseller as another line of business? In the post it says you need about 1200 drives a month (if read that right) so you could buy 10,000 from the manufacturer, and then sell the extra as Backblaze Approved(tm) or some such. I'd much rather buy a drive I know you guys have put through its paces, especially if I knew that purchase would help fund more data and research, by supporting your business.

krzyk 10y ago

The only problem with blackblaze is that they are on osx and Windows only. I'm using Linux so the only cheap backup is from crashplan, kudos to them that they support us.