
50B Restores and Counting - ingve
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/50-billion-restores-and-counting/
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noodlesUK
Backblaze looks great, but I really don’t understand their encryption model,
and why they made the choices they did. They’re so close to being properly end
to end encrypted, but when you do a restore, the decryption is done on the
server side. Why? Why not just bake that into the client?

Other systems like restic manage to do this correctly, why not the biggest
player in the backup space?

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
This is what turned me away from Backblaze Backup. I think it is disingenuous
from them to advertise with “Encryption” and “Personal Key”[1] because it
gives the impression of end-to-end encryption. In reality it is just a feel-
good thing. As soon as you want to restore data you must provide them with the
key and they decrypt your data on their side before sending it to you. When I
inquired about this strange architecture they avoided explaining the reason
which made me even more distrustful.

It’s like a honey pot. Advertise encrypted backups to become big, force
server-side decryption when people really need their data.

[1] [https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-
backup.html](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html)

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xavierstein
Backblaze is one of the few services I recommend to everyone. The $5/month
unlimited backup service with the 30 day versioning built on top of it is such
peace of mind.

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bluedino
>> 28,841 Total Restores

That puts it a little more into perspective. That's a much, much smaller
number.

Now, how many "Backblaze lost my files", or 'I couldn't restore my data"
stories are there? Hundreds of those (I'm speculating) would be bad,
statistically.

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juancn
I had a hard drive failure, and on restore Backblaze lost ~70% of my files.
They were unable to help. They were just gone (I cared about pictures mainly,
roughly 160GB of them).

So in my experience they don't check data at rest very often. Unless you try
to restore frequently, your data may be gone.

~~~
rubyn00bie
Sorry about yer data loss, mate. That's rough, I've been there.

Reminds me of most places database backups... I always check to make sure they
restore correctly, a lot of people just assume they will.

\--

Other Engineer: We back up our database nightly! It's AUTOMATED and even
copied to another data center in a different region!

Me: Have you ever tried restoring it?

Other Engineer: ... well, uhh, no... _awkwardly pauses_ I mean why? _scoffs
and quickly walks back to desk_

[two hours later]

Other Engineer: Holy shit, our backups wouldn't restore.... good thinking,
mate. We would have been totally fucked.

\--

You'd be surprised how often people don't check their backups, critical
systems, restore functionality. Like just because you're doing it doesn't mean
you're doing it right...

I personally think unless you somehow corrupted the data before failure, that
Blackblaze sort of sucks hard here since this is literally their job. I hope
they try to make it right somehow or actually figure out and find what caused
that to happen.

