
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage - SudoAlex
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/
======
jbeda
Took a quick look at the API. For context, I was involved in the early days of
Google Cloud Storage.

It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API -- at
least for common object/bucket create/delete. This will require more code to
be written and it will be harder to adapt client libraries.

The API documentation is here:
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/)

Other notes:

* The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL followed by doing the actual upload.

* They _require_ a SHA1 hash when uploading objects. This is probably overkill over a cheaper CRC. In addition, it means that users have to make 2 passes to upload -- first to compute the hash and then another to upload. This can slow uploads of large objects dramatically. A better method is to allow users to omit the hash and return it in the upload response. Then compare that response with a hash computed while uploading. In the rare case that the object was corrupted in transit, delete/retry. GCS docs here: [https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#che...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#checksum-validation)

~~~
brianwski
> It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API ....
> The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they
> require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL

And... you answered your own question. :-) We reduce our operating costs by
not having as many load balancers in the datacenter and pushing off the
responsibility to the API. It all comes from our traditional backup product
where we wrote all the software on both sides so we could save money this way.

With that said, we are actively considering offering an S3 compatible API for
a slightly higher cost (basically what it would cost us to deploy the larger
load balancing tech).

~~~
mwcampbell
I, for one, prefer the directness of not having to go through a front-end
proxy. It probably eliminates some failure modes. I think that, instead of
Backblaze providing an S3-compatible API, someone should do an open-source
S3-compatible front-end for B2, that any interested user can run on a cheap
VPS.

~~~
narsil
I work at [https://kloudless.com](https://kloudless.com). While not
S3-compatible, we offer a similar proxy that provides a single API to multiple
storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. We've
also released support for S3 and Azure and are looking into B2.

------
degenerate
Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most _useful_
announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we
released this" but instead " _we released this, and here are some practical
use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z_ " \-- nice job.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> I cannot describe how pleased I am to read this
comment. Thank you!

~~~
bedros
Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore
in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of
data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all
that data

I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google.

Another question, what's the max number of buckets can an account hold?

Looking forward to try this service out, Thanks

Bedros

~~~
brianwski
> Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Yes. In our traditional 8 year old product line of online backup, you can
order a restore on an external USB hard drive for $189 (you keep the hard
drive, and the cost includes world wide shipping). We FedEx the restore to you
anywhere in the world. (We ship to Europe all the time, but add an EXTRA 24
hours for that to arrive.) Oh, if you only have 128 GBytes of data you can
order a USB thumb drive of that FedEx'ed to you for only $99.

B2 absolutely supports this USB drive restore functionality. We call the
feature "Snapshots" (you take a "Snapshot" of some of your data, then you can
either download it as one large zip file or you can have it sent to you via
USB Hard Drive).

Our online backup product tells you that the restore is up to 4 TBytes, but we
have prepared Drobos as "special orders" for customers that were much larger
than that. We aren't trying to make profit from that part of the business,
just kind of break even on materials and shipping and create customer
goodwill. You would be AMAZED how happy some customers are to receive 8 TBytes
of Drobo with all their data they thought they might have lost. :-)

~~~
EvanAnderson
I'm really glad to hear this. I haven't kept up w/ Backblaze, other than to
read blog posts on hard drive reliability and the storage pod designs. This
comment made your services vastly more interesting to me, and much more
applicable to my Customers. Gonna go read about your product offerings now.

------
ComputerGuru
In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single
datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily
because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters,
though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth.

There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that
they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as anyone who's used their
software can tell you, it's throttled. I don't know how many users they have
to tell you how much bandwidth they're actually handling, but can they handle
people using B2 as a distribution point for large files for customers? For
example, I have a huge S3/CF monthly bill from customers downloading ~400MiB
ISO images tens thousands of times a month. Amazon CloudFront is ~$0.085/GB
for the first TB, while BackBlaze B2 is an incredible $0.05/GB - but at what
performance? Will my technical support representatives be getting angry phone
calls about halting download speeds or do they have the capacity for something
like this?

Hosting the world's data is no tiny task, I hope they're ready for it and I
do, truly, wish them all the luck. I've been a BackBlaze customer for a few
years now (at least 5 or 6, I imagine) as a tertiary or quaternary backup
(haven't had to restore... yet), and B2 looks and sounds promising, but as far
as technical details go, this post is nothing.

EDIT: In response to the reply below, I believe it's throttled by default in
the client, though that can be turned off in the application settings. Also,
you've replied to my claims of throttling but have ignored my question
regarding backbone capacity and network readiness...

~~~
brianwski
Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited
about throttling. :-)

We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a
couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll
purchase more as our customers need it.

But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current
product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but currently we only use a
tiny, tiny fraction of the OUTBOUND connection. So if you want to serve files
out of our datacenter we have a metric ton of unused bandwidth we would LOVE
you to use. And if you fill it up, we promise to purchase more.

But also keep in mind, Backblaze is very experienced with STORAGE and I have a
lot of confidence we won't lose any of your files. What we don't have a huge
amount of experience with yet is serving up viral videos and such. So just
bear with us during this beta period while we figure it all out. Personally
I'm looking forward to that part (all the CDN/caching layers).

~~~
chinathrow
But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to
onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith
as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?

~~~
brianwski
Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra
capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5
petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to
contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our
capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any
issues.

As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a commercial datacenter with a
bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our
capacity as we need it.

~~~
samstave
> __ _we 're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers
> already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it._
> __

Whats the lead time in your case?

In my historic experience doing this regardless of if I was even in MAE-
West... cross connects and provisioning were eons in internet time...

~~~
brianwski
I'd estimate a week? That's probably what you meant by "eons". :-)

It could go faster, but _if_ we need to buy a new (expensive) network switch
that can take a few days to arrive. And as you mention, the datacenter guys
are happiest if you give them 3 - 4 days and a work order to do the cross
connect.

Building out more vaults (the blocks of 20 storage pods we store data in) is
usually about the same if we rush it, but we have a big (multi-petabyte)
buffer spinning ready to accept data at anytime. We have a regularly scheduled
delivery of pods once per month based on projections, but we have been known
to tell our provider to go ahead and build three months worth of pod chassis
(everything except for the drives) immediately and ship them to us. We supply
the hard drives, so that either comes from our own stashes or we quickly order
some more from various sources.

------
budmang
I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just
$0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do
with storage today & what you might do with B2.

Here are my thoughts on our announcement today:
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-
provider/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/)

Gleb

~~~
acdha
Do you have any plans to offer some sort of WORM model where you could “seal”
a bucket, file, etc. to prevent future changes? This is really nice for
protecting against malware, human error or malice, etc. and a regulatory
requirement for certain industries.

~~~
budmang
We're at the very beginning of this journey, and heard from a lot of folks
that they wanted access to inexpensive cloud storage. I imagine we'll learn a
lot more about needs & use cases from people overtime. I can certainly
understand the value of WORM storage and it is something we'll definitely
consider adding. Appreciate the suggestion!

------
Osmium
Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm
guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to
use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual.

Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though,
so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups
generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup scheme is, for
example (though it seems pretty simple -
[https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt](https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt)).
I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure.
It's probably good enough for my use, given that I'm not storing state secrets
or anything, but it's still a little unsettling to 'lose control' of one's
data.

From Backblaze's point of view, I guess this is either smart (diversifying
themselves–people can use other backup software if they like, and Backblaze
still profits) or less smart (turning themselves into a commodity), but it
seems like their software is still first rate, so I guess it'll work for them.

~~~
Freaky
> I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure

They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-
obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was
faster than 3DES.

I can only assume they do this because migrating would cost them money, and
being able to advertise "448 bit encryption" actually sounds like a plus to
most people and not the glaring red flag it actually is.

> it seems like their software is still first rate

What, like their backup client that can't actually do restores? It's still all
"log in to our website and let us decrypt your data for you" :/

~~~
Osmium
> They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-
> obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was
> faster than 3DES.

Not defending it, because I know it's old and there are weaknesses, but aren't
Blowfish and 3DES both still technically secure? This is a genuine question.
It was my understanding that if implemented correctly, with a random key etc.,
that neither has been formally broken. 3DES is 2^112 no? which is still not
practically accessible by brute force. Not that this means anyone should use
them, of course, AES is a standard for a reason...

As you say, I had just assumed the migration cost was too high to move to
something newer, but I don't think it necessarily means data stored there is
unsafe?

~~~
Freaky
Sure, but it's not exactly putting them in a good light is it? Dressing up
obsolete stuff as state of the art "same as your bank uses", while either
being unwilling or unable to migrate to something more era-appropriate.

Calls into question their competence, their honesty and their architecture all
at once.

~~~
dragontamer
Wait, what about Blowfish is insecure? BCrypt is built on top of Blowfish.

Blowfish supports key-lengths up to 448-bits. And I've never heard of a single
criticism of the function. Its just kinda... less used than Rijndael because
it didn't "officially" win the contest. But otherwise, it is a fine function.

EDIT: Confused Twofish with Blowfish in the AES finalists.

~~~
Freaky
Obsolete is not the same as insecure. But it is old, it does have its
weaknesses, and there have been better options out there for a very long time.
Why continue to use it? Is upgrading your crypto _that_ difficult that you'd
rather just leave it for another decade or two?

It also calls into question the nature of all the other crypto they're using -
is that all >20 years old too? Still tuned for a world of 486's and 68040's?

------
gaul
Updated object store comparison:

[http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store-
comparison/)

~~~
bedros
your chart is missing [https://nimbus.io/](https://nimbus.io/) which is .02
per GB/Mo.

~~~
gaul
I added an issue to track this since Nimbus is still in private beta:

[https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-
comparison/issues...](https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store-
comparison/issues/9)

------
falsestprophet
For context, OVH offers object storage with 3x replication for $.01/GB [1].

[1] [https://www.runabove.com/cloud-
storage.xml](https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml)

~~~
Matheus28
It is certainly interesting how OVH undercuts the competition by quite a large
margin in everything. We use them for dedicated servers, but I wonder why
they're not as well known as AWS...

~~~
mdasen
For me, there's a combination of reasons.

First, they weren't in North America until recently. Having a server in France
means high ping times for me and latency for the vast majority of my visitors.
OVH started operations in Québec in 2013. So they've had less than three years
to establish themselves. EC2 is 9 years old.

Second, it's hard to figure out what to buy. With EC2, they're all Xen
instances and you decide on the right CPU/RAM configuration. DigitalOcean,
Linode, Vultr, etc. all are easy. With OVH, what am I supposed to buy? Do I
want a dedicated server or an infrastructure dedicated server? And then if I
click for dedicated, I need to choose from Hosting, Enterprise,
Infrastructure, Storage, Custom, or Game. I know computers - tell me the
processor, RAM, and storage without breaking it into categories. So, I go with
Hosting and half of the options are for "Delivery from September 30". Ok,
that's more than a week out. Maybe I want more flexibility like hourly billing
on VPSs. I can go to Cloud -> VPS. And now I can choose SSD or Cloud with
different prices. Why is the SSD so much cheaper? $3.50 vs $9 and they're both
1 core, 2GB of RAM, 100Mbps network link KVM boxes. Then I wonder if these are
the same things as the RunAbove labs vs regular. The labs ones shared the
processor cores, but this seems to indicate that both don't have the noisy
neighbor problem. So I check RunAbove. Wow, everything has changed. Looks like
they don't offer the SSD of Ceph instances anymore, but they have SATA backed
instances. So, they're running all sorts of different combinations. And should
I be looking into Kimsufi or SYS brands? Do they still exist? What if I want
object storage. Ok, the US site takes me to RunAbove which tells me that it's
now part of OVH proper which brings me to their UK site with apparently no way
of loading it on the American site. Compare that to DigitalOcean where you
just get a very simple, "here are the plans, there's no complex stuff with
weird names or categories, buy what you need." Even Vultr manages simple with
SSD VPS, SATA VPS, and Dedicated Cloud. Perfect. Most likely I want the SSD
VPS, but maybe I need more storage or maybe I want metal servers sold to me
like cloud servers. Easy.

And to be fair, OVH used to be a lot more complicated and a lot worse. It
looks like they're streamlining a ton. But they should still simplify a lot
more.

Third, OVH is terrible at marketing. I want to define what I mean by
marketing. DigitalOcean is a king of marketing. You go to their site and you
see brief comments from the creator of jQuery, the creator of RailsCasts, the
creator of Redis, and a Rails core member. You might not use those
technologies or even like them, but you recognise that DigitalOcean can't be
total crap given that these are people with options and a reasonable amount of
taste. DigitalOcean sponsors hackathons like woah. Giving students a dozen or
so dollars in credit makes them well-known and an easy service to try.
DigitalOcean's site inspires confidence in its simplicity. You don't feel like
there's some hidden thing because it's just simple plans that increase rather
linearly. Finally, try searching for VPS + some tech term. "VPS Ansible" has a
DigitalOcean blog article as #3. "VPS elasticsearch" has DO with the top two
spots. The point is that you see that and it's an indication that they're part
of the community (supporting some free content) and kinda get it.

OVH, on the other hand, inspires none of those good feelings. OVH has a
generic site that you can't tell apart from other generic sites. It has the
kind of "throw everything at the user and see what sticks" design that I don't
think users want. We want DigitalOcean to say "this! this is good!". OVH is
like, we have a lot of different things and someone has written "enterprise"
or "cloud" on some of them without really indicating how some options are more
"enterprise" or "cloud". And there are stock images of network switches and
RAM and such like a pizza place that has a stock picture of a pizza on their
take-away menu that isn't their pizza. Do they get it?

I really wish OVH well. More providers means downward pressure on pricing
which is good for me. I mean, 2GB of RAM VPS for $3.50? Awesome! Glad to see
that graduate from RunAbove. But OVH still has a ways to go. Lots of the time
you have to wait for servers. If I want a dedicated SSD box, they're quoting a
10 day wait for all except one model. The entire "hosting" range has quotes of
3-12+ days. "Enterprise" has one box for 120 second provision, two that are 3
days out, and two that are 10 days out. It seems like OVH is a place to get a
good deal if you're willing to deal with complicated process, waiting for a
box, and them switching things up on you. But maybe OVH is stabalizing. I'm
hoping their VPS offering will be a lot more stable than it has been. Seems
like they're cutting down on using alternative brands like SYS and Kimsufi.

I can see OVH being a good company, but it's no surprise to me that they
aren't as well known as AWS.

~~~
ksec
Agree with everything above. Especially the complexity.

Runabove, OVH, VPS all those. The worst part is they keep posting about their
streamlining and deep thought into reorganization. And yet no body understand
"their" why.

To many it seems more like a reorganization for the sake of reorganization.

Then there is their Network. Which could range from Very good to VERY VERY
bad.

And the final final thing? Is their lack of support or communication. You fire
a email or ticket at least other host gives you a reply. OVH? None.

And when you add their non active support, unable to talk to sales or people
for inquiry, and their overall complexity it is not hard to see why they dont
pick up as much customer as they should have.

------
jcreedon
The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure,
Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one
datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is
quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this
they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Something to note: Unless you're storing data in us-east-1, all other regions
in AWS are "one datacenter". Yes, they have AZs, but those aren't datacenters,
they're just compartmentalized segments of the same datacenter.

So! If you can tolerate the loss of a datacenter, store in Blackblaze. If you
need geo-redundancy until Backblaze can offer it? Store in us-east-1 (which is
geo-redundant between Virginia and Oregon).

~~~
BillinghamJ
This is incorrect on almost all points.

All AWS AZs are physically separated facilities with redundancy on all their
infrastructure, although they're obviously in the same general area.

us-east-1 is _not_ geo-redundant. It is entirely on the east-coast, as the
name suggests. Although S3 does have geo-redundancy in all regions.

You may have been thinking of "US Standard", but it is the same as "us-
east-1".

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_r...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region)

~~~
toomuchtodo
> This is a feature for EU and US-West. US Standard is bi-coastal and doesn’t
> have read-after-write consistency.

Quote from Jeff Barr @ AWS: [http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-
write-consistenc...](http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-
consistenc..).

~~~
mentat
Their documentation is really inconsistent on this...

~~~
toomuchtodo
I've emailed Jeff to get clarification on it.

~~~
jeffbarr
You did? I didn't see it...

~~~
toomuchtodo
From my gmail account :/ I'll resend!

------
atrophying
Fair warning: Backblaze has a habit of making major changes silently (without
any indication to the user), and their customer support is TERRIBLE. I was a
customer for several years and never had a positive interaction with their
support staff. The final straw was losing several files last year after they
changed their backup method without notifying users, a method that
contradicted their documentation. I got full IDGAF treatment from their
support. That's right - a backup solution failed to backup, then support
basically shrugged and said "your loss, too bad, so sad" when I contacted them
_even though they admitted it was their fault._

Buyer beware when it comes to Backblaze.

~~~
Dylan16807
How did it change that you lost data?

~~~
atrophying
They started picking and choosing which parts of AppData they backed up, but
never informed their users and kept on claiming they backed up "everything."
See, the backup app used to be set up so you could see what was being
excluded, and modify it if need be. I had the entirety of AppData selected as
"for backup," then had several bits of saved user data wiped out. One of those
was an extension that stored its data in the browser user profile, something I
used frequently and had restored a half-dozen times from backup. Then it was
gone. Backblaze stopped backing it up, deleted it from their servers, and I
had no way to restore it. Three years of data lost and zero effort from
Backblaze to recover it, not even an apology.

The technology isn't bad, but their customer service is some of the worst I've
ever seen. I was a Backblaze customer for three years and not once did I have
what I'd consider a positive experience. If anything goes wrong they leave you
hanging. They're not a company I'd ever trust with valuable data again.

------
aidenn0
Reading the API, it seems that I need to precalculate a SHA-1 before
uploading? This makes it impossible to stream data to b2 from another source,
I'll need to store it first then send to b2.

~~~
brianwski
Right now your only option would be to "buffer" packets of say 1 MByte in RAM,
calculate the SHA-1, then store them as separate files in Backblaze B2.

We do plan to add file offset access and larger file support very soon, so you
would be able to append a 1 MByte chunk to an existing file in Backblaze with
a SHA-1 of only the 1 MByte chunk. That should allow you to stream?

All great feedback, by the way. We really want to hear about these
shortcomings in our API right away.

~~~
nickcw
Having to know the SHA1 in advance would be a show stopper for rclone (
[http://rclone.org](http://rclone.org) ) as it uses a streaming model
internally (it can stream between cloud providers).

Being able to append to a file in 1 MByte chunks (or larger) would be perfect
- that is exactly the way Amazon S3 multipart uploads and google drive
multipart uploads work.

~~~
voltagex_
I'm planning on storing files as encrypted X megabyte chunks (where X is TBD)
- would calculating per-chunk and then uploading solve it? There's metadata
support which could store original filenames etc.

------
devit
Finally some more reasonable prices in this space.

Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like
DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost
virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a
perfect complement for each other.

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for
an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over
again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so
computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since
Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download
your data to analyze it.

What I'd really like is a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross
connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2
instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that
charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of
thing.

~~~
jagger27
Amazon might not be open to it, but I would bet Digital Ocean would be.

~~~
inopinatus
I would rate the likelihood of AWS offering free, multi-path, multi-Tbps
connectivity into their AZs to a competitor to be effectively nil.

If the alternative cloud ecosystem wants to compete effectively against AWS,
it desperately needs a more sophisticated authorization scheme. Don't forget
that IAM/STS is a major enabling factor in applications integration of EC2 and
S3.

------
graniter
The price is being heralded as the thing to get excited about, but I'm also
very concerned about the security and availability of my data. I suppose those
details are somewhere, but they're not in this article which is quite lengthy.

I would like to know more of the implementation of this and more information
on policies to protect access to my data. And I would like to know where the
data is stored. I suppose I got read the manual, but maybe some info tidbits
could be included in the announcement.

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy and
pretty much everything we do. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in
20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here:
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-
architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-
architecture/) You can also read about our "Backblaze Storage Pods" (the
things filled with drives) here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-
pod/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod/)

Also, we are the only company we know of that releases our drive failure
rates. We release them quarterly, here is the most recent failure analysis:
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-
stats-...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-
for-q2-2015/)

------
Jake232
You should allows period (.) in your signup form email field. I know you can
just remove the period and the email will still get delivered to my gmail, but
plenty of people likely don't know this.

~~~
brianwski
You mean a period at the end? Like tmp@zebra.com. ? We'll fix it...

~~~
Jake232
No. The form wasn't allowing xxx.yyy@gmail.com

~~~
icelancer
Accepted my xxxx.yyyy@gmail.com just fine, unless they just fixed it.

------
kiwidrew
One feature that I'd love to see: the ability to update part of a file (e.g.
replace bytes 512-1023 with new content of the same length) and/or append to
an existing file! For whatever reason, these cloud storage products are always
implemented as either block-based (so you can replace parts of the file) or as
file-based (so you can create a hierarchy of files with names and metadata).
Why can't I have my cake and eat it??

~~~
brianwski
> Why can't I have my cake and eat it?

:-) We definitely plan to add an API to append to an existing file. The
current largest file size is 5 GBytes, and we want to support much larger
(imagine a 1 TByte encrypted disk image). That will be by appending chunks to
files followed by a "commit" declaring the file as complete.

I think the reason most of us cloud providers don't like replacing parts of
files is it helps our caching layer be much simpler, and it would change the
SHA-1 checksum on the file which just means "more complexity". But it isn't
out of the question, it might just come with a "cost" (like you can replace
the span but it might take a while and then we provide you the final checksum
of the whole file in the response).

------
martin-adams
I couldn't tell from the docs, but is it possible (or will it be possible) to
generate a single use download URL to return to clients? I wouldn't want to
have to pay double for outbound traffic going from B2 -> my server -> client.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, you could get a URL and give it to somebody.
Every time that person accesses it though, there'd be a charge (unless you're
within our free parameters). If I understand correctly...

~~~
martin-adams
Thanks Yev, is it possible to have the URL auto expire after a time period or
number of accesses?

------
Bud
Real attention to detail in this announcement. I signed up right away.

If there's attention to detail with one thing, odds are you'll find it in
other places, too.

~~~
atYevP
Yev at Backblaze -> So pleased to hear your say that! I'll forward it to the
engineering team. They have LITERALLY been working nonstop on this for a year
and deserve some praise! Thank you for signing up, I'm excited for you to
start using it!

------
jrnkntl
cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99: 0 results.

Only on
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html)
it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers
of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is
or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or
developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit
more specific.

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy. We
use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our
datacenter. You can read about it here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-
cloud-storage-architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-
storage-architecture/)

~~~
jorangreef
I have read plenty of posts from Backblaze in the past including the linked
post, but I admit I also wanted to see details about the replication factor on
the marketing site for B2.

------
ck2
Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8
TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the
6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...

~~~
ck2
Tigerdirect had them for $170 for a few days.

Note TDs are air-filled 7200rpm regular drives.

Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow._

My understanding of HAMR is that it is probably perfectly fine for Backblaze's
backup products, which are (more or less) write-once, read-rarely. Shingled
magnetic recording should also be OK for that use case.

But clearly not good for cloud storage.

~~~
ck2
Heat assisted is fine for write once but helium filled drives actually leak
over time and fail because their molecules are so small.

------
tzz
Nine months ago, I said the following. It feels good to predict things before
they happen:

 _Backblaze should expand their service to a cheaper cloud storage service
similar to Amazon S3. They already have the infrastructure and the know-how._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119)

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> Yea, it was hard not say..."we're working on it".

------
DoubleMalt
Just yesterday I was discussing with a friend that I'd like to use Backblaze
as backend for our zero-knowledge backup at
[https://cloudfleet.io](https://cloudfleet.io) and that I'll ask them for a
metered pricing model when we're big enough.

And voilá ... here it is.

------
jhardcastle
Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site
backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're
75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the
Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.

~~~
daemoned
AltaVault sounds like the thing your looking for.
[http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection-
software/altava...](http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection-
software/altavault/)

~~~
khc
AltaVault is a backup target, but not a backup product that the OP was likely
asking for. But many companies use products like Arq, BackupExec, or NetBackup
in combination with AltaVault to achieve what the OP described.

Disclaimer: I worked on the predecessor to AltaVault at Riverbed

------
thoughtpalette
Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets?
Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it
provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket?

Just curious as to why I would migrate from S3 for FE assets to Backblaze.

~~~
brianwski
Yes! RIGHT NOW (during beta) we don't have the top level folder feature yet,
the URLs all come from https:://f001.backblaze.com type of URLs. But this is
one of my favorite uses (I have a private website I plan to move over) and
we'll definitely be adding this feature soon.

~~~
thoughtpalette
Wicked! Time to start writing all those gulp-backblaze upload scripts!

------
derekp7
Are there any plans to add application hosting along with this offering?
Specifically, it could be useful to have a shim application that has direct
access to the data without traversing the Internet, to minimize what needs to
be transferred. For example, if used for a backup application, each day's
incremental delta may be in one archive, but a periodic operation would be to
move files from one archive to another. Or a full system restore may be
pulling some data out of multiple archives, and a "shim" app (running within
Backblaze's data center) would eliminate unnecessary transfers out.

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here. We'll add a LITTLE bit of app hosting support
around this, but you won't be seeing a full blown EC2 type of product out of
Backblaze for a while, realistically we don't have a large enough team to
charge down that path and still do a great job at B2 and also our traditional
online backup product that we still maintain.

What I'd really like in the short term is to do a deal with Amazon where we
put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2
so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge
(or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is
open to that kind of thing.

------
ehPReth
What provider does Backblaze use for SMS verification? I'm using a Twilio
number and it seems that the two disagree with each other. (It might be due to
short-code use, but I'm not sure what their outbound number is.)

~~~
brianwski
Backblaze uses Plivo (and we have a short code if that makes sense to you).

~~~
ehPReth
Thanks! Twilio isn't able to handle incoming SMS from short codes at this
point so that would explain the issue. I'll use another method to verify for
now until they do

------
scott_karana
Good lord, that's affordable! I cannot _wait_ until someone writes a
Duplicity[1] backend for this... :-D

1 [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)

------
dchest
Looks like you still don't accept customers from Montenegro. "For security
reasons, we are blocking your country's IP address." Why?

------
xrjn
This is a really cool service, I can already think of a few cool uses for
this. I once participated in a project (movie to gif library), and one of the
biggest constraints was the cost of cloud storage - hopefully more competition
in this space can drive prices down to where they become even more negligible.

------
JungleGymSam
Please tell me you're working on a PowerShell module. Microsoft is pushing
PowerShell HARD (because it's awesome) and admins that do use it know its
power and want ALL their vendors to use it.

You can open yourself up to a large number of customers by making it easy to
get started via PowerShell.

------
tachion
Congratulations on the launch! And I am also happy to announce, that the
official command line tool, b2, is already ported to FreeBSD:
[http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/](http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/)

------
Poiesis
For me, the signup page loaded once but now I get redirected to a 404 page at
[http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html](http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-
storage.html) when trying to load the signup page.

------
willcodeforfoo
This is awesome! I've been waiting for this for awhile.

I saw the comment about getting drives shipped to you, which is pretty neat,
but what about the other way? I have about 50 TB of data we'd like to store,
but only 5mbps upstream. Can we ship drives to you?

~~~
brianwski
We call that feature "drive seeding" and it is requested often. Realistically
I don't think we'll get to implement it in the next few months, but maybe in
the 6 month timeframe?

------
GordonS
I didn't see this - are data centres available in different regions? Or is
this a US-centric offering?

I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were
_very_ slow.

~~~
kalleboo
They only have a single data-center.

> I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were
> very slow.

Curiously from here in Japan, I've managed to clock 80 MBit/s backing up to
Backblaze. I presume it all has to do with what kind of international peering
your ISP has.

------
IanCal
Great stuff.

What's the setup for file permissions? Can I have multiple people writing to
the same bucket? Can I restrict deletion & write rules?

~~~
brianwski
Brian from Backblaze here. It's pretty simple for now. You can have as many
people reading and writing to the same bucket, but they would all need to
share the same credentials. Buckets are either "allPublic" or "allPrivate"
(and you can flip them back and forth at any time between those two settings).
But that's it at this point.

We're actively looking for feedback in this area, so as developers ask us for
something like Amazon's IAM (AWS Identity and Access Management) we'll be
filling that functionality out. Hopefully without adding too much complexity
to the simple model we have now.

~~~
IanCal
That makes sense, release and iterate!

Personally I'd like to use some access management, and there's one case that
I've not seen solved particularly well (though would appreciate anyone chiming
in with things I've missed):

Distinct write and create permissions.

I'd like to be able to grant someone permission to create files but _not_
allow them to modify or delete them later. I end up generally adding this
externally.

I think B2 is really close to this, as you've got the file ids for multiple
versions, so I can effectively ignore the filenames and use the file ids
instead. It'd need a difference between "upload new version" and "delete
version" though.

------
robhu
I asked Arq support if / when it would support B2 and got this reply:

Hi Robert,

I don’t know whether or not Arq will be integrated with B2.

\- Stefan

------
wcchandler
Awesome. Can't wait to see this added to Déjà Dup as a backup destination.

------
jadegrade
What do we think about the charges for deleting on b2?

------
Thaxll
Are they using Ceph?

~~~
khc
From their previous blog posts they built their own storage stack

------
venomsnake
> Downloads are just $0.05/GB

Can anyone compare that to other similar providers? While the storage is
cheap, it seems more useful for cold storage.

~~~
ehPReth
[http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store-
comparison/) mentioned by @gaul a little bit ago has outbound pricing listed
for a bunch of providers

