
Save Data Directly to B2 with Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0 - jhack
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/save-data-directly-to-cloud-storage/
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throwitaway132
> No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days

Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the
first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we
disconnect a drive.

I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long
vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the
entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the
trip, I'd have been shit out of luck.

Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the
price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to
their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because
of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies:

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_version_settings)

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_download_deleted_files)

None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days"
bullshit.

Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product
imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.

~~~
jve
Just this week logged on to Backblaze to restore my external disk which kind
of died. Was a little late and no backup there :(

I still hope that the HDD is alive but perhaps USB controller is dead and will
try to revive it.

~~~
propogandist
You can try a product called SpinRite (grc.com) - it can help revive the drive
to get your data out of it.

~~~
jve
My computer doesn't see that drive. Once I connected it saw it for a moment,
files were there.

It's not the USB cable - same with different cable. Data recovery software
(like photorec) wouldn't be problem. I'll try to hook it directly to a desktop
PC

~~~
propogandist
it's not meant to be data recovery, it's positioned as a harddrive maintenance
software. The drive may be failing and this will help fix some of the
problematic things to get the drive working.

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ksec
And it is still very much Desktop based, I wonder if Blackblaze will one day
have a Consumer No Fuss NAS along with B2 Subscription model. ( Something I
wish Apple had done with Time Capsule and iCloud )

So I just set, forget and pay monthly knowingly the Data should be safe.

~~~
DCKing
Synology and FreeNAS support backing up to Backblaze B2, both easily
configurable in their respective GUIs. Many other popular NAS solutions allow
you to install Duplicati, which will allow you to do the same.

~~~
tyfon
Will the nas connecting count for the 30 days?

I've been thinking about having an external backup of about 5 TB of images,
video and documents in an encrypted form but I have issues finding someone who
can do it properly.

For now I just have a 2nd nas at my fathers house that mirrors my data.

~~~
DCKing
I've always backed up my NAS to B2 since its early days, and honestly have
forgotten about the 30 day deletion limit. I've never encountered the limit in
various NAS setups, even when I backed up using cronjobs using the B2 Python
client library.

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izacus
I'm having trouble finding supported operating systems for the tool - does
Backblaze support Linux yet?

~~~
moreentropy
I'd recommend using Restic ([https://restic.net/](https://restic.net/)), it
supports backing up to Backblaze B2 and generally is the best and most
innovative backup tool I've ever used.

Backblaze has a Restic howto: [https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115002880514-Ho...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115002880514-How-to-configure-Backblaze-B2-with-Restic-on-Linux)

~~~
eliaspro
And if you'd like something more accessible for regular desktop usage, check
out Relica which makes use of restic under the hood. Author is Matt Holt, the
guy behind Caddy server.

[https://relicabackup.com](https://relicabackup.com)

~~~
locusm
Big restic fan here, will check this out. Thanks.

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cdumler
The reason why Backblaze and Crashplan have various restrictions is due to
being all-you-can-eat. At some point, they have to create an arbitrary cap.
So, the snapshot is a curious feature, but seems to be implemented poorly.

It doesn't seem to be snapshot system, but an archive system. A snapshot is
usually a point in time represented by a series of changes. By being a series
of change, it would deduplicate redundant files between snapshots. It appears
that this is a full archive backup, which is fine but have some limitations:

* Need to upload the whole archive every time. * No deduplication. * Need to have double the space to restore (download then unzip). * No partial restores. * No encryption of personal files.

If you have any technical willingness, consider restic. It is a command line
utility that has the ability to backup to many backends, including B2. Being a
CLI, it can be scripted. Files can be arbitrarily backed up and restored. It
has encryption that the servers can never see. I also hear Duplicati is
similar, but have never used it.

If you want an easy way to just make archives locally and store it on B2 for
cheap, consider a cloud mounter, like Mountain Duck. You can treat B2 as a
drive and upload/download files as needed. Note: B2 is a _very_ simple store,
so simple that it doesn't support renaming files (must download, rename, and
upload). But, it is fast and inexpensive.

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mike503
I see BB pushing B2 more and more and it makes me sad. Instead of a Linux
client (which I can’t imagine would be that difficult, ultimately, after this
many years) they’re putting all resources on the pay-for-utilization model.
Good for them, bad for us waiting for a Linux client.

CrashPlan is garbage. Bloated client, keeps breaking down and I get reports my
devices aren’t backed up but then they say they are, after backing up 30+ TB
(it took years) it says my original backup had to be reset so I had to restart
the entire thing, just not a lot of confidence with them. But it is the only
unlimited Linux option out there.

Also, they just removed their personal plan and do business only and per
device now. If they could make their client not suck, and give better
confidence in their platform, I wouldn’t complain.

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atoav
I use duplicati with AES-256 for exactly this on backplaze (and another
different SFTP target)

~~~
stubish
Duplicati is still very much in beta, and from personal experience I would not
recommend it for larger or critical backups. It does seem really promising
though.

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bsutt
This is a pretty useful feature. It goes some way towards solving the problem
of keeping a backup of my photos. Rather than having to keep buying more
physical storage I can archive off photos in batches to B2 from my regular
Backblaze backup.

~~~
mlangenberg
Wouldn't that remove an additional layer of protection?

When you move from physical storage + backblaze backup to B2 storage, B2
becomes a single source failure, right?

~~~
bsutt
Yes, that would be correct. I guess a better idea would be to fill the drive
up, lock the physical drive away in a fireproof safe, then archive the files
from that drive's Backblaze backup to B2. Buy a new drive and repeat.

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toomuchtodo
Very cool feature release. Is it possible to generate a public link to a
snapshot?

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atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> There is no way to give a public link to a
Snapshot. But you can "share" a single file from your Backup with a public
link!

~~~
yumraj
Yev, can I use the Backblaze Cloud Backup to just do selective backup with B2,
without requiring a full computer backup subscription? I know numerous clients
already support writing to B2, but would be great if there was an official
client to do just that, again, without a backup subscription.

~~~
atYevP
No this feature requites the data to already have been sent to Backblaze via
the Backblaze computer backup application - so it's not quite a 1st party app
for B2 (still requires the subscription to get the data uploaded). We vet all
the integrations listed on our site and there's some really simple ones that
do a good job of sending the data over to B2.

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msh
I wonder how this works with encrypted Backblaze backups.

