Backblaze is a great backup solution. They publish drive stats and even show you the hardware they use.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/storage-pod
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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I am a happy backblaze user and generally I’ve only heard good things about them.
They do have multiple data centers and they are operating B2B products too.
Is there anything in particular that would make you think they could be unreliable?
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I've used backblaze b2 for almost 8 years now and it just works. I've never had any data lost by them in that time.
I just recently switched over to Storj.io as it a bit cheaper at only $4/TB as compared to B2 at $6/TB. Both are S3 compatible and work with just about every backup software out there. I have used Borg, Kopia and now Restic to do backups of important data. All 3 tools deduplicate all your data and reduces the amount of storage used. They also do encryption client side and are open source. They also have a built-in verification mechanism that checks the data is intact.
There definitely isn’t a docker container that will let you run Backblaze in WINE so that you can get the cheap unlimited plan working on Linux. You shouldn’t go looking for such a thing to save money. /s
Awesome and hopefully they never find out as that's against their TOS. Sticking it to the man for what? ~$20 a year, potentially losing your backups and not having any if they find out? Why would you want to potentially lose your backup service over this? Idk why but this seems dumb. The point of 3-2-1 is to reduce points of failure and you are increasing your potential of data loss by doing this.
You are massively oversimplifying the situation. They are discriminating against which operating system I use, and not addressing that data is data. If I ran a windows VM on the same machine and put my data in there, it would be exactly the same as running the Backblaze container.
And it isn’t a $20 per year difference—if I backed up the same amount of data on the B2 plan, it would be around $3000 per year. Seems like a pretty steep increase to back up the same amount of data through Debian as opposed to Windows. They’ve never complained, never even tried to sell me the B2 plan, and I haven’t even seen anything telling me I’m storing an overly large amount of data for my plan.
Lastly, I read their TOS, and I don’t consider myself to be breaking them. I’m only backing up personal files at home and the program is technically running through a windows environment. That is what their unlimited plan was designed for. If they wanted it to be different, they could call it a 10TB plan.
I’m sure some will disagree with me. To each their own.
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Do you use zfs? Something that I am unsure if is whether people are making ZFS backups to backblaze, or if they're backing up files directly.
Ie: Do I need the same filesystem as the source in order to recover the data?
Personally I'm using rclone with the crypt backend of top of the usual b2 remote
I do use ZFS and I just backup the files with restic. To restore a file in a zfs snapshot I would have to download the entire thing to a spare HDD, even if I only need to recover a few files. Restic has snapshots too and is designed to be used with cloud providers like B2.
I think the main thing is for you to try doing a test restore of your data before you need to (and you already have a local backup anyway if your test goes wrong)
That will give you a better understanding of the whole process - they might be 100% reliable in storing data which is totally unusable by you because you've lost your decryption key, weren't backing it up correctly, etc (for example).
I've never really understood the logistics of how to do a test restore.
Do you have to buy a 2nd computer?
You dont need a second computer, just replace the drive with an empty one.
No, you can jusy restore to a second location...it depends on whether everything was backed up, or just a few test files.
I prefer backing up specific folders rather than "everything", so it's easier to test. (I'd just reinstall the OS if that was nuked)
Let's say I want to do a test restore of all my photos. I just rename that folder to simulate that it's been accidentally deleted... then I just do a normal restore - and do a bit-by-bit comparison of the two folders and check it all went well.
I just have a smaller dataset using the same settings, which I try to recover a couple of times/year.
It’s not perfect as recovery exercises go … but it feels safe enough for me.
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I’ve used backblaze for years and regularly run recovery exercises. Never had a problem.
However, to avoid any fears, I store remote backups in two locations (the other one being OVH, a large French cloud provider).
My data retention regime:
- Mirrored disks in local NAS.
- Continually (every night) copy to Backblaze(US) and OVH (DE).
- Once/year, copy all local NAS data to offline disks (ie disks that are plugged into a tray only during the copy) to avoid a file locking/encryption infection that could spread to the online files.
I use them as my backup backup provider. Crazy cheap, my bill was like $1.50 for a month. Their backup command line tool is pretty solid also. I would definitely use them if you need a new backup provider.
Yeah well I have over 3TB to store
So.... $18 a month? That's a Netflix subscription homie.
And that's more expensive than a lot of other providers
It's more expensive than one other provider, iDrive. But iDrive doesnt provide nearly the same level of service. Back laze is the cheapest full featured B2 service on the market. If you are concerned about data integrity of your backups but you cannot afford $18 a month, then you cannot afford to have that much data.
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How was it so cheap? How much data are you storing
It is $6 a TB. I use less than a TB. Their whole sthick is being cheaper than others. It is a very basic service overall. But does it's job.
Also they publish drive stats which is pretty cool to have that transparency.
Oh ok. $6 a TB but if you use the computer backup instead its $10 for infinite storage which is great
It's alright. I use both their desktop backup service and B2 extensively. Their desktop client and web interface is very basic and a bit rough, you don't buy their service for the well-developed UI. The service works as advertised though.
I use them as well. Cheap, reliable and easy to use. I only had trouble once, where I was caught in some sort of anti-spam measure and they blocked my account. An email to their support fixed the problem pretty quickly though.
One thing to look out for is to determine where you want your backups. You can't change your account's server location after you create your account afaik.
Tbf I think a 2-2-1 is sufficient for home users.
I would only recommend 3-2-1 to some that has a business behind themself.
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Used them since the company started but stopped this year due to the cost going up. Never had an issue.
I have used them since januar 2019, and I don't have any complaints. I have only needed to restore backups once - it worked as well as could be expected.
Any issues with backups have always been on my side
Can you explain the situation around you restoring a backup? Did backblaze lose your data?
AFAIK AWS replicates your data across buckets for reliability in case their datacentre goes down, which (from what I understand) is the cost of a whole another bucket with B2. That's my concern. I don't think Backblaze is going out of business any time soon but I'm afraid of data loss (I do have one local backup but my budget is unfortunately a bit tight right now - I'm going to have to pick and choose important bits from all of the data and add a second backup I guess)
AWS has multiple teirs of storage options in s3, some replicate and some dont. by default those that do replicate do so in multiple availability zones, but not across regions. unless you turn on cross-region replication (CRR) which is an additional charge.
So, for example without CRR if your bucket is in us-east-1 and 1 availability zone goes down you can still access the data, but if all of us-east-1 is down, you cannot.
I've got my mom setup on their PC backup service, no complaints so far (on the Backblaze side that is, she still insists that she doesn't need continuous backups even though I've had to restore multiple times for her).
I switched my backups from Crashplan to B2 as it was significantly cheaper than going to AWS. B2 is more expensive than what I was paying for Crashplan Pro Unlimited (about 8x for the amount of data I have), but I have more peace of mind with it not relying on Crashplan's terrible Java client.
A reminder that the only good backup is a tested backup.
I don’t use them but I work for a dj that uses them to backup all their music and production music. This has been going on for over 10 years now and they are still using them. At one point I was over there while they were downloading a large batch of their files and the speed was fast enough to saturate his internet.
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