Subscription Changes for Computer Backup | Hacker News Reader

Subscription Changes for Computer Backup

backblaze.com

87 pointsLaSombra95 comments

Working in video production, I know there are a lot of videographers and photographers "abusing" the unlimited nature of this service. It's not my business how BackBlaze does things, or if the usage falls within their acceptable use policy, but I see so many in my industry brag about the insanely cheap rates BackBlaze offers on their computer backup.

From my armchair, it seems like a bunch of personal users subsidize the freelance photo/video production industry. I wonder why BackBlaze doesn't give those extreme users the boot? Or, put in place a reasonable storage limit (e.g., 5 TB or something that 95% of users will be okay with.) I like BackBlaze but it always rubs me the wrong way when I see people in Facebook groups using the Computer Backup solution as if it were B2 or a higher-tier service.

Exactly this "truly unlimited" sounds nice until you realize that you are paying for the average user of the service. In terms of cost it is good if you are above average, bad if you are below average.

Of course there is a real UX benefit to unlimited. You don't need to worry about what you can back up, project your growth and cost or hitting your limit. It is definitely simpler from the user side.

Maybe the marketing value of being “truly unlimited” outweighs the cost of the abuse? There are a good number of people who value the lack of cognitive load of fine print, even if they’re paying more for it.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We go into it a bit in the blog post, but over the last two years our average data stored for Computer Backup increased by 15% - it's not just a handful of people pulling the number forward. That plus the rising cost of hardware over the last year and a half resulted in us having to make this adjustment.

Or instead of a hard limit, make it $7 up to ${very_large_amount} then B2 pricing, so that 99.5% of your non-technical customers don't have to worry about where the limit is at all, and no one gets kicked.

+1 and same considerations apply for Linux users. Just charge people for usage above a certain threshold (high storage and bandwidth) and give "normal" people the flat rate.

At one point, Mozy which was another backup service acquired by EMC went from unlimited to flat rate up to some limit and then charged incrementally, effectively "firing" their heavy users. I wasn't even that extreme and it made Mozy very economically unattractive to me.

Backblaze knows the numbers and I don't but it's certainly possible that the heaviest users don't cost them that much relative to the benefits of being truly unlimited without much fine print.

There is probably just not enough of those types of users to really change the calculus for Backblaze.

I appreciate how this blog entry puts the most important thing out first - the fact that prices are increasing. And only then goes to justify why customers should be still happy.

Yev from Backblaze here -> thank you! We didn't want to fill it with a bunch of fluff first and then give bad news. Went with the most pressing information up front since it's the most relevant, and then tucked the offer towards the back. I'll make sure that the team sees the feedback :)

I went the "DIY" Arq/AWS Glacier Deep Archive route for personal backups. I have roughly 2-3TB of storage and pay about $5/month for it (I think a bit of that cost is just uploads of new backup data and that all churns through normal S3 until the lifecycle marks the files as Deep Archive later).

BackBlaze's backup option looks a whole lot more elegant and would absolutely be a lot cheaper for restores. The small price raise seems like a good business strategy from their side - I'm just here to remind people the "DIY" backups pathway isn't that much more inexpensive. I just stick with my "DIY" path because I'm mostly backing up my external time machine and media disks, and enjoy having full control over the encryption keys.

When I did my DIY AWS Glacier solution in 2014 (still in use), for 500 GB of storage Dropbox billed 499 eur/year. However there were many other companies (haven't looked whether they are still in business) at 59 eur/year. https://nikonyrh.github.io/GlacierBackup_blackblaze_cmp.png

Did you consider tarsnap? I've also been using AWS but was looking at migrating to another service. Curious if you or any reader here has experience to share on that.

I, for one, am happy to pay a bit more to keep supporting Backblaze. More than worth the $7/mo to sleep better at night, and the service has worked flawlessly for me.

Also a Backblaze unlimited backups user. The Mac app still doesn't autoupdate gracefully on demand using something like the Sparkle framework (clicking "Check for updates" brings up a prompt which takes you to a browser window to download a zip file you have to open and perform a traditional manual reinstall). The mobile app (at least on iOS) is seriously lacking. The restore experience is minimum viable (compared to Arq and Time Machine). Are my files backed up? Sure. Do I feel like I'm getting value? I'd move to iCloud TimeMachine target if Apple rolled it out today as part of iCloud; the value isn't in the object storage (even Apple uses S3 and Google Object Storage on the backend), it's in the backup and restore experience.

Maybe my expectations are too high; I'm looking for a UX as beautifully put together as Dropbox (both on Mac and iOS).

EDIT: I will compliment the ease at which I can pick a filesystem tree and snapshot it to their B2 storage system (say, for snapshotting all of my Apple Photos Library at points in time), but it too has a lot of rough edges.

(using ~332GB of storage for backups, which is ~$20/year using Backblaze B2 vs unlimited backups offering; Arq offers five computers and 1TB of cloud storage for $60/year)

> The Mac app still doesn't autoupdate gracefully

It does: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665068-How-d...

Improved my comment to better communicate the thought. I believe my point still stands that if an update is available when you "check for updates", you have to download a zip file, open the disk image, and perform the install manually. Contrast to something like Bitwarden, where checking for an update performs the install and restarts the app automatically.

It's a minor quibble, but demonstrates a lack of polish imho.

I agree the restore is lacking compared to Time Machine. But I have a ~fully automated dev machine setup process, so it's not as big a pain for me. However, having been able to find files I deleted but ended up needing has saved my ass (and time) on multiple occasions.

Backblaze completely lost my wife's data several years ago due to a bug in their platform, then their support tried to gaslight her into thinking it was her fault. The actual issue is that their dashboard stored cached data and said files existed when they didn't, which was only discovered when trying to restore data to find it was all missing.

I know its probably not your fault, but this is a sysadmin best practice (though, if you read /r/sysadmin, you'll see they regularly don't do this either). Backups are useless unless you regularly validate them. Backups can break in many different ways, and you don't want to find out that they broke when you truly need them. This obviously increases cost/time for using a service/solution, but its good to do to hope it does work when you need it.

The whole value proposition of Backblaze and similar services is that I don't have to have sysadmin levels of knowledge. It just works.

If I wanted to deal with regular validation of backups and similar sysadmin tasks, I'd just run the whole thing myself.

It takes like an hour a year to request a USB stick from Backblaze, browse through it and return it. Validating backups on top of rolling your own would take a lot more time (i.e. the value proposition is more complex.) There’s really no “it just works” in backups of data you care about unless you have people you can delegate the restore testing to.

How do you know for sure that the stick they send you is a valid restore snapshot?

Do you have a program you wrote to go verify the contents of each and every file on the stick and compare that to what is currently on your system?

It seems to me that the backup validation process also has to be provided by the vendor that created the backup software itself. Only they know their file formats. Only they know how to properly compare file A and file B to see if they are correct and accurate.

The first improved feature they tout as part of their rational for the price increase is "extended version history." I feel like this is quite a bit mis-leading, as you pay extra for this feature. I got a Backblaze price increase about 1.5 years ago, then I upgraded my version history, and now I get another price increase. I understand the need to increase prices, but I'm also starting to feel a bit nickel-and-dimed here.

Also, they claim that they have "optimized the app to be kinder to your computer." Am I the only one that find the opposite to be true? I've tuned my exclusion lists pretty heavily, but bzserv is constantly using more and more cpu on my machine.

Yev from Backblaze here -> are you using version 8.0? It should be a lot more efficient on your machine.

No, I'm not. Interestingly, the app never asked to update. I'll give 8 a try, thanks.

You bet - we sent an email out recently, but haven't run auto-update yet - but that's coming!

Hey, I hope there is a BackBlaze person lurking the comments.

I use BackBlaze to make sporadic, one time backups. I then disconnect everything - which is just 2 mirrored drives. These drives only contain important documents.

Can BackBlaze please not delete my backups if my drives are not connected for X days, even though I pay for the backups? It is very confusing to me, and actually pretty damn frustrating.

To be more clear, my backup solution is detailed here, where I recommend BackBlaze even: https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2020/07/backing-up-for-mortals...

Thanks!

I'm an engineer at Backblaze. We do have extended version history that you can enable to have the files held for a longer time.

https://www.backblaze.com/version-history.html

But what if I don't care about any version history, and I just want a single snapshot held indefinitely? Should I instead go with a service like Google Drive?

Does the $2/month extra cost for "Forever Version History" add-on not solve your concern?

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035247494

I am not an user of this service, can backups be deleted due to inactivity? This sounds very confusing.

I know it sounds like a broken MP3, but I don't see "support for Linux on non-servers" on that list of improvements - apparently because they still think only Linux users have large hard drives...

It's just not as easy to stop abuse on Linux, people would find a way to backup their 50TB NAS on it.

I absolutely know people who not use it in good faith. Same people that crammed many terabytes into Amazon Drive back when it was unlimited so that they could "back up their plex server".

So what is the best off-site solution for backing up a NAS in good faith? I have about 10TB of data that is "backed up" to varying degrees but no all-in-one solution right now.

Assuming that your NAS is Linux-based, maybe Borg with Rsync.net may suit you (used it for mine, satisfied with it). Note that you are responsible for keeping the Borg encryption keys if you used it. $80/month (for 10 TB) might be yikes though if you're expecting a web or mobile-browsable backup though (since Rsync.net is literally a ssh storage provider), and if you want to keep snapshots, you need to also pay for their storage. Borg supports FUSE access though, so if you really need to browse then that should be good enough for occasional one-off restores.

Borg: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Rsync.net: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

rclone with anything that's paid per tb, e.g. Amazon S3/Glacier or Backblaze B2. Data storage (and retrieval!) isn't cheap, however, and the pricing isn't simple.

You can back up 10 TB of data to a single external hard drive these days. Making it "offsite" is as simple as taking it to a secondary location (office, family, etc.). Your one-time cost is higher, but there's no ongoing monthly fee.

I use Backblaze b2. You can use any S3 compatible backup tool or file browser. Downloads routed through Cloudflare are free

How would being on Linux help with that?

How are Americans using Backblaze for multi-terabyte backups? comcast/xfinity has a 1TB/month bandwidth cap (unless you pay for the unlimited tier). The main thing that's held me back from getting a cloud backup solution is not knowing how I would feasibly backup my ~10TB of data.

Only a minority of Americans are on a decent ISP, but that's still tens of millions with FTTP.

Backblaze also has data centers in the EU, where most of the population has FTTP and even the people who don't are much less likely to have data caps because the EU is actually pro-competition.

I tried online backup from my NAS to B2 for 3TB of data (worked fine, ultimately too expensive for my scenario), and it's feasible if you don't mind the first backup taking weeks (or maybe months in your case).

Since this thread might attract people who know …

I’m looking at getting a NAS for home backup to get my data out of cloud services.

Is synology still a good option for this? I’ve read that they are starting to engage in some anti-user behaviors like restricting the types of drives that can be used with their gear.

I'm de-Gooling myself, and a few months ago purchased the following:

- Synology DiskStation DS720+ - Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro - APC Smart-UPS SC 450VA

I'm genuinely happy with it, the Synology "OS" (or w/e) is pretty good. Honestly, I just wanted photo backup, and their "Moments" photo software really isn't too shabby.

Now, if someone could help me battleproof it, that'd be wonderful. I've setup a cron to turn it off at Midnight, just so I only use it when I need it. Hearing about those 0days affecting those other NAS's makes me super paranoid about self-hosting all my stuff, so until then it's off until I need it

Depends on how technical you are, how much data you have, and how much you like to tinker.

Buying an appliance off the shelf is usually going to have limitations. I built my own personally, using a pile of WD reds and an old i7 that was destined for disposal. This is optimal for my use because I can expand it if I need to, I have full control of my data and appliance, and it's really zero maintenance once it's set up.

If you want to set it and forget it, get a QNAP or Synology. If you want to tinker with it, build your own.

You still should backup your NAS to the cloud per the 3-2-1 backups strategy (3 copies of data, 2 types of storage, 1 offsite copy). Synology has an app that can do that for you. If you're stashing away a lot of data on your NAS the cloud storage fees won't be too much cheaper than BackBlaze.

If backing up my synology to Backblaze what's the best practice to ensure full end to end encryption. I do not want backblaze to have any way to see my files (I'd probably be ok with filenames however)...

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/231668907-Encry...

Arq backup

You can save a lot of money if you buy a couple extra harddrives, make a copy and store it with your friends/family. As a bonus, less likely to get the NSA involved.

this was my thought instead of cloud backup

I don't care so much to lose the most recent few months. Can store some extra drives at a family members house and swap them out whenever I go to visit.

I would assemble your own using FreeNAS/TrueNAS or buy a TrueNAS system that is already built for you. Having a full FreeBSD based system with modern ZFS is much more robust and does not come with any restrictions.

I personally built a NAS and use unraid on it along with (dockerized) resilio sync, and it works great for my purposes of local backup from multiple sources.

I wish I could use Backblaze to back up a Time Machine drive (second-level backup, offsite, daily/weekly) but that a use case they specifically don't do.

What do other people use for this?

I have two local Time Machine backups and I also have Backblaze running against the drives that Time Machine backs up.

I used Backblaze B2 for a project as the store of the files.

I had to switch to elsewhere once hitting production, when doing thousands of async upload requests, some would randomly 403 on me. Their customers rep solution was to handle it on my side (yeah, I know) but it was easier for me to just switch providers.

I guess for other products Backblaze is good, but I wouldn't recommend their Backblaze B2 to other fellow devs, those nines of availability in difference are noticeable on the long run

B2 was designed for backup storage, not being a fake hard drive. Even if it was, you would have a far better solution for dealing with latency and your data being in the clear if you would use `rclone`. Add the B2 storage backend, then a local cache to B2, then encryption to cache. You then get local performance from the cache, unlimited space from B2, and it becomes eventually consistent in the background.

B2 advertises itself as an object storage suitable to applications. This can be thousands of mobile devices using an app to save photos. His use case is, IMHO, right inside what they advertise.

The cloud backup is another product.

> B2 was designed for backup storage… unlimited space from B2…

You seem confused – B2 is Backblaze’s pay-per-GB-stored-or-downloaded AWS S3 competitor, not their consumer unlimited backup product. It even clones the S3 API for maximum ease of switching.

It’s not unreasonable of anyone to expect B2 to work in the same usecases one would have for S3.

Their API used to frequently have a _high_ error rate, to the point my exponential backoff retry loops were giving up occasionally.

Seems to have improved a lot in the last few years though.

Uh... can this be abused to backup CCTV footage from a old DVR ? The data would be at once just 1 tb but the CCTV reuses the space so its 1tb each month. I know it would be ethically "bad" but if I had to do it, maybe set up a cron to push data from DVR to a PC which then uses backblaze software to backup and keep old files?

Kinda, you can pay ($2/m) for extended version history, and that might keep the files for longer.

Cool

Not a big fan of this, our home computers are all less than 2tb, at this point it looks like it’s cheaper to find someone else to do the backups who isn’t “unlimited”.

The biggest selling point to me for backblaze was set it and forget it + stable price.

Now they’re raising their price every year, and require that I jump through hoops to have the old price.

I had backblaze on a laptop that was stolen. The thief uploaded all of their criminal activities to my backblaze account. I was able to inform five federal agencies on their wrongdoings as a result.

Thanks Backblaze for adding the forever hold feature! You helped prevent more victims of a very bad human.

How was the thief even able to login to your laptop?

It was a spare on a shelf at my office in a co working space. Password was not set up so a low level worker could use it if I needed them to grab it. Worked out well as the thief used it and thought nothing of securing it.

It was a cheap wintel computer that could have had the os reinstalled if the operating system had been locked.

The thief had opportunity and access to the coworking space.

Thankfully they didn’t realize backblaze was on it.

Probably just extracted the credentials from an unencrypted drive.

Seems a bit more savvy than I'd expect a typical laptop-snatcher would be, but with the possibility of finding a cryptocurrency wallet these days, maybe more thieves go to the trouble (or sell them to people who would).

I have a NAS running Synology with like 5TB. Is there a way to back this up with end to end encryuption?

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/231668907-Encry...

That's backblaze B2, not personal backup.

Does anyone have experience using this to sync between a Windows PC and a Mac?

I've tried using OneDrive and it's pretty bad. I basically keep it disabled until I remember, "hey I haven't synced in a while, turn it on until complete, then turn off again."

It's backup, not sync.

Your basic consumer choices for cloud-based sync are OneDrive, Google Drive, or DropBox.

I prefer Google Drive now that I can keep all my files in the cloud and download/cache on demand, rather than keep it synced -- this way I get a usable 2TB disk rather than being limited to my laptop's 256GB storage. Google announced a new unified app yesterday actually:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/new-google-drive-app...

I don't actually need/want any sort of sync integration.

I do however want a remote copy of only current local files, which is a kind of sync. Then be able to make a local copy of the current remote files in a device/directory of my choice. A command-line tool to start the sync operation is fine, especially if it can run incrementally/resume.

I'm curious, can you clarify?

What do you mean by "current" in "only current local files" and "current remote files"?

What does it mean to want a remote copy of only current local files, as opposed to all local files?

'current local files' are the files that are currently on the machine I'm using right now.

'current remote files' are the files that the cloud storage has from the last sync operation with any computer.

When I perform a sync between a computer I'm on and cloud storage, any new remote files (since last sync on this computer) are copied down, any files deleted locally are deleted remotely, newer local files copied up. I think I can script this with rclone (if it's anything like rsync).

Sorry, you said "I don't actually need/want any sort of sync integration".

But what you're describing is just... regular sync?

What are you asking for that's not regular sync? What am I missing here?

Does HN have something against Mega? It seems like it would fall more in line. It even has a CLI.

This Backblaze product doesn’t sync between computers. Their B2 storage can, but you need a client for it that can automatically work with S3-compatible storage. I use Arq but free options exist.

I've used Syncthing to sync between Mac, Linux and Android. They have a Windows client.

It's not the most intuitive software to set up, especially on mobile where there are confusing filesystem restrictions from the OS, but once set up seems to work nicely.

I don't use the versioning / read-only features, so I don't know how well it performs for sort-of-backup purposes.

This looks interesting, but I was interested in each computer doing a sync with cloud storage. I realize that's not well-defined, but even keeping the more recently updated version in any sync session is ok with me. The thing I wanted is that I only use one computer at a time and don't leave the others on so doing direct pc <-> mac sync is less convenient, compared to run a sync on whichever machine I'm using at the time.

Should I just be getting some cloud VM that backs up its storage and use rsync/ssh?

If there's always at least one computer switched on (which be a rented VM, or even a phone if that's enough storage) then Syncthing could work. I haven't tried making many edits from different places with lots of time offline though — mostly, I use it to sync photos I take on my phone to my computers and vice-versa for DSLR pictures, and music etc from the computers to my phone. Files generally sync within a few seconds.

rclone is the cloud equivalent of rsync, it syncs to S3, GCS etc. But you'd have to set up the "latest version" part yourself (--update?) and something to make the synchronization happen after changes (inotify on Linux?).

Syncthing has worked for years for me without a single hitch.

OneDrive and Google Drive are similar and fail in similar ways, I think because they look at files and not blocks. A lot of the goofy OneDrive gotchas have been resolved, but I don’t trust it for backup.

Dropbox is king of sync, especially if you are on the same LAN as it syncs locally. That said, Dropbox has a long-term strategy of alienating their customers through annoying upsell and doing weird stuff with clients.

Personally, I went the old school route and setup a file server. I bought a surplus HP Thin Client on EBay and stuck a big SSD in it… it’s a silent, low power device that I can backup with standard Unix tools. I think the device was $50 and the drive $189 on Black Friday.

Woah, it occurs to me that I've cloud-blinded myself. Do I really, really need offsite backup? If not having an always on third machine really does do the job, especially if I can get remote access set up for it.

I kinda don't want to handle the physical media though. It works well short term, but for longer time frames I can't be trusted. I have misplaced/erased/reused/damaged so many devices. It's also a pain to keep up with the upgrading/updating of the various interfaces the devices use.

You don’t need to be dogmatic about it!

You can have a little file server, and have it backup to something like backblaze, aws, rsync.net, and just focus on the backup aspect.

if you want protection from a ransomware attack you absolutely want a cloud backup, or you need to setup a cloud-like backup solution, where the "local" server is somehow airgapped from your local network and uses a different set of credentials, and none of your local-net pc's have access to it, except to write new files.

If you using OneDrive as a backup, it is not designed for that. You need to use the service that are specialized for backups which BackBlaze is the right product for it. OneDrive is mainly a online storage/vault with syncing capabilities. If you have a thousands of file to backup to OneDrive, you will have a problem since OneDrive need to upload everything that you want to backup to. Imagine 500,000 files that OneDrive have to upload for the backup, that will take a while. Their upload speed is not that great which is why they are not designed for backup.

My specific case is keeping a cloud copy of my audio media, in the order of 30 to 80 GB and most files do not change with metadata in auxiliary files. I started the initial upload and went to bed--it may have taken a few hours. Either sync or backup would be fine as long as unchanged files are not transferred. Automatic or manually (or scheduled) tasks are fine too.

No but you may want to try rclone. Not exactly lightweight but it’s very easy to use and configure with a variety of storage services.

Thanks, this is the only answer that seems to understand what I want. Most of the other comments say sync != backup, but depending on your (or my) use case either could work just fine.

rsync is good enough for me so rclone may be too. Hopefully I don't run into any OS/filesystem difference problems, e.g. case-insensitivity, special chars, or path lengths.

FYI, rclone is built on top of rsync. So you’ll have a good understanding of how it works underneath. Think of it as rsync + remote storage and service mounting tool. The nicest part about rclone IMO, is the plethora of services it can mount, so if you have compatibility issues (which you shouldn’t) then you could choose another service.

Sync and backup are different things. Dropbox is the best at sync but would get very costly for large backups. Backblaze is the best for disaster recovery backup.

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