Yev, thanks for intervening but I’ve just received an update so incredible and unapologetic that I’m tempted to share verbatim excerpts here, and I think you should take a look.
Support is basically telling me that the inherit process on the server can’t handle my "too large backup state’s indexes", and that I’m gonna have to start afresh and reupload 2TB or so from scratch. Not only that, but in order to even be allowed to do this, I’m gonna have to free up my license first by deleting my existing backup, and accept being left without one during the weeks this will take. You’ve gotta be kidding me ?
And I’m this situation in the first place not even because I have a new computer I want to inherit the backup, but because support themselves suggested that I nuke my local backup state and restore it using the inherit feature, to work around the installer being unable to upgrade me to the latest 6.1 release. That’s how it all started.
No apologies given either, no offer to investigate further to avoid that very inconvenient outcome. I’ve been a customer for 7 years but honestly, if I can’t trust your systems to handle the "too large" 2-3TB backup of my MacBook and a couple of external HDDs and I’m supposed to accept that, that suddenly makes me less confident in everything else you do. I hope I misunderstood something here, but I don’t think I did.
EDIT: Ok, reading the email again I may have misunderstood the part where I need to delete my existing backup first. It looks like I can use the 14 days trial to start a new backup, then transfer the license over before the end of the trial. It’s still pretty bad because there’s no way I‘ll have those 2-3TBs reuploaded within 2 weeks, and of course it’s still a massive inconvenience to do so.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and I wrote the Inherit Backup State functionality.
> inherit process on the server can’t handle my "too large backup state’s indexes"
Yeah, I'm sorry about that and it is on my plate to fix it. The issue is that Backblaze uses a ZIP library that only handles up to 4 GByte zip files. We zip up your "backup state" (the list of files that were backed up) and download it to the client that is "Inheriting". Your "backup state" has exceeded 4 GBytes, which is unusual, but not unheard of (maybe 2% of our customers right now). And it is "on the rise" as more and more customers have more data, plus backup for longer and longer with Backblaze.
The fix is to either link with a new zip library, or sub-divide your "backup state" into 2 or 3 or 4 zip files. Easy enough, but it doesn't help you this week.
> No apologies given either
I am sorry about this. In our support tech's defense, they were CRUSHED this past week by our attempts to get everybody auto-updated in anticipation of the Macintosh OS X 10.15 Catalina release which came out yesterday. So if they were terse it wasn't out of disrespect, it was out of sheer load they were dealing with.
The issue was that if we didn't get everybody to upgrade, anybody that chose to install Macintosh OS X 10.15 Catalina then it would break Backblaze and popup a completely random error dialog that wasn't helpful and didn't solve the problem. By getting people upgraded before Catalina, there are no issues at all and they won't have to contact support.
> It’s still pretty bad because there’s no way I‘ll have those 2-3TBs reuploaded within 2 weeks
To maximize your chances, make sure you turn off all power savings modes on your computer (like don't even let the monitor go to sleep) and make sure Backblaze is set to use 30 threads, and give it LONG periods of time (overnight 8 hours is ideal). You should be able to backup 1 TByte every 24 hours or so, but it can go slower if you don't have an SSD drive, or if your bandwidth is limited. One idea is to take your computer to a location with faster bandwidth, like a school or your work place and leave it there for two or three days, then carry it back home for the incrementals. By the way, Comcast has announced that it literally intends to offer full 1 Gbit/sec service to every last customer in the United States, so another way to go is upgrade your internet for 1 month, then downgrade it later.
> can’t trust your systems to handle the "too large" 2-3TB backup
We can handle the backups, just not the "Inherit" feature for long running backups with large amounts of data. And it's a fairly straight-forward fix for me to fix that, I just need to get to it. I'm sorry you got bitten by this short-coming, I will get it fixed.
By the way, Comcast has announced that it literally intends to offer full 1 Gbit/sec service to every last customer in the United States, so another way to go is upgrade your internet for 1 month, then downgrade it later.
Comcast is promising 1GB download speeds. Their maximum upload speed is still an abysmal 35Mbps.
> Comcast is promising 1GB download speeds. Their maximum upload speed is still an abysmal 35Mbps.
Well, I have Comcast and my upload speed is 100 Mbits/sec.
But even at 35 Mbits/sec you can upload 378 GBytes PER DAY. That means that within the Backblaze free trial of 14 days you can upload 5.2 Terabytes. Within Backblaze's recommended "fully backed up" period of 30 days you can upload 11.3 TBytes!! And we'll look the other way if it takes you 60 days and you get 22.6 TBytes uploaded.
Consumers really can have "online backup" with 35 Mbits/sec upload speed. They really can, and they can be comfortable doing it.
And if you fully max out the 35 mbps upload, your connection will be useless for a month - even for downloads. Learned that from when I did have Comcast and I was uhh “downloading Linux distros with bit torrent”.
Thanks for your reply, this is what makes HN awesome !
> Your "backup state" has exceeded 4 GBytes, which is unusual, but not unheard of (maybe 2% of our customers right now)
Not to put any extra pressure on you, but given the raw numbers, 2% of your user base affected by this issue sounds like a pretty big deal to me !
> And it is "on the rise" as more and more customers have more data, plus backup for longer and longer with Backblaze.
That's interesting : given that up until now there was no revision history or deleted files retention beyond 30 days, why would my backup state be larger as a customer of many years than if I signed up now, given the same set of files ? Do you keep metadata for all historical file activity even after the files themselves are gone ? Sounds to me more like a backup log than "state" then !
> By the way, Comcast has announced that it literally intends to offer full 1 Gbit/sec service to every last customer in the United States, so another way to go is upgrade your internet for 1 month, then downgrade it later.
I'm not in the US, but I do have pretty good symmetric 5G. Thanks for the advice, 2 weeks might be enough after all (I'll reinstall to reset the clock, for one thing).
It's still a significant nuisance in terms of hogging bandwidth and leaving my laptop running 24/7 for days with fans probably going full speed.
I just wonder what Backblaze would say to a customer on metered Internet (still common in many places) or simply with a slower uplink (a large part of Europe is still on ADSL/ADSL2 with 25M down / 1M up)
> And it's a fairly straight-forward fix for me to fix that, I just need to get to it. I'm sorry you got bitten by this short-coming, I will get it fixed.
Again, thanks for responding in person, I couldn't have hoped for much better in terms of a technical explanation.
I think I have 21 days left in the backup I want to inherit before the first external disks in it get deleted.
I'm actually tempted now to wait a few more days, in case you manage to get this released quickly (especially if it's a server-side fix) :)
Something that could really be improved in situations like these, is that support should have discretion to help out the customer to make up for an issue that's on your side.
For example, putting backup expiration on hold until the bug is fixed (should be really easy actually now that your new offering is implemented : why did they not offer to move me to 1 year retention temporarily ?), issue an additional license so I didn't have to rely on the trial... anything that helps mitigate a problem that's not my fault. Not to mention, throwing in some free months of service for the inconvenience :)
Yes, unfortunately the re-upload will take some time, but hopefully you can increase threading and get the data uploaded quickly. Understand it's not ideal, but hopefully there's not too much of a time gap between backups.
Support is basically telling me that the inherit process on the server can’t handle my "too large backup state’s indexes", and that I’m gonna have to start afresh and reupload 2TB or so from scratch. Not only that, but in order to even be allowed to do this, I’m gonna have to free up my license first by deleting my existing backup, and accept being left without one during the weeks this will take. You’ve gotta be kidding me ?
And I’m this situation in the first place not even because I have a new computer I want to inherit the backup, but because support themselves suggested that I nuke my local backup state and restore it using the inherit feature, to work around the installer being unable to upgrade me to the latest 6.1 release. That’s how it all started.
No apologies given either, no offer to investigate further to avoid that very inconvenient outcome. I’ve been a customer for 7 years but honestly, if I can’t trust your systems to handle the "too large" 2-3TB backup of my MacBook and a couple of external HDDs and I’m supposed to accept that, that suddenly makes me less confident in everything else you do. I hope I misunderstood something here, but I don’t think I did.
EDIT: Ok, reading the email again I may have misunderstood the part where I need to delete my existing backup first. It looks like I can use the 14 days trial to start a new backup, then transfer the license over before the end of the trial. It’s still pretty bad because there’s no way I‘ll have those 2-3TBs reuploaded within 2 weeks, and of course it’s still a massive inconvenience to do so.