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C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

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Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#101
post #97
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 2FV (two factor verification, I assume), is it another name for 2FA (two factor authentication)? If so, what kind of verification is it used for? In any case, thanks for responding here!

Yo! Sorry, yes. To sign in to the web for Backblaze B2 you can choose to have 2FV enabled - though we require that you at least set up the phone to do this. 2FV is like 2FA except in our implementation, at the moment, the only 2nd factor is a phone. 2FA tends to have a few more options (like apps and such) but it's essentially the same thing.

Alright, well, until it's possible to opt out of the phone number requirement, I'll probably not be using B2.

Thanks again for the info!

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#103
post #98

> The durability of your data are covered by a contract with clear guarantees with financial compensation for loss of data. I wonder what the details of the SLA are. I can't find them on the page.

in the T&S here https://www.online.net/cgv-c14-en.pdf

Note the SLA compensation (clause V) says it only applies if the data is stored in more than one C14 datacentre, which is currently not possible.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#104
post #52
post #12

Very interesting. Aside from the slight inconvenience of not being able to use standard tools like ftp, scp and rsync... Amazon Cloud Drive's $60 a year plan ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/ ) is still significantly cheaper for storing more than ~2.5TB. It's also free of charges per operation and such like. Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure i…

Can anyone with direct and frequent experience with Amazon Drive comment on how well the product's been working out for them overall? I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scal…

My experience is entirely based around using the service through their REST API, so probably not relevant to your case specifically, but perhaps useful for others. $60/yr for unlimited is impossible to beat for my use case (>4TB of data with potential for downloading most of that).

The REST API is dodgy at the best of times. About 1 in 4 requests fail with random errors (Internal Server Error, Timeout, TooManyRequests, Temporarily Unavailable, etc). The API has an aggressive authentication scheme that requires re-auth every 5 minutes or so. Detecting when re-auth is needed is done by waiting for an Unauthorized error on any request. At least, that's what the spec says. What actually happens is that it returns 401 sometimes, and other times it returns a generic 4xx or 5xx class error with the error's message mentioning that the auth token has expired (sometimes the error message even says 401 Unauthorized, even though the actual error code isn't 401).

Upload speed is quite bad, in part due to the constant errors requiring re-tries and backoff, but mostly because the total response round-trip time is slow. This is particularly cumbersome for many small uploads.

Recently I've been getting waves of TooManyRequests errors, where it will only return TooManyRequests for a day, or even a whole week, making the service unavailable to me (currently in contact with them to see if this can get fixed).

So in other words, I've been using the service for about 5 months and managed to upload only ~1TB of data to the drive (on a 20Mb/s up line). From what I hear the official client suffers similar issues in terms of sync-ing speed.

For $60/yr and no real alternative for me, I feel I'm getting what I pay for. I just wish the API wouldn't completely die for days on end.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#106
post #48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.

Wait, this isn't random access (live) storage ? How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...

It is looks to be more like AWS Glacier, not like S3.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#107
post #5
post #3

"send up to 20 TB of data using FTP... " -- that's funny. At 24 MBit/s it comes to 2,000 hours, which is more than two months.

where did the 24mb/s come from?

Highest listed ADSL download rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_..., ADSL2+)

But here we actually want the upload rate, so it would take even longer.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#108
post #67

For anyone else who was wondering what "80 Go" means, it's 80GB. It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French call their bytes "octets" -- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps variant of theirs or something.

As a French, I'm ashamed at the lack of effort taken to properly translate this page. I wouldn't care so much if it was a random individual who just want to get their thing out, but here we have one of the french biggest companies in cloud offerings.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#109
post #48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.

Wait, this isn't random access (live) storage ? How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...

It says on the page that there's a 7 days window during which your data is freely accessible and mutable, after which it is permanently stored in the homemade infrastructure.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#110
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been fairly happy with it... though I'm not a heavy user. I've mostly used it to backup pictures and email. I use rclone ( http://rclone.org/ ) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out. Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.

Unfortunately rclone doesn't support encryption (yet) though... so the cloud provider can see all your data - https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219 (unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)

Mmm... true. Though if you're truly paranoid then you'll never really trust anyone to encrypt your data. :) I use tools like attic (https://attic-backup.org/) to create encrypted snapshots of my backups.
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