back to article Behold, Backblaze’s public B2 beta blast off

Everybody’s darling cloud backup service startup, Backblaze, has opened up a public beta test for its coming B2 Cloud Storage. With this B2 beta anyone can sign up and use the service. The private beta started in September, flagged as offering lower-than-Amazon costs, with a headline $0.005/GB/month cost compared with Amazon’s …

  1. Shell
    Flame

    Bandwidth hungry

    Their consumer service is superb... as far as I can tell (never having had to restore from it, touch wood). ~1Tb encrypted and archived from my home server for peace-of-mind. I'd be tempted to use them commercially, but given how bandwidth starved most corporate environment I've worked in have been (relative to my blistering home broadband), I remain to be convinced of the practicalities. I guess as storage for already online services?

    1. Electron Shepherd

      Re: Bandwidth hungry

      It's the restore that's the problem. Having 1TB of backups remotely is great, provided you can get the data back. We have 6TB of collocated off-site storage, which we update once a month (about 1TB goes up each month). This is throttled to avoid taking all our outbound bandwidth (it's on a 1 Gbps link at the hoster).

      Should disaster strike, we won't even try to restore data over the internet. Someone will drive down to the hoster, put the physical device in the back of a car, and drive back to the office.

      The bandwidth of a bunch of 4TB disks doing 70mph on the M1 is quite high...

      1. Jonathan Richards 1

        Re: Bandwidth hungry

        Someone will drive down to the hoster, put a clone of the physical device in the back of a car, and drive back to the office.

        FTFY

        The risk of losing one's only remaining copy of one's business data due to a traffic incident or other mishap is, IMHO, too high.

  2. John Stoffel

    They need a linux client

    I love these guys and I'd use them in a second, but they don't have a linux client, which is a damn shame. For the price, and because they talk so frankly about their pod designs (been trying to buy one for work for cheap D2D2T staging) are so open, that I keep recommending them to others.

    But again, they need a linux client. Heck, Dropbox does one, how hard could it be?

    1. @YevP

      Re: They need a linux client

      Yev from Backblaze -> We may not have one for the online backup client, but with B2, there's already integrations with Duplicity, which does run on Linux. It's already up and running!

  3. Mikel

    Backblaze is an amazing company

    Remarkably open, honest and fun. Fanatically frugal in a good way. Can't say enough good about them.

    If they could figure out a way to backup Linux desktops on their unlimited service without inadvertently becoming a backup archive for Archive.org, every porn and FTP server and bittorrent seed on the Internet they probably would do so... but they can't.

    1. Brad Ackerman
      Facepalm

      Re: Backblaze is an amazing company

      Code42 doesn't seem to have any trouble offering a Linux client for CrashPlan, and your hypothetical nightmare scenario applies just as well to Mac or Windows.

    2. @YevP

      Re: Backblaze is an amazing company

      Yev from Backblaze here -> We decided not to have a Linux client for our unlimited service, but B2 already has integrations w/ Duplicity, which does run on Linux. Have at it ;-)

  4. DerekCurrie
    FAIL

    I Dumped Backblaze, And They Me, After They LOST My Encryption Key

    There is nothing 'darling' about Backblaze from my lousy experience. I'd uploaded all my computer data, encrypted with a key I held close in a separate encrypted disk image, to Backblaze in hopes that they were the great Trust-No-One backup cloud service I was looking for. Then one day, I needed to restore one file from my backup. It had gone corrupt on my system and a good copy was, supposedly, up on Backblaze.

    Except my encryption key, the one and only, DIDN'T WORK when I wanted to download and decrypt the file. Backblaze offered no explanation, no apology. Instead they played the old crap company game of Blame The Victim. That was followed by an offer to refund money for the remaining time on my account under the condition that I GET LOST.

    Don't trust Backblaze folks. And no, I'm not going to join into a flame war about them. This is my experience and I'm sticking to it. My duty now has ended.

    1. Jonathan Richards 1

      Re: I Dumped Backblaze, And They Me, After They LOST My Encryption Key

      Derek's experience highlights two important aspects for backup policy. (i) Test recovery at the point of implementation, and often thereafter, and (ii) have redundant secure key storage.

      I know nothing about Backblaze, but I'd be much more comfortable with a company that doesn't store my backup encryption key. If they can decrypt my backup, there's always a chance that they'll get hit with a court order to do just that. You either care about that possibility, or you don't.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Backblaze Fanboi Here

    I have been using Backblaze on my machines for years. Ever since my home server took a dump and I became paranoid about losing one of the machines that I was backing up to the server. I've met Gleb in person and like what I see from him. I've restored files on more than one occasion and I recommend the service to every single person I can. To the flame retardant commentard that states Backblaze lost his encryption key, I am curious as to how often you verified that the key worked, if ever. Even the non-key secured recommendations are that you check a file randomly on a regular basis to ensure you are in fact backing up what you think you are. With more than 6TB of data backed up to BB currently, I've not had any file I've checked have an issue.

  6. Jonathan Richards 1
    Go

    Backblaze problem

    Fired (haha) with enthusiasm, I signed up for the B2 beta. There's a typo in the command line tool, though, that makes it impossible to authorize an account. To fix, edit line 352 from

    352 auth_urls = {'-production':'https://api.backblaze.com'}

    to read

    352 auth_urls = {'--production':'https://api.backblaze.com'}

    that is, add a second hyphen before "production".

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