[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).