[degenerate]

Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most useful announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead "we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z" -- nice job.

[atYevP]

Yev from Backblaze here -> I cannot describe how pleased I am to read this comment. Thank you!

[bedros]

Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all that data

I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google.

Another question, what's the max number of buckets can an account hold?

Looking forward to try this service out, Thanks

Bedros

[brianwski]

> Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Yes. In our traditional 8 year old product line of online backup, you can order a restore on an external USB hard drive for $189 (you keep the hard drive, and the cost includes world wide shipping). We FedEx the restore to you anywhere in the world. (We ship to Europe all the time, but add an EXTRA 24 hours for that to arrive.) Oh, if you only have 128 GBytes of data you can order a USB thumb drive of that FedEx'ed to you for only $99.

B2 absolutely supports this USB drive restore functionality. We call the feature "Snapshots" (you take a "Snapshot" of some of your data, then you can either download it as one large zip file or you can have it sent to you via USB Hard Drive).

Our online backup product tells you that the restore is up to 4 TBytes, but we have prepared Drobos as "special orders" for customers that were much larger than that. We aren't trying to make profit from that part of the business, just kind of break even on materials and shipping and create customer goodwill. You would be AMAZED how happy some customers are to receive 8 TBytes of Drobo with all their data they thought they might have lost. :-)

[EvanAnderson]

I'm really glad to hear this. I haven't kept up w/ Backblaze, other than to read blog posts on hard drive reliability and the storage pod designs. This comment made your services vastly more interesting to me, and much more applicable to my Customers. Gonna go read about your product offerings now.

[brianwski]

> what's the max number of buckets can an account hold?

We are limiting each account to 200 buckets right now until we gain some experience. Each bucket can hold unlimited numbers of files.

We really want feedback on these decisions, so as you run into issues just let us know. Many of the limits are arbitrary, I think the 200 buckets was so we didn't have to create a paginated list on your logged in webpage for version 1.

[wcfields]

Love to see this as well. Part of the selling point of Backblaze as an online backup is the ability to get a FedEx'd hard drive.

I could see this being a practicality for small time video editors, I need to keep copies of old projects, but would be willing to pay $300 to get an overnight hard drive of the files since whatever new project will pay for that cost.

[brianwski]

Up to the first 4 TBytes it is only $189 which includes you keeping the hard drive. I'll make it even better - if you ship us back the hard drive within 30 days (you pay return shipping) we'll refund the entire $189. The info on the program is published here: https://help.backblaze.com/entries/67512970-How-to-order-a-r...

[johntash]

Thanks for the information, I didn't know those drives were refundable! I was always turned off by having to download a huge zip file from backblaze when I wanted to restore something, but this actually sounds really nice of you guys for large datasets.

[brianwski]

We didn't originally offer refundable hard drives. About six months ago we started this quiet experiment of allowing full refunds. We were worried it suddenly make the USB drives hugely attractive and overwhelm the currently deployed servers and Backblaze employees dedicated to the USB restore tasks. :-) It's been a successful test, and now we'll start promoting it more.

[ddavidn]

Yes, this is very important for my BUDR plan as well.

[brianwski]

There are several of us that are very happy to hear that!

[larrys]

I want a way to be able to use this with ssh rsync scp and so on to preserve legacy backup routines that are now in place. (Including on systems that you will not be writing b2 clients for like old versions of Solaris).

[hga]

The canonical $$$ (relatively) way to do this is rsync.net: http://rsync.net/pricing.html

Saved me from losing quite a bit of data when a tornado trashed my apartment.

[icelancer]

Backblaze generally does this very well with their product offerings and white papers. Would that the rest of the self-absorbed tech community do the same...