
The NSA might want some Backblaze pods - mightybyte
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/11/12/nsa-might-want-some-backblaze-pods/
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timf
I'm saving that (very nice) picture to show my kids. I hope we can look back
and say "look how primitive this is, an exabyte needs an entire city block"

Anyhow, as we discussed when the NSA news came out, they're looking to buy 1
million square feet of datacenter space and to spend about a billion dollars.
2015 is probably far too soon to get to the yottabyte level with those
constraints.

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Tichy
Might be easier to create a gigantic botnet and use citizens harddrives for
storage. The government could force everyone to install the client.

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clistctrl
awesome, i'd love to hack that and see what the government is really looking
at :)

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Tichy
If you are so good that you can break current encryption, go for it :-)

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dstorrs
I've been using Backblaze for a few months now. I'm very pleased with the
"continuous" upload option, and it doesn't degrade my machine performance
noticeably. I have not, however, gotten around to testing the restore process,
which means I don't really know how useful it is as a backup service. Yeah,
that's a failing on my part.

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docmach
I've also been using it for a few months and I tried a restore. What I found
out is that the large zip files they create don't work. They warn you about
creating zip files over a certain size, but I tried it anyway. I couldn't get
it to unzip successfully on Mac OS X or Solaris using a variety of programs.

I'm also skeptical of their data integrity. From reading about there setup it
seems that they have no checksumming and their only redundancy is RAID. So bad
blocks or multiple disk failure could cause data loss. It's still worth it for
my because it's so cheap, but I wouldn't make it my only backup.

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budmang
Thanks for the discussion here. I wanted to just clarify - we take data
integrity very seriously and actually checksum EVERYTHING. We assume that data
might get mangled over the Internet, in memory, on disk, etc. Thus, we
checksum each file on your computer and ensure that it is returned to you upon
restore identically.

Our system also does self-healing: monitoring every file in the datacenter and
if a checksum ever doesn't match (due to a cosmic ray flipping a bit on a
harddrive), it automatically contacts your computer to request that bit of a
file be backed up again.

Gleb Budman CEO, Backblaze

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sadiq
It's a shame they don't have a Linux client or an API or i'd be quite tempted
to give them a spin.

