> We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon Ok. But why ? Technical obstacles such as having to deal with distribution diversity - or is it a way of market segmentation ?
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 offers a Linux desktop client, and I believe they're a smaller player than Backblaze.
How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.
I don't always buy the exact models, but I've switched to HGST few years ago after studying Backblaze reports and so far, no regrets (I'm running heavily used postgres on these drives at home)
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 offers a Linux desktop client, and I believe they're a smaller player than Backblaze.
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?"
Yev from Backblaze here -> have you checked out B2? We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon, but our B2 service has a lot of integrators (like Cloudberry and Duplicity, HashBackup, etc..) that can back up Linux machines, a lot of folks have been going that route.
> We likely won't have a Linux client for our backup service any time soon Ok. But why ? Technical obstacles such as having to deal with distribution diversity - or is it a way of market segmentation ?
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.
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 offers a Linux desktop client, and I believe they're a smaller player than Backblaze.
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.
With hard drive size increasing so quickly but hard drive transfer speeds basically flat, I wonder if there are long-term implications for them with respect to recovery from backup and downtime. For example, if a whole rack goes down, and they are on 32TB drives in the future, for example, could it takes a week or more for their data to get online?
How are people using Backblaze's excellent hard drive reliability reports in making purchasing decisions? For example when I search for HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 on Amazon I get a dealer selling old out of warrantee drives as new. https://www.amazon.com/HGST-MegaScale-HMS5C4040ALE640-Coolsp... I get similar results with many of the other drives listed and with other websites such as NewEgg.
Note to self: stay the hell away from Western Digital. Good lord, an 8.2% annualized failure rate? That's unbelievable. They have the first, second, and third worst failure rates on that chart.