I actually have 3 Crashplan for Families under my hands.
My mom and dads iMacs is one of them. This is literally easy money for Crashplan. But the price would double to move them to the new Small Business plan.
What I liked about Crashplan, besides the unlimited space was that if files would get deleted, and you would find out about it 3 months later, you could recover them.
With Backblaze, which is mentioned here, you wouldn't. Which, for me beats the whole purpose of doing backups at all.
This makes no sense to me: so if a malicious hacker, virus, Trojan or your kid deletes a folder... by the time you find out, Backblaze might already have stopped taking backups of it, itself.
After we are done talking about Backblaze as a snappy app (yes, it has always been many times faster than CrashPlan), cleaner and simpler interface (no doubt here), a lot faster speed (this has been my experience and seems to be the case with a lot of people), it really isn't much good as a backup service choice.
I have mentioned before, I think here on HN too, the data retention policy is just too bad and their reasoning for it, that "it's not an archiving tool", is beyond ridiculous.
And then their interface for restoring files is only from the website. Yes, even if you have to download a 15GB file you do it in the browser or ask them to ship the hard disk to you. I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether.
I will stick to CrashPlan for the time being and go for the 1 year Small Business plan (at 75% discount for existing Home customers) but beyond that or maybe even before that I am looking at something solid and self-hosted. I already backup my Dropbox folder to Tarsnap (which has a kind of okay GUI now), I will look at Glacier or a VPS and backup using something like Attic or Borg. Sad they have no GUI. I feel confident about backup apps with a GUI - I find it intuitive to customize and can see in one look (or maybe keep seeing) what's happening if I want to.
> I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether.
Backblaze sends USB hard drive restores to other continents every day! Today we have one restore shipping to Finland and one to Great Britain. And to be clear, we absorb 100% of the cost: it is $189 USD deposit and we absolutely absorb 100% of the shipping cost whether it is Texas or Finland.
Also remember that the USB hard drive restores are "free" to customers if they return the USB hard drive to our office within 60 days. The only thing the customer has to pay for is "return shipping" and that can be on a super slow service and we're talking about 3.5" drives here that weigh just a few ounces. Of you can keep the 4 TByte drive for the $189 deposit (turns into "purchase price") which includes shipping and the hard drive and the service.
Hey Brian, so nice of you to be commenting here. Thank you.
I am sorry if I am sounding like an obstinate whiner but no, I don't want that. I mean I am glad if you offer that but I want:
1. A way to restore that is from the app and that can withstand disconnection, gap of hours, or maybe days - right inside your really awesome app (I mean it) with partial download and shit.
2. (I didn't know about international shipping, thank you for telling me) I don't want to rely on that and I honestly am not looking forward to cover whatever little (or more) cost that is and being out of USA it will be more and then the hassle of returning is even worse.
You know, I may just want 30GB out of my 3TB, or hell maybe even 5GB and even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad.
As a customer I would urge you to have a look at it and maybe listen to customers on it (or future customers :))
And data retention! You didn't even touch upon it. Kind of shows your/BB's stand is clear on it, right?
[edit]
And I forgot that you need my encryption password for sending me that hard disk. Now that's a design problem you shouldn't even have in the first place :(
It is a lot of valid feedback, we're doing a lot of emergency planning this week, but when the smoke clears we'll definitely start figuring out a "local restore".
> I may just want 5GB out of my 3TB, even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad.
I'm slightly confused by this one. I assumed that pixel-for-pixel the interface of local restore would match the pixels in "the browser restore interface"? Is there an assumption that if it is a local application, then there would not be a "tree view" you see in the web and instead you would get something that looks like a Macintosh Finder or a Windows native "Explorer" interface?
If that is the case, what if we built something that looks IDENTICAL to the local Finder or Explorer but in a web page would that make some people more happy?
> And data retention! You didn't even touch upon it.
Just an oversight. :-)
> Kind of shows your/BB's stand is clear on it, right?
No, I can ALMOST guarantee you the Backblaze data retention policy is about to change, and possibly within a week. We heard all of you loud and clear and we're just struggling to figure out exactly how much this is going to cost Backblaze, or exactly how much of that cost we plan on passing on to customers and what that looks like.
>> "I may just want 5GB out of my 3TB, even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad"
Browsers are usually (or maybe never) good for downloading very large files. For example I am downloading a 6GB file or ZIP from BB using my browser and it crashed when I was done downloading 5.6GB. In most cases those 5.6 GBs would be gone and I will have to start over. Where as in a desktop or some kind of download manager/helper (which will have my login state/credentials just like Backblaze app has) it can be done over a period of time and will withstand machine going to sleep, shutdown, network disconnection etc.
But since you mention:
> what if we built something that looks IDENTICAL to the local Finder or Explorer but in a web page would that make some people more happy?
As I've mentioned above - it was about the functionality and not the look and feel.
And, imho, it will really be good if you could move the "restore" functionality to the main BackBlaze app:
- where I can see my files and hopefully available versions too and select version > file at that version or version > then files at that version (some apps first let a time to be selected and then files at that time are available for restore - and some apps do the opposite)
- or, at the least I can do all that on the web and the BackBlaze app starts restoring when it connects to the Internet again in a folder designated by me (
- restores retain the same folder structure. e.g., I am restoring a.png which was at ~/MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png and restore function dumps it like this ~/<BackBlaze Restore Folder>/a.png. Ideally it should give me option to either dump just the file or give me the restore like this: ~/<BackBlaze Restore Folder>/MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png or at least recreate it where it was and if another copy with the same name exists, rename the other file but this (latter) option will be a mess in case of many files
> I can ALMOST guarantee you the Backblaze data retention policy is about to change
That's very good to hear. Probably the best thing I head since yesterday :-)
PS. Please make sure this retention is something really cool and preferably not something like "well, let's make it 2 or maybe 3 months from 1" :-)
Because, as you must be knowing, the point of backup is that if I am looking for an important Excel sheet file after 7 months and somehow it was corrupted or deleted I'll turn to my backup and with a short retention it would have been gone forever defeating the purpose of my backup.
While we are at it, here's another feedback: Maybe start warning users when Backblaze sees some files (it was backing up previously) deleted before actually deleting them from archive (mark for deletion in a month or so). Maybe let the user do some action like "yeah, go ahead get rid of them", or "Uhuh, didn't mean to delete them - please restore it or put it where it should have been".
For full folder backups, duplicity [1] has been great for me, does incremental backups, and has quite a few backends. You control rotation policies, full-snapshot frequency, etc, and bring your own storage (works with s3, rsync, etc.). Full-folder recovery is also pretty easy in my experience.
The downside is that it's all on you to configure providers, pay for storage, and I'm not aware of any indexing or ability to retrieve single files. Also, it's CLI-based, so it might not be very intuitive for desktop use. Still, a free solution with lots of utility. :-)
The issue with these for me is that with the common cloud storage providers, even just backing up my Documents folder raises it above the price of BackBlaze or a similar offering.
Duplicity can backup to Backblaze's B2 service, which is an S3-alike where you only pay for storage and download, not upload. 40$ to restore backup in the case of a failed disk, and a few bucks a month (literally) for storage.
I use rsync [1] to backup my laptop to my server twice an hour. (Hard-linking files that already exist in previous images.) Then another script [2] on the server prunes old backups every night.
I agree it's a concern. If you're in a Mac I'd recommend doing time machine backups as well. I consider those my first resort backups for file recovery and such. My Backblaze backups are a worst case scenario, belt and braces off site option.
Even my time machine backups only go back about a year though due to capacity limitations on the backup drive. My most critical files are also on Dropbox, which I know isn't really backup but it's nice to have as an extra recovery option.
Agreed, it's not a backup if it only exists in one form, or one space.
After purchasing the eventual death and exit of your 10th or 15th laptop, you kind of want to spend less time doing those transfers, especially with complex installs that can't be trivialized to the cloud.
For Mac users, I like the backup practice of using two drives in two locations, Time Machine for incremental backups, and Carbon Copy Cloner for bootable backups, and then bump one of those images up to the cloud. One drive on a desk at home, one at the office, offsite, or a family member's house.
Additionally, keeping a third hard drive in rotation elsewhere, or use a local NAS that bumps up to the cloud for you as well.
The bootable backups tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper provide are priceless in my mind.. you can simply plugin your HD into another mac and boot off the external drive not missing a beat while your hardware may be getting attention.
The bootable backup is key. As the commenter above said, that will be the thing that lets you get back up and address any other missing data and find long-term replacement hardware. SuperDuper has saved me and my family a couple of times.
I'm in this same predicament. I used to have to do constant backup/restore on family member computers, and Crashplan really made that painless. This transition is going to be a real pain.
So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans.
> So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans.
Yeah, it seems that not only would the peer-to-peer backup process stop working, the already-backed-up files would be rendered useless too.
Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like it was an additional point of failure.
There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to their servers.
It is abuse, however, if you sell a service as a backup, and people use it as primary storage (e.g, by running backup/restore cycles to store and retrieve files). I don't know if people were doing this, but given some of the silly things I've heard of happening on other backup services, I wouldn't be surprised.
It's not abuse if you are following the TOS though. So if you want to classify it as abuse you need some objective measurement for what is acceptable use or not. 1 restore a month? 10? 100? You have to have a documents AUP before you can call some usage pattern abuse.
Sure, this is a figure of speech -- if it were abuse in a technical sense they would be going after users for terms of use violations rather than changing their pricing. I think the intent here is that they probably predicated their pricing on a certain anticipated usage pattern where most of their users would be regular people making backups of typical hard drive sizes and contents, and that more people took advantage of the unlimited offering to do something other than that, which meant their pricing didn't cover their costs.
I have a feeling (if this has not already happened) that someone is going to sue over the use of the term 'unlimited' and some court is going to rule that 'unlimited' does not mean 'without limits' but 'an reasonable amount based on the average expected use'.
This was sorted out back in the dial-up days when providers (including the one I worked for) offered "unlimited" dial-up service.
Customers sometimes argued that they should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long because that's "unlimited".
Our definition (that we indicated in our terms) was "you will never be billed a surcharge for usage during a month", but there was no guarantee of being able to use a certain number of hours. So we reserved the right to de-prioritize (i.e. disconnect) high-usage users during peak times to allow other users to get on when our lines got full.
I'm sure somewhere in Crash Plan's terms of service they define what the term "unlimited" means in the context of their offering, and I would bet it means "there will never be a surcharge for usage of storage".
So they will never ding you for using more than X storage, but there's no guarantee that you can store a specific amount of data on the service.
While I like Backblaze's storage offering, they really have an extremely inferior management platform for their system. Management of devices is manual and reports are sent manually in Excel format. Cancellations and device reallocation are also done manually and over email.
If you're looking to recover a file 3 months later, have you tried set them all up with TimeMachine as the first layer of backup? Cloud backup services should really just be for catastrophic.
Yeah, I'm bummed about this as well. One answer to your accidentally deleted file might be to do snapshots at home (I do them using ZFS). That way, you can recover those locally if required and then use your external backup provider for true disasters. But I agree it's a shitty compromise.
WTF. This sucks, my main use case for Crashplan is downloading files that I long ago deleted (or left on an old machine), or downloading stuff from old external hard drives (which Backblaze also doesn't support). I might just suck it up and pay the small business price.
To my mind, keeping copies of old, deleted files is an important part of a backup. Just to be clear, I wasn't using crashplan as a kind of media file store or anything - their restore experience was far too clunky for me to bother with that!
I'm more concerned about old files I've accidentally or deliberately deleted that I later turn out to need.
Anyway, my storage requirements are pretty low (probably 1tb) so I'm going to look into solutions like B2 with Arq (along with my existing Time Machine).
My mom and dads iMacs is one of them. This is literally easy money for Crashplan. But the price would double to move them to the new Small Business plan.
What I liked about Crashplan, besides the unlimited space was that if files would get deleted, and you would find out about it 3 months later, you could recover them.
With Backblaze, which is mentioned here, you wouldn't. Which, for me beats the whole purpose of doing backups at all.
See here:
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666688-What-...
This makes no sense to me: so if a malicious hacker, virus, Trojan or your kid deletes a folder... by the time you find out, Backblaze might already have stopped taking backups of it, itself.