CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market • Hacker News Board

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#221

Post by domador » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:20 PM UTC

brianwski wrote: post #201

SpikeDad wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thi is a nice ego boost for you but I wish you had answered some of the questions that folks have posted. What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool and b) you can't restore files from more than 30 days.

> What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool I am so confused by your question? With Backblaze, you can get 100% of you data back in two ways: 1) you can get a free external USB hard drive sent to you with all your data on it, or 2) You can prepare a free ZIP file with all your data and download it. We provide a restartable native bzdownloader to help you download the recovered files. >…

I just posted a long reply to your original message, without first seeing that you'd replied to this comment (made by someone else).

If this is how the 30 day policy works, it is slightly more appealing than what I thought. However, it's still not enough peace-of-mind for me. This means that recent files are vulnerable to corruption during their first month of existence (through accidental overwriting, and some kinds of viruses and ransomware). The "most recent version" that is backed up may end up being a corrupted, useless version.

I agree that retaining infinite versions of every file would be cost-prohibitive. However, you may be able to find a healthy compromise. Maybe you could retain a ton of versions of small files and fewer versions of large files. Maybe you could provide users with a space allowance for versioning and allow them to decide which versions of which files to delete (if they reach the allowance limit) or to pay more to increase the allowance.

To summarize: You need versioning in order to be an awesome backup service (and an awesome backup service is the only thing I'll happily settle for!)

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#222

Post by brianwski » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:20 PM UTC

domador wrote: post #208

brianwski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm biased because I work at Backblaze. I'm also one of the founders. Backblaze started in my living room in Palo Alto. Backblaze is A LOT LESS LIKELY to exit out of providing consumer online backup anytime soon as it is our primary business. I don't fully understand what just occurred with CrashPlan, but they had two separate "clients" - one for consumers and one for businesses. As far as I can tell, Cra…

Thanks for sharing that fascinating insider insight regarding non-zero-sum competition and advertising! This whole CrashPlan Home episode deepens my skepticism about services that claim to offer an unlimited amount of a physical resource (atoms on a hard drive, in this case) for a fixed price. Code42 has mentioned certain reasons for exiting the home user market, but I wonder if an unmentioned reason is the cost of p…

> Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer fromthe backup on your servers after 30 days?

The original reason was to prevent customers who owned a single 1 TByte hard drive from filling it with content, backing it up to Backblaze, writing down the date, then emptying the hard drive and filling it with DIFFERENT content, backing up to Backblaze, writing down the date, repeat 50 times.

The idea was this: if the data is not important enough for you to keep a local copy, Backblaze is not going to keep it either. You aren't allowed to go down to just "one copy in Backblaze".

We chose the 30 days as something we thought of as "reasonable". For example, we expected that within 30 days you would realize your laptop was stolen so you could request a full restore. That sort of thing.

However, and now we're all furiously debating the 30 days based on the enormous amount of feedback we are getting today. We will do an analysis and if we can afford it, we will be increasing that number.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#223

Post by deanclatworthy » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:20 PM UTC

chrisper wrote: post #218

deanclatworthy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have looked into Duplicati, but I'm not so keen on running an SSH server on my machine and/or SFTP in order to let others back up to it. A lot of extra admin work would be involved in protecting that set up and creating the necessary port-forwards and firewalls. Whereas crashplan just works. I'm certainly not going to go through the steps of setting up CLI tasks on my families machine members either.

You can choose any kinds of destinations for Duplicati. Even a local place. I personally use it with Google Drive.

If you see the parent comment, I am referring to backing up relatives' machines to mine. These relatives are not local. Backup must happen over the internet.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#224

Post by digikata » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #112

lima wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it works well, Duplicity is rather slow and only supports expensive full-incremental-full backup cycles. Modern incremental-forever backup tools like borg[1] (fork of Attic[2]) are much faster since they are based on block hashing, which also gets you deduplication for free. Basically, a backup is a set of hashes - this means that you can selectively delete or retain old backups without having to merge them. I…

Borg is amazing, except for the lack of public key encryption, which makes it unusable: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/672

Been keeping my eye on restic for just this reason.

https://github.com/restic/restic

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#225

Post by sreitshamer » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

mioelnir wrote: post #179

Looks like neither Backblaze nor Carbonite support E2E encrypted backups where I do not have to send the password to the cloud, or the private key is in fact generated inside the cloud. Which means I have to really scramble to find something else that is compatible with computer-illiterate family. Geez, not what I needed.

(Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup)

Arq encrypts the backups before transmitting them, and the encryption key you choose never leaves your computer.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#226

Post by geostyx » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

brianwski wrote: post #203

tomjen3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance you could add the ability to store files for more than 30 days? I doubt that it is actually that much data, but I don't want to come to my computer to see that some ransomeware has been encrypting my files for 90 days and now demands to be paid.

Based on the enormous amount of feedback we have received today, we are actively talking about increasing it. It was an arbitrary business decision, it is as easy to change as a constant in the source code. If Backblaze can afford it, we will definitely be changing it soon.

If you can't afford it, let me pay extra for this feature.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#227

Post by sreitshamer » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #111

The only reason I used CrashPlan is that, on my home network, anything I'd want to back up is on my NAS. Are there alternative "consumer" solutions that support that?

(Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup)

Arq will back up files that are on your NAS, or anything else you want it to back up.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#228

Post by brianwski » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

brianwski wrote: post #201

SpikeDad wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thi is a nice ego boost for you but I wish you had answered some of the questions that folks have posted. What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool and b) you can't restore files from more than 30 days.

> What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool I am so confused by your question? With Backblaze, you can get 100% of you data back in two ways: 1) you can get a free external USB hard drive sent to you with all your data on it, or 2) You can prepare a free ZIP file with all your data and download it. We provide a restartable native bzdownloader to help you download the recovered files. >…

> if I delete a file will you retain it forever

No. We consider a file deletion as "the final version of the file you wish to retain". In that case you can get the deleted version for 30 days, then it is gone forever.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#229

Post by toredash » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #112

lima wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it works well, Duplicity is rather slow and only supports expensive full-incremental-full backup cycles. Modern incremental-forever backup tools like borg[1] (fork of Attic[2]) are much faster since they are based on block hashing, which also gets you deduplication for free. Basically, a backup is a set of hashes - this means that you can selectively delete or retain old backups without having to merge them. I…

Borg is amazing, except for the lack of public key encryption, which makes it unusable: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/672

Agree, but lack of public key support is the only reason for me not using it

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#230

Post by 0x5f3759df-i » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 8:24 PM UTC

brianwski wrote: post #214

berdario wrote: post #204

I got a 4 year contract with Crashplan (expiring in 2018) and I'm also pissed by this news... I paid less than 4$ per month (the price would've been already higher if I renewed yesterday, but still acceptable) and stored around 130 GB of data (so not a lot, but it's already more than the 100GB threshold that some services use) I need something that would keep watch on all the files on the system (see inotify) to avoi…

Brian from Backblaze here. > Backblaze ... none of the 3rd party integrations with B2 seems to support live watching of files I'm not exactly sure what you are going for, but you can "preview" files through the web interface on BOTH the Backblaze online backup and also B2. If you are specifically asking about movies, just stay tuned. The first step was allowing preview of simple images, next we want to support previe…

>I need something that would keep watch on all the files on the system (see inotify) to avoid continuous rescans of the disks, and that would work on Linux...

What op is looking for has nothing to do with previews