from Hacker News

Save Data Directly to B2 with Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0

by jhack on 1/25/19, 3:06 AM with 42 comments

  • by throwitaway132 on 1/25/19, 11:47 AM

    > No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days

    Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we disconnect a drive.

    I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the trip, I'd have been shit out of luck.

    Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies:

    https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v...

    https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...

    None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days" bullshit.

    Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.

  • by ksec on 1/25/19, 10:09 AM

    And it is still very much Desktop based, I wonder if Blackblaze will one day have a Consumer No Fuss NAS along with B2 Subscription model. ( Something I wish Apple had done with Time Capsule and iCloud )

    So I just set, forget and pay monthly knowingly the Data should be safe.

  • by izacus on 1/25/19, 8:43 AM

    I'm having trouble finding supported operating systems for the tool - does Backblaze support Linux yet?

  • by cdumler on 1/25/19, 2:43 PM

    The reason why Backblaze and Crashplan have various restrictions is due to being all-you-can-eat. At some point, they have to create an arbitrary cap. So, the snapshot is a curious feature, but seems to be implemented poorly.

    It doesn't seem to be snapshot system, but an archive system. A snapshot is usually a point in time represented by a series of changes. By being a series of change, it would deduplicate redundant files between snapshots. It appears that this is a full archive backup, which is fine but have some limitations:

    * Need to upload the whole archive every time. * No deduplication. * Need to have double the space to restore (download then unzip). * No partial restores. * No encryption of personal files.

    If you have any technical willingness, consider restic. It is a command line utility that has the ability to backup to many backends, including B2. Being a CLI, it can be scripted. Files can be arbitrarily backed up and restored. It has encryption that the servers can never see. I also hear Duplicati is similar, but have never used it.

    If you want an easy way to just make archives locally and store it on B2 for cheap, consider a cloud mounter, like Mountain Duck. You can treat B2 as a drive and upload/download files as needed. Note: B2 is a _very_ simple store, so simple that it doesn't support renaming files (must download, rename, and upload). But, it is fast and inexpensive.

  • by mike503 on 1/26/19, 3:03 AM

    I see BB pushing B2 more and more and it makes me sad. Instead of a Linux client (which I can’t imagine would be that difficult, ultimately, after this many years) they’re putting all resources on the pay-for-utilization model. Good for them, bad for us waiting for a Linux client.

    CrashPlan is garbage. Bloated client, keeps breaking down and I get reports my devices aren’t backed up but then they say they are, after backing up 30+ TB (it took years) it says my original backup had to be reset so I had to restart the entire thing, just not a lot of confidence with them. But it is the only unlimited Linux option out there.

    Also, they just removed their personal plan and do business only and per device now. If they could make their client not suck, and give better confidence in their platform, I wouldn’t complain.

  • by atoav on 1/25/19, 9:39 AM

    I use duplicati with AES-256 for exactly this on backplaze (and another different SFTP target)

  • by bsutt on 1/25/19, 9:46 AM

    This is a pretty useful feature. It goes some way towards solving the problem of keeping a backup of my photos. Rather than having to keep buying more physical storage I can archive off photos in batches to B2 from my regular Backblaze backup.

  • by toomuchtodo on 1/25/19, 6:37 AM

    Very cool feature release. Is it possible to generate a public link to a snapshot?

  • by msh on 1/25/19, 3:38 PM

    I wonder how this works with encrypted Backblaze backups.