Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Sukotto 3294 days ago
I used Backblaze for several years before closing out my account in 2012.

Initial backup took a long time. There was no easy way to prioritize, for example, my photos over system files. I ended up manually prioritizing by disallowing pretty much my entire filesystem, and gradually allowing folders to sync. First, photos, then documents, then music, etc.

Eventually it all got synced up and it was trouble-free... until I tried to get my data back out.

The short version of the story is that a power surge fried my local system. I bought a new one and had some stress when it appeared the BB client was going to sync my empty filesystem (processing it as a mass delete of my files). I managed to disable the sync in time.

Then I discovered there was no way to set the local BB client to pull my files back down. Instead, I had use their web-based file manager to browse all my folders and mark what I wanted to download. BB would then zip-archive that stuff which would then only be available as an http download. There was no Rsync, no torrent, no recovery if the download failed halfway, and no way to keep track of what I had recently downloaded. Also, iirc, they were limited to a couple of GB in size per file. (which didn't matter because at that time, the download would always fail it the file was larger than __MB (I don't remember the exact number. 100MB? 300? Also hazy on the official zipfile size limit)

So I had to carefully chunk up my filesystem for download because the only other option BB offered was to buy a pre-filled harddrive from them (that they would ship to me).

I felt like Backblaze was going out of their way to make it hard for me in order to sell me that harddrive of my data. I felt angry about that and stubbornly downloaded my data one miserable zipfile at a time until I had everything.

Once I was reasonably sure I had everything I cared about, I closed my account and haven't looked back.

[Edit to add] This was at least 5 years ago. No doubt their service has improved since then.

5 comments

I would think that for a full restore you might be better off with their restore by mail. Note that if you move your data off the drive they ship then send it back they refund the charge for it.
I use Backblaze but haven't had to do a restore yet. It appears their current limits are 500gb per zip file. They also have a "BackBlaze Downloader" utility (Mac & Windows) that has the ability to resume interrupted downloads.

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665888-How-t...

It looks like styx31 linked to B2 which is a separate service from their backup service that's closer to S3 or Google Cloud Storage. With that you can use rclone which should avoid the issues you encountered, though at higher cost if you have a lot of data (there are per-GB storage and download fees).
My restore experience was also poor with Backblaze. The download speed was slow. If I had to restore an entire drive it would have take me many days to download the entire thing.

I switched to Arq with Amazon Drive as the storage backend.

Well you get to choose cheap backup vs expensive restore. Better than impossible restore (that is if you don't do backups)