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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

If only you had a Linux client ...

Yev from Backblaze here -> For B2 we do have a few Linux connectors! Check them out -> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html!

Pretty sure any decent B2 CLI client supports Linux.

But for regular backup, this bit hard. I ended up switching to Crashplan for not only Linux support but also support for external hard drives. Then again the official Crashplan client is GUI-only and AFAIK closed-source, so you can't run it on a headless server

As a not incredibly impressed customer of Crashplan, I switched to rclone/duplicati and Amazon Cloud Drive for these and other reasons. The price is the same, and you can use whatever client you want.

Are rclone and duplicati yet more deduplicating backup programs? we now have:

    - rclone
    - duplicati
    - rdiff-backup
    - duplicity
    - attic
    - borg
    - bup
    - zbackup
    - ...?

I'd love to see a comparison of these because right now I have zero idea which one(s) I should use for any given purpose.

I don't know all of them, but I know some.

* zbackup: Appears to be unmaintained, superseded by attic/borg.

* attic: deduplicating backup repository. Doesn't seem actively maintained anymore either.

* borg: deduplicating backup repository. I used this recently. It's cool, but the performance is disappointing. It's single-threaded. I got into the GitHub a little bit and they seem committed to their current way of doing things, which makes it hard for an external multithreaded compressor to take over (everything is processed in 2 MB chunks).

* rclone: Meant to provide an rsync-like interface to any cloud backend

* duplicity: Automatically performs encrypted, compressed delta-enabled backups, but requires some upfront configuration. Been using this for years.

* rdiff-backup: Haven't used, but it seems more like an ad-hoc backup utility for "I want to keep an old version of this folder". Duplicity seems like a better choice for disk-scale backups.

BTW, rclone, duplicati, duplicity, and others now support Backblaze B2: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

Can't speak for the others but I use duplicati and send the backups to my unlimited google drive. I like that it encrypts and gives you the key vs some app saying they encrypt it.

I also ended up switching to CrashPlan. My reasons were Linux support, and the ability to back up to another computer running CrashPlan instead of cloud only. I hate their GUI.

However, we have a sizeable Elasticsearch snapshot in S3, and it's getting expensive. We'd love to use B2 instead, but there's currently no Elasticsearch plugin for B2.

Running Elasticsearch would require compute, which we don't have. However, how often do you run analysis on the data? Would it make sense to move the data to B2 and put back on s3 when it's needed?

Not sure what you mean that running Elasticsearch requires compute. I'm talking about the snapshot/restore functionality in Elasticsearch. We use it mostly for backups. As far as I can tell, it should be quite possible to implement a B2 plugin for that (Azure, GCS, HDFS, and S3 are available currently).

Got it. Let me look into that. Agree that if you're just taking a snapshot from Elasticsearch and putting into B2, that should be an implementalbe plug-in.

Backblaze supports external hard drives. You just have to keep them plugged in. If they aren't plugged in for 30 days, Backblaze will erase the backup - but gives you a warning.

SFTP/SCP/rsync support would be great. Currently, only HTTPS are supported for B2: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/230383828-Suppo...

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