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Comment by luser001 | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things?

Dropbox is primarily a sharing and synchronization tool: using it for backup is very expensive.

IMHO. YMMV.

Edit: They now match Spideroak's pricing. If anybody from Spideroak is reading this: you have an awesome service, but here are a couple of things you might want to do. I like your commitment to privacy and hence use it, but sadly, IMHO it's not easy enough for my spouse to use, and I wouldn't recommend it to them.

1. simplify the client.

2. sharing is not intuitive

3. default setting should be that all folders are synchronized: the opposite of the current one.

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Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things?

Because their homepage says: As low as $3.96/month per computer for unlimited data.

I consider that to be an unmaintainable low price, and their "unlimited data" claim really puts me off. My files are too important to me; I couldn't even consider going with them.

DropBox certainly costs more but:

1) I trust them (knowing that they use Amazon S3 is a BIG bonus)

2) $20/month is an incredibly low price for peace of mind.

Note: I'm not the same author as the grandparent comment.

You can then add suspenders to your belt: sign up for multiple backup services. E.g. I have Backblaze and Crashplan. $3/mo for Crashplan and $5/mo for Backblaze give me two unlimited backups.

If you were to choose one, which would it be? I'm with CrashPlan now, but their upload speed is so impossibly slow that I'll never upload all my data. Uploading only 250GB has taken me 4 months. And the software is not so great.

I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more if those problems were fixed.

Not sure… I had tried Backblaze last year and had the same problem as yours: after a few months I was still not done with the initial backup, so I cancelled. A few months ago I figured I should give online back-ups another try and I signed up for both at the same time. Both took less time the second time around somehow… I was planning on keeping only one but in the end, at that price, it's worth it to keep both.

Overall I don't care too much about the software (I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad) since it would be needed only in case of crash. But I like Crashplan a bit better because it can back-up your whole drive and they're cheaper. Their family plan is very cheap too.

    I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad

I'd say so... They just reset my backup for no discernible reason.

Backblaze doesn't limit your upload speeds if you have a lot of stuff to backup which is why I stuck with them instead of switching to another provider. That said, backing up from Norway still isn't fast - I only get about 13GB/day, so it's still taking forever to get everything backed up, but I just made sure to exclude the lower priority stuff at first and add another folder or drive at a time in order what is most important to me. So far I have about 2.5TB backed up across 2 computers.

In case you didn't know they invented the "Backblaze Pod" to reduce storage costs.

I don't think their costs are unreasonably low.

1 TB of double-redundant bare HDD space costs about $250 for five years (they have an interesting blog post where they candidly admit that they buy high-warranty drives and the manuf's eat the loss of drives).

Even if you manage to upload 1 TB to their servers, they still don't lose money. Just to be clear, imho 1 TB is an insane amount of data. My pictures and videos from about 3 years still total only about 100 GB.

Given the slow upstream bandwidth of most users, most people are unlikely to upload anywhere close to 1 TB.

I don't think their costs are unreasonably low.

Fair enough. For me, though, there are so many possibilities for things going wrong when it comes to storage, I'd rather not trust it to a company trying to squeeze a profit from taking in a few dollars a month - and that's before processing costs.

Also, why would I go for the cheapest option when I get so much greatness for the equivalent of buying a few coffees/beers? It's not mega money by the majority of people's standards.

I used to use Mozy and then switched to Backblaze when Mozy upped the prices. I see your point about pricing and data security, but for me I'm willing to risk it to save some money because it isn't like Backblaze is the only source of my data.

I've got the local active copy, a local backup to a home server and then Backblaze for off-site. While Backblaze could theoretically disappear any day as far as I know, the chance of all three of my data sources being lost simultaneously is very small. Small enough that if it ever happened I suspect I'd have bigger problems to worry about than my data backups.

What makes you think that, if their pricing proves low, they won't simply increase prices? And marginally so? They'd have to more than quadruple prices before DropBox is the better backup solution.

Lack of reasonable Linux support made it surprisingly difficult to find a backup provider. I ended up going with CrashPlan. I tried SpiderOak but their client software was terrible and the headless install basically didn't work.

Jungledisk is good and got clients for Linux Mac and windows

(Op here)

Basically what others have said - I want things Synced, not just backed up. I like being able to access all my things on iPhone, on other computers, etc, and with it always working.

Also, I used Dropbox first, Dropbox "opened this market" for me, so to speak, which means I wasn't even thinking that this kind of thing would be convenient before I installed Dropbox and started using it. It's very possible that there are better services which I don't bother looking at because I'm with Dropbox.

My experience exactly. I started with Dropbox’s free 2 GB account for a short while, and once I saw the benefits of it I went with the 100 GB plan. I pay $20/month and now will get 200 GB for that. I also have two local clones of my MacBook Pro on my desk so I have a fully bootable option if I need it. Dropbox has worked well for me and I am very happy with this setup.

Because it's convenient and reassuring to be able to access everything from everywhere, including from iOS devices. Also: instantly share any file or folder with a link; zero upload time for content that already exists. (I did give up Dropbox a while ago because keeping projects on it was killing my MacBook's battery life. I'm planning to come back, though.)

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