[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.

[Dylan16807]

Though that sounds tricky to set up all the UI for. For now you can set up a separate backup of that stuff. Set B2 as the backend and you get 10GB free.

[sjwright]

Maybe—and the UI could be little more than a script that does exactly what you described.

The point of making it a UI is, first and foremost, to get people thinking about this question. And it gives people the option to acheive what you just described without stumbling upon a post like yours on Hacker News.

[Dylan16807]

A post like mine? But it's your post that has the idea...? The only thing I said about how to make it possible is "separate backup", which anyone can think of in two seconds and is only a hint of a tenth of an explanation. I don't understand.

[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.