50B Restores and Counting | Hacker News Reader

50B Restores and Counting

backblaze.com

16 pointsingve7 comments

Backblaze looks great, but I really don’t understand their encryption model, and why they made the choices they did. They’re so close to being properly end to end encrypted, but when you do a restore, the decryption is done on the server side. Why? Why not just bake that into the client?

Other systems like restic manage to do this correctly, why not the biggest player in the backup space?

This is what turned me away from Backblaze Backup. I think it is disingenuous from them to advertise with “Encryption” and “Personal Key”[1] because it gives the impression of end-to-end encryption. In reality it is just a feel-good thing. As soon as you want to restore data you must provide them with the key and they decrypt your data on their side before sending it to you. When I inquired about this strange architecture they avoided explaining the reason which made me even more distrustful.

It’s like a honey pot. Advertise encrypted backups to become big, force server-side decryption when people really need their data.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

Backblaze is one of the few services I recommend to everyone. The $5/month unlimited backup service with the 30 day versioning built on top of it is such peace of mind.

>> 28,841 Total Restores

That puts it a little more into perspective. That's a much, much smaller number.

Now, how many "Backblaze lost my files", or 'I couldn't restore my data" stories are there? Hundreds of those (I'm speculating) would be bad, statistically.

I had a hard drive failure, and on restore Backblaze lost ~70% of my files. They were unable to help. They were just gone (I cared about pictures mainly, roughly 160GB of them).

So in my experience they don't check data at rest very often. Unless you try to restore frequently, your data may be gone.

Fellow Backblaze user here. What was the UX when you did the restore and experienced data loss? Curious how I can preempt this by doing automated restore and verification operations myself.

Sorry about yer data loss, mate. That's rough, I've been there.

Reminds me of most places database backups... I always check to make sure they restore correctly, a lot of people just assume they will.

Other Engineer: We back up our database nightly! It's AUTOMATED and even copied to another data center in a different region!

Me: Have you ever tried restoring it?

Other Engineer: ... well, uhh, no... awkwardly pauses I mean why? scoffs and quickly walks back to desk

[two hours later]

Other Engineer: Holy shit, our backups wouldn't restore.... good thinking, mate. We would have been totally fucked.

You'd be surprised how often people don't check their backups, critical systems, restore functionality. Like just because you're doing it doesn't mean you're doing it right...

I personally think unless you somehow corrupted the data before failure, that Blackblaze sort of sucks hard here since this is literally their job. I hope they try to make it right somehow or actually figure out and find what caused that to happen.

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