| Backblaze seems so forward thinking with the hardware, but if you've ever tried to restore a file using their web interface, it's an exercise in frustration. If you want to pull a single file, you'll be navigating through a windows 95'esq tree. They store snapshots, but if you want to change the snapshot, you wait a minute for each while it loads. Even going back to a snapshot you were just looking at, you wait the whole load time. Now if you actually need to restore something. You can download a zip file. They will only let you make the zip file so big, so you have to break up your restore into multiple zip files. You will have to do that manually, there is no way to have BB auto-generate the parts for you. These are zip files and not one of the many archive formats that allow for parts. Besides that, you will need double the amount of storage to recover this data since you'll need to store the zip and the extracted backup. The way around this is to pay BB to put the data on a USB drive (flash up to 128GB or external up to 4TB) at $99 and $189 respectively. A 128GB external usb on Amazon, first result is $120. They actually won't give you a 4TB unless your restore needs it, but the price is still $189. Labor I guess? According to their own FAQ, you will wait 2-3 days for them to ship these drives, so hopefully you don't need that restore anytime soon. I really liked Backblaze up to the point I needed to use it for it's real purpose. It seems like nobody at BB cares about the restore process or that it doesn't sell new subscriptions. -- Also, maybe someone from BB can explain why the secure.backblaze restore website loads tracking pixels from googleads.g.doubleclick, a.triggit, s.adroll,facebook, ads.yahoo,x.bidswitch, ib.adnxs and idsync.rlcdn. Are you selling my need for a new harddrive or something? |
Brian from Backblaze here -> I care! It just keeps getting bumped by something higher priority. I have a spec for how to speed up the restore tree browsing, it's just waiting for us to have a spare moment. For a while the Vaults took precedence.
Part of running Backblaze without VC funding is we can only hire programmers when we can afford it out of profits, and we're up to about 6 programmers (the result of a recent burst of hiring) which handle all of: Windows, Macintosh, iOS, Android, and in the datacenter they built the pods, the Vaults, and the web front end. But we'll get there, I swear.
> or that it doesn't sell new subscriptions.
This is unfortunately the heart of the problem. The most important thing to get smooth as glass is the BACKUP part, that sells new subscriptions. If we have your data safe, we can always hobble through a restore even if it is a little slow and clunky we can get all your files back after your laptop is stolen. If it held up sales, we'd jump over and do the one week of work to speed it up.