[pfranz]

I'm curious how you did the restore and roughly how it went? I've done a few restores years ago. I don't know if this reflects the current process, but my experience was a bit rough. However, I'm still a long term customer with little interest in going elsewhere.

In late 2016 my laptop's drive died suddenly. I tried to restore everything via a shipped drive. I'm not sure if it was because of copy on their website (at the time) pointing out that they overnight USB drives or me just expecting that's the fastest way to get my data, but I was disappointed at the turnaround. Because it was a relatively large amount of data (a few hundred gigs?) there was a "staging" process that took a day or two. It got interrupted and had to start again (a server reboot on their side?). After receiving the drive everything went smoothly; I believe the data had been encrypted in transit, but wasn't onerous to restore from. I even think I was outside of their 30-day return and it wasn't an issue (the problem wasn't my hard drive, but a cable...with no hot spares and a special cable it took longer to resolve). At work I had a similarly annoying experience with Amazon Snowball where physically locating it and "testing" it took a few days longer than expected when expecting tight turnaround...maybe I need to adjust my expectations for physical logistics.

Many years previous I noticed my music files were showing up as 0-size--my hard drive was failing. Thankfully I could pull my collection from 30 days previous and I chose a download option. It was a bit annoying that they had created a series of zip files (which makes sense), but I believe I was restricted to the web interface for downloading them which made managing it difficult.

[yreg]

For me the restore experience was painful.

I attempted to restore about 1TB of data (on macOS). Since I have 500mbit internet I assumed I'd be able to download it through the app, but that didn't prove easy. Even when split into smaller zip archives, the download would go terribly slow. Often, the archives would be corrupted and I'd have to re-download them.

In the end I had to order a drive to Europe (and pay the tariffs), which is a pain in the ass. (But they did return the deposit even though I missed the 30 day window.)

Edit:

Oh yea, and when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well! That's what happened to me right before a multi-week trip, so I was pretty unhappy that I wasn't able to download my backup in the 5-or-so days I had at my disposal, thus having to order the physical drive.

[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well!

Not anymore! As of this morning's 7.0 release, you can always switch your backup to one year retention EVEN FOR JUST ONE OR TWO MONTHS and for an extra couple of dollars you can keep the data around for a year (or forever). You can switch it back to "30 day retention" at any moment, all through the website.

Also, you can always do a "Restore to B2" to make a complete copy/snapshot of all your files entirely on the server side, and we'll keep those as long as you don't delete them. This will cost you $5/month to store 1 that entire duplicate 1 TByte copy in B2 (in addition to your original $6/month bill), but it's an option available to customers.

[buildzr]

> when you loose your data you have only 30 days to get it back before Backblaze deletes it as well!

Uhhh... this one could be a significant issue for me right now. I've got a laptop that's been offline for about 2 months now due to a motherboard failure due to liquid damage. I haven't bothered dumping the drive yet because I figured even if it's got issues Backblaze has a copy.

You're telling me that if I login to my account right now, the data is gone? If so, they really need to make that one more obvious.

EDIT: Just checked Backblaze, still looks like the data is there after 70+ days. Has this policy changed at some point?

[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> Has this policy changed at some point?

It is more complicated than just "after 30 days" (and always has been). If your laptop is entirely offline (or you simply uninstall the client from your laptop), then the policy is ACTUALLY that we keep your backup for 6 months as long as you keep paying your bill. But to be honest, it's more like a year or two. The 6 month policy is we guarantee the backup will be preserved, not that we will immediately go out and delete it at exactly 6 months and 1 day.

This is a completely different situation than files you delete but the backup continues. For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into.

Or, if you have a hard drive that you disconnect and aren't willing to reconnect for more than 30 days. Since your backup is continuing, Backblaze assumes the drive will never come back, so the files are then deleted to save money in the datacenter. Of course, this changes with the 1 year retention policy, you can unplug the drive for up to 1 year and still dial back time and restore all your files.

[yreg]

I should have explained the 30 days better. I would edit my comment if I still could.

But yeah, since I kept the computer online and Backblaze app running _after_ I lost the files, Backblaze marked them up for deletion in those 30 days. To be fair, I didn't try to contact them and ask to help me, maybe they would.

I spent several days trying to download the backup and then I gave up and ordered the drive.

Good to see that you have a new retention policy since then.

[justsubmit]

> HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into.

I'm glad to hear that Backblaze has finally made such an option available. However:

> For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days.

As someone who once almost lost his PGP key and had to recover it from old physical backup media, I'd like to point out that that is not a "backup" service. It's sort of like a lazily expiring mirror, but it's definitely not a backup service.

Do you look at all of your files every 30 days? How long would it take you to notice that a random file had disappeared from the filesystem 7 layers deep? Have you ever needed to restore a years-old file?

(You need not explain why you do it; I understand about users who could use it as a cloud storage service by deleting files after they're backed up. The point remains that it's not a backup.)

[wtallis]

What you're referring to, I'd call a historical archive, containing many backups.

When I think about a backup, I'm thinking in terms of recovering last good state after a drive failure or catastrophic filesystem corruption. I don't tend to think of a backup as implying a deep history unless that part is explicitly stated. That distinction was easier to notice back in the days of backing up to tape or optical discs - you don't expect each tape/disc to contain a version history, just a single snapshot, and you don't expect your collection to retain long-gone files unless it's an ever-growing pile of tapes/discs.

In that mindset, it's not reasonable to expect that a backup service necessarily provides the full historical archive.

[justsubmit]

> you don't expect your collection to retain long-gone files unless it's an ever-growing pile of tapes/discs.

Rule number whatever of backups: Don't discard old backups. Bitrot occurs, and people make mistakes, and newer backups can have flaws that older ones don't, which will go undiscovered until it's too late.

We're not talking about piles of tapes, we're talking about virtually unlimited disk space. State-of-the-art backup software chunks and deduplicates data and stores snapshots of directory trees. For most cases, there's no reason not to keep a subset of old snapshots, and many reasons to keep them.

[pfranz]

What's your criteria for backup? I completely agree that something like RAID is not backup, but 30-60 days seems comparable to other backup services and covers most scenarios. The old-school manual process of swapping a USB drive at work every week/month has the similar retention.

The only consumer-facing system I've used with multi-year retention is Time Machine. Every few years it has trouble "verifying" the backup and I have to start over (it also deletes old backups when you run out of space). Right now my backup only goes to August.

[sjwright]

Backup means that if it takes me 6 months to realise that the 2014 finances folder had been accidentally deleted, I can still recover it.

I'd love to see BackBlaze offer the option to select "mission critical" folders that have super-long-life (Time Machine-like) version retention. Give everyone a few gigabytes of this for free, charge a premium to increase that space.

[justsubmit]

> What's your criteria for backup?

Something like Attic, Borg, CrashPlan, Restic, etc, that allow snapshot retention periods, like "1 per year for the last X years, 1 per month for the last X months, one per day for the last X days".

> I completely agree that something like RAID is not backup, but 30-60 days seems comparable to other backup services and covers most scenarios.

That doesn't protect against bitrot. e.g.

1. File is backed up (snapshot A).

2. File is slightly corrupted by bitrot, cosmic ray, etc.

3. File is modified by user, corruption is unnoticed.

4. File is backed up again (snapshot B).

5. "Backup" service deletes snapshot A.

6. User discovers corruption.

7. User looks to restore earlier versions until an uncorrupted one is found.

8. User discovers that all available snapshots were made after corruption happened.

Or replace "file" with "directory" and "bitrot" with "accidental file deletion" and the user still suffers from data loss.

Mirrors are not backups, and a few revolving snapshot slots is effectively a mirror.