If you only have 2 - 10 TBytes, I suggest you get a faster network connection, or carry your laptop to a location (like your work place, or a library, or your neighbor's house) with a fast connection and just upload it. You might be surprised how easy and fast it is to upload a couple of TBytes nowadays. Using the Backblaze Personal Backup with 30 threads, I can upload about 1 TByte every 12 hours or so. So if you can leave your laptop at your workplace for 4 days you can upload 8 TBytes, then bring your laptop back home for the incrementals.
It's been over a year, can you please ask someone at backblaze to add a single line of code into the snapshots so you can leave a comment? Right now if you make a snapshot, the only info is the date and time. Not the data, what's in the snapshot, literally anything about it. Please!
Actually, very very quietly as part of the 6.0 release (4 days ago), we now allow you to "name your snapshot".
While this is not a comment, and you can't change the name LATER (so useless to old snapshots), at least going forward you can put up to about 1,000 characters of description in the snapshot name.
I have cable Internet with 20mbit/s upload which I believe is decent (unless you have fiber) means uploading 8 000 000 gigabits (=1 terabyte) would take 400 000 seconds, that's about five days and that's the theoretical maximum. At ten terabytes you are now looking at two months...
Backblaze "Best Practices" recommends you get fully backed up within 30 days, but honestly we won't be bothered and cut you off even if it takes 6 months to upload your whole backup. As long as you are aware of the exposure for the first two months (where only half your data is backed up), I still think this would be FINE for somebody with 10 TBytes.
If you do something like this, the only thing you have to know is Backblaze backs up files in "size order". Small files first. So maybe if your digital movies are more replaceable than your pictures, you might be through 5 TBytes of photos in the first month and be "protected enough" to live with?
I wouldn't advocate for breaking any laws or stealing anything that doesn't belong to you, but a whole lot of places have "totally unused bandwidth" and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity.
Funny story: I'm kind of unusual that I run an open WiFi hotspot in my home, because I have plenty of unused bandwidth and guests in my house and even neighbors are welcome to borrow some of it anytime. But one of my neighbors one time downloaded illegal content on my WiFi (the exact name of the "True Blood" episode was included, with a date and time), and I got a "cease and desist" letter from the ISP. (sigh) I felt it was pretty rude of my neighbor. I mean, just because I leave my car door open in my driveway doesn't mean it isn't rude of you to use my car as a getaway car in a robbery, you know?
> and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity.
Unless they have data caps in their contact and you go over them. Or they monitor for anomalies and data leaks and the IT will come asking questions / reporting incident. If you don't know everything about the setup and have an approval, don't do it.
That is why you must secure your network.
Depending on where you live you could be criminally responsible. What if one of your neighbors is sharing child-pornography?
Thank you for reaching out. I love it when company folks will get into the conversation on HN.
As far as connection, I've got 300/300 from Frontier. It's good, and I can help out my friends. But more questions below...
I had been using CrashPlan for years. Converted to their business plan when they decided to ditch the Consumer stuff.
My confidence in their viability/user experience has eroded. I have personally ditched their service. My concern is for some family members who I've also had on my plan. I think they have roughly ~3TB of photos backed up. I want to find them a new home.
Color me skeptical that folks outside of the public cloud providers are going to be around in 10 years.
Convince me why Backblaze is a good option to send folks to, and please understand, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just wary after having "the CrashPlan experience." Know what I mean?
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so you should always view my answers skeptically. :-)
> Color me skeptical that folks outside of the public cloud providers are going to be around in 10 years.
Backblaze is now 12 years old, and we're actually kind of unique in that we have never raised any significant VC funding and we're (slightly) profitable. We have run the business entirely as a business (not on unsustainable VC dollars), and we aren't planning on going anywhere. Backblaze is employee owned and run, the only voting board members are the original five founders. We have a couple of "board observers" from outside the company for "adult supervision and experienced advice", but they cannot control us, and they cannot even vote.
Side Note: The Backblaze founders and a good portion of the staff all came from the same previous startup/company, and in that case the VCs forced us to sell it, which murdered it. The whole reason we self funded Backblaze and ran a sustainable (profitable) business was a reaction to how horrible that situation was.
Backblaze currently has 803 PBytes of storage in our three datacenters, and business is really going well and we are growing quite healthy. We also understand (and talk about among ourselves) the large responsibility here, which is realistically that amount of data cannot ever be moved. If Backblaze decided on a whim to shut down, we would seriously, SERIOUSLY hurt or even manage to destroy thousands of businesses which depend on us. So we are not going to do that.
Same here, another burned ex-Crashplan customer. My setup was like a few TBs of personal data, and a few GBs each of family from 7-8 different computers (I was on the family plan). Not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to find a replacement for my own data than the family's, and they are under higher risk. Per computer pricing is a terrible deal for that — I'd love to have a per computer plan, plus quota of x Gb per month for N amount of computers that I can distribute as I wish.
Though what I probably want is just S3... Maybe I should just build it and sell that.
Thanks for weighing in. I wish it was that fast. I'm a new customer (formerly CrashPlan) uploading about 7TB, mostly photos and videos. Got a 500Mbps up/down line (in theory and in practice), but my daily uploading to Backblaze has never surpassed 30Mbps I've tried both low, medium and max thread numbers.
In such a case, could the HDD itself be a bottleneck as it's trying to slice and dice a lot of files large and small? It's running at 70-80% active time.
Probably doesn't help that I'm located abroad either..
Yes. Backblaze makes a copy locally of all files larger than 30 MBytes, broken into 10 MByte chunks. They’re stored on your “Temporary Scratch Disk” (which you can specify). One hint would be to put your temporary scratch disk on a fast SSD.
Personally I can get over 150 Mbits/sec upload, but I am on a PCIe SSD and have excellent latency to the datacenter. The worst case is a 5400 RPM drive powered only by USB, located in New Zealand. They would have trouble hitting even 20 Mbits/sec using the newest 6.0 client with the max of 30 threads.
Because Backblaze doesn't allow program files I'm forced to upload a backup image of my C drive, and since the scratch disk needs to be bigger than the biggest file.. I don't have an SSD big enough. But not to worry, I'll be up to speed in a few weeks
> You might be surprised how slow it is in many areas of the US, let alone the world.
I know there are digital deserts. (I just made that name up.)
But one thing I'm curious about -> often when the only CONSUMER ISP in one area (like your DSL company) is slow, there are quietly companies in your area with Gigabits of connection. If you really live out in a remote area of Colorado this may be 30 miles away from your current location, but I would LOVE to see a real "heat map" of high speed connections in the USA.
I think an absolutely killer feature for a company like Kinkos would be to have a "rent a super fast internet connection for a couple days" so you could drive someplace, download a movie or upload your backup, then come home.
The Backblaze office in San Mateo California originally only had very sad DSL line available for consumers. We requested a 10 Gbit/sec symmetric fiber connection to our office, and it took a VERY ANNOYING 3 month wait, but eventually a commercial provider (AboveNet or whatever it is called now) brought it to us as long as we signed a 3 year contract. Totally without asking, AboveNet put a fiber line in where we can light it up at up to 100 Gbits on a single strand of fiber, and they put 40 fiber strands into our office!! This costs $1,500/month so not really viable for an individual home, but maybe for a Kinkos or local ISP or shared among 10 - 100 houses this may be viable.
I have three suggestions, but I have only tried the second suggestion, so please do your own research before my bad advice costs you a lot of money. :-)
1) Comcast (at least in many places) allows you to exceed your bandwidth cap for two months before clamping down on you. I think they are trying to prevent serious long term abuse, not a one time overage. So if you have 3 TBytes and can get it uploaded in one or two months, just do it, apologize, and it won't cost you anything. Backblaze only does "incrementals" after the initial upload.
2) Personally I have Comcast and I pay them an extra $30 or so per month for "unlimited" (remove the cap). Now when I look at my usage, my family stays just under the 1 TByte limit ANYWAY, so this is wasted money, but I don't want to stress about it, and I run like 5 Nestcams CONSTANTLY streaming video, plus my family loves Netflix, so I just drop the $30 and relax. So you could call up Comcast and change over to "unlimited" if you can afford it.
3) A modification of #2 that I have NOT TRIED is to raise it to "unlimited" for the duration of the initial backup. I don't know if you have to commit to a year of unlimited bandwidth, or six months, or if you can change at any time?
AWS has the Snowball program. They ship you what is essentially a network storage device with 10G ethernet, and you upload data over your local 10G network using their protocols, then ship back and they ingest into S3/Glacier.
Haven't used it personally, but did a fair amount of digging ~3 years ago. It was a potential backup solution, but we ended up shipping a 4U server full of 4TB drives to a partner for off-site backup, since they needed routine access anyways.
If you have terabytes to back up, are there still any backup services left that'll let you ship them a drive for a faster initial backup?