[howellnick]

Coming from working in IT support, it's frustrating to me that you've made a big public ordeal over something that, firstly was fixed by rebooting your PC, and secondly you haven't tried downloading the file a second time. I'm not necessarily defending Backblaze here, but posting this when it doesn't work quite right the first time seems a bit harsh. I feel like we need more information before we all grab our pitchforks.

[SeanKilleen]

I agree with your point to a certain extent -- I've spent many years in IT Support as well. With that said:

* I went out of my way to avoid Pitchforks, merely calling attention to an issue and also ensuring I blamed myself enough * A 6GB download took 12+ hours. How many times am I supposed to wait for critical data that long to have it fail, and what happens when I try my 340 GB restoration, wait weeks, and it fails? * I think there are many potential better ways of doing it -- breaking into chunks and verifying each chunk as it is downloaded, any sort of check before the application says "complete", a little more finesse than merely using 7-Zip, etc. There are ways the experience could be improved is the point I'm making, since as customers this is the part where Backblaze really earns its keep.

I have no desire for pitchforks, which is why I pointed out that the CEO was extremely helpful and that I'm hopeful the problem will be resolved.

This is not an attempt to shame / dump on Backblaze; if they resolve the problem I'll very much still recommend and use them. However, both sides of the issue (my idiocy/negligence and Backblaze's areas for improvement) seem to be worth discussing.

[howellnick]

I don't use Backblaze, so I don't know what kind of upload speeds they have on restores, but 12+ hours for 6gb seems very slow (or the bottleneck is your download speed). It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for someone that's storing 340gb to download 6gb twice. Of course, and it's been stated already, that if this is critical data you should really keep another backup.

I see that you've made some effort to be transparent and fair, but I think this should have stayed as conversation between yourself and Backblaze until there's more substance to the issue at hand.

With that said, it sounds like there could be some good discussion on their restoration process.

[SeanKilleen]

I appreciate this comment. And you have a great point that I could have waited longer to post this. I've never posted to HN before with any sort of results; my goal wasn't really to rush this out there. It just seemed like a conversation that was worth having, and I didn't think through the fact that it would look like a very ranty customer before posting it here. Your perspective has been very helpful in that regard.

As a (minor) side note, regarding the download speeds, the bottleneck wasn't my speed I don't think (though I do have Comcast and so I'm sure the mileage varies). Right now I'm pulling 56mbps down and even when when my laptop was dealing with slow internet it was still 13-15 mbps.

[kalleboo]

> a little more finesse than merely using 7-Zip, etc.

RAR works great for this type of situation. Download the data, if decompression fails, download the required parity files. This is how binary downloads on Usenet work (where random articles may be missing from server retention).

[Dylan16807]

There is no excuse for independent download software to fail because chrome is running, I don't care how fixed it is by a reboot.

[res0nat0r]

The point the poster above is making is: Generally when you see posts with not a whole lot of troubleshooting which are decrying that the major component of your entire company (IE: restoring backups), is fundamentally broken, usually this leads to PEBCAK. After 10+ years dealing with users who claim that $ITEM is broken (yet has been working for years for the majority of customers) sets off the PEBCAK meter in that either they are doing something wrong, or more troubleshooting is needed before jumping to conclusions. If further troubleshooting does seem to point to an edge case, then finger pointing can begin...

[SeanKilleen]

I understand this concept. I also would not describe me as "decrying" Backblaze at all, nor saying that restoring backups is fundamentally broken. It's broken for me _right now_, and I think the UX and approach could be better.

I've been in IT for 10+ years, and while force killing chrome worked, it was a genuine surprise, given that every other site (including bandwidth-sensitive) activities performed fine. On that one, I should have dug deeper. Rather than closing and reopening the windows, I should have killed the processes sooner. I'm willing to give them a pass on that.

I'm more concerned about waiting 12+ hours for a 6GB restore that then can't be extracted and restored, even when I used their downloader to ensure better results.

These issues also happened on two different machines, both of which work fine in every other respect.

[howellnick]

He's not even sure that Chrome.exe was at fault. Why are you so quick to assume that it's Backblaze's fault in this one customer instance? He could have just reinstalled his machine, did a lot of weird configurations, etc. and not have even rebooted his computer a single time yet. Anyway, my point is that there is a lot of missing variables and information to make such assumptions. The customer is _not_ always right, you know.

[SeanKilleen]

By "not being sure if it was Chrome", I mean that by any user's standards, I had closed and re-opened the application several times.

The first issue (downloads not working) was on an otherwise-fine laptop that I checked to ensure could do other bandwidth-sensitive tasks (streaming HD video, etc.) it was only the Backblaze site and downloader that showed 0-3kb/sec and then failed.

I could have done a lot of weird configurations, but just to be clear, in this situation, I did not. On the first download that didn't work, I was restoring to a laptop that I had just booted up and had not performed any configuration on. In the second case, I was downloading a 6GB file to newly restored system that I'd rebuilt from scratch, and I'd tested all of the components (including the network connection, disks, etc.) prior to considering the rebuild complete. After that and all of the updates, it had run in a stable condition for some time before I attempted the download.

I agree that the customer is not always right. But also note that I am not claiming that backblaze is evil. I'm claiming that this process and my experience makes me question their model as well as my own idiocies.

And I also should note that while I might not seem that adept in this scenario, I've spent years as an IT support person, systems administrator, and developer. Which is not saying I'm right all the time or to bolster my case, just to note that I didn't do _no_ troubleshooting before I wrote the post.

[Dylan16807]

This was a different machine, but you're right that that problem might not have been backblaze's fault.

But if he had problems downloading on both computers it's quite likely that backblaze is at the very least providing a low-quality downloading application, if not having outright broken features.

It's ambiguous but I think he did the 6GB download on the restored machine?

[puredemo]

What makes you think the issue has anything to do with Backblaze, rather than something specific to the OP's machine?