This is absurdly expensive. If you have a 400GB laptop, fully backed-up and with negligible deltas, you are paying $1440 a year.
(400GB is not an absurd amount, either. I personally would ideally have about that much in my off-site backup.)
(400GB is not an absurd amount, either. I personally would ideally have about that much in my off-site backup.)
The query that suxnoll responded to supposed that you have 400 GB of data with small deltas. But that's only possible if you're filling your harddrive with files created from random noise from /dev/random and updating all your files monthly by more random noise.
Actually, combining crypto and dedupe in such a way that the server can never tell what's on the client computer but the client can still reliably pick what's changed and dedupe it?
That's honest-to-goodness computer science. And Colin is the guy who invented this stuff.
More recently we'd been trying to get to the bottom of some unusably slow macs (mountain lion). Turns out that the BackBlaze filelist service (that watches for changes to files) is very poorly behaved. Initially we discovered that it fights with apple's mds. Even once we'd fixed that (by stopping mds from watching a load of folders) it still ignores the scheduled backup times so it runs all day. BackBlaze support acknowledged the issue but the only workaround we've found is to have a cron job unload the BackBlaze daemon during the day to stop it destroying performance.
That's really disturbing, does it misbehave and interact with /dev/fsevents directly instead of using the public fsevents api? If so somebody needs to get flogged over that choice.
The behaviour we saw was a constant scanning of all the metadata of all the files on the filesystem - not just things that were changing. It seemed that instead of being notified about changes it was relying on comparing to its cache by polling. There were huge folders with years of photos in that hadn't been touched in months being scanned again and again all day.
To be honest, my business partner contacted BB about it and they didn't seem as concerned as we were. It was at that point that for the first time in a couple of years I found myself with the desire to investigate backup services again. It's a shame because BB has been good when I've needed them. A drive died recently with a lot of important data on it (years of photos and music) and they had a replacement to me in a matter of days.
I'm still running their backups at the moment but I also started Arq running last night. It seems to fit my use-case perfectly.
Edit: I just ran it a again to check. The bzfilelist process does an lstat on every file in the system one by one.
Wow, so it doesn't even listen for fsevents? What a terrible design, I understand running a full scan every now and then to ensure you haven't missed anything while the filesystem has been offline (in case it's mounted on another machine), but holy crap.