It's a mixture of a couple things. One is that we tend to run pretty lean and our engineers are all booked up for the foreseeable future. Linux users are a passionate community, but we can't quite justify the development time for a market segment that is not very large. Additionally, because we run an unlimited model, a lot of people would immediately sign up and back up their Linux servers for $5/month and we'd sail out of business. We could address that by putting in limits for those types of devices and only allowing certain Linux builds, but that adds complexity and we want to keep the backup side of the service very simple - which works for the vast majority of folks. So it's a combination of a bunch of factors. We hoped that developing B2 APIs and CLIs would give Linux folks something that they could use if they needed to have offsite backups or archives and wanted to use our infrastructure cause we're pretty neat. Long-winded answer, but TL:DR - small market segment, development time/cost, possible abuse.
It's worth considering though that the Linux compatibility is worth more than the actual market share. Our company (with roughly 90% Mac / 5% Linux / 5% Windows users) went with Crashplan to have a single backup solution for all of the employees.
Absolutely, and that makes perfect sense. Having one system in place definitely beats out multiples. We know we can't be all things for all folks, but Crashplan is great, no hard feelings ;)
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. The underlying base of original client backup software was originally written from scratch on three platforms simultaneously: 1) Windows, 2) Macintosh, and 3) Linux. It was designed that way from the beginning. This code continues to compile every time we do a client release, simply as part of the process. However, it is entirely lacking a GUI layer and an installer - those were never written. The underlying backup engine runs even when the user is logged out or the GUI has stopped working.
So it is technically possible, but along the way we released Backblaze B2 (storage API) which not only supports Linux, we assume Linux is the primary customer! We're seeing if that can satisfy the Linux community. Backblaze B2 is a large ongoing effort consuming a lot of our software developer's time.
A note about limited resources: Backblaze never really raised any funding, there are no deep pockets, so we can ONLY hire an additional programmer when the products we sell throw off enough money to pay that salary. We run on really tight margins (thus our obsession with failure rates of drives) which is fabulous for our customers, but not so great for hiring lots of extra help to do projects like a Linux GUI. :-)
Their MacOS client is amazing, so I doubt it's a technical constraint. My guess is that because they don't have size limits on their backups, if all of their customers are backing up terabytes, Backblaze bleeds money, so they depend on most people only backing up a couple hundred gigabytes. Linux users may have a wildly higher amount of stuff to back up such that it's not profitable. And changing their branding to have mostly unlimited except for some people is probably not too appealing either.
Probably because the market is too small to justify the developer time when other developers are willing to spend the time integrating their B2 cloud offering as a driver.
CrashPlan made a different decision. If I was to offer an unlimited backup service, I would offer it to novice users, not a small minority of power users and professionals who were going to break the business model with TBs of data.
Let's be honest: when people see unlimited, most think "I don't have to worry about how much I'm storing" but a small group thinks "How can I take advantage of this?"
> Let's be honest: when people see unlimited, most think "I don't have to worry about how much I'm storing" but a small group thinks "How can I take advantage of this?"
I don't want to take advantage of it. I just happen to have 8TB of data to back up...
But backing up that much data over the internet isn't practical in any case.
CrashPlan built their system using Java and offers enterprise versions of their clients and servers. They have a very different technology stack and business model.
Ok. But why ? Technical obstacles such as having to deal with distribution diversity - or is it a way of market segmentation ?