[universenz]

Your comment just sparked an interesting question in my mind: If a drive has failed, until now I always imagined the drive was just trashed. But now that you mention they are probably RMA'ing them, do you think that BackBlaze send the RMA drives through a magnetic tunnel of some sort before they ship the drives back to the manufacturer? Because otherwise, how do they ensure potentially unencrypted customer files are not accessed during the repair/refurbishment process?

[bb611]

I work at a large B2B SaaS that stores customer data, we pay extra for the option not to return failed drives that can't be wiped for RMA. We still get a replacement but the original is physically destroyed with a shredder.

[anarazel]

I'd hope that their data is all encrypted at rest. Compared to the bandwidth of spinning disks, the cost of doing hardware assisted AES isn't big.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, I would expect any data reaching the drives to be encrypted by Backblaze, with the key newer reaching the disk.

You could even have keys per disk and wipe them when a disk fails.

Either way, you should be fine to RMA the drives as for an external observer without the keys they just contain random noise.

[ISL]

When I back things up with BackBlaze, they leave my computer encrypted, so they're encrypted at rest with them.