Thank you again.
No, what I meant by:
>> "I may just want 5GB out of my 3TB, even for that "the browser restore interface" is just sad"
Browsers are usually (or maybe never) good for downloading very large files. For example I am downloading a 6GB file or ZIP from BB using my browser and it crashed when I was done downloading 5.6GB. In most cases those 5.6 GBs would be gone and I will have to start over. Where as in a desktop or some kind of download manager/helper (which will have my login state/credentials just like Backblaze app has) it can be done over a period of time and will withstand machine going to sleep, shutdown, network disconnection etc.
But since you mention:
> what if we built something that looks IDENTICAL to the local Finder or Explorer but in a web page would that make some people more happy?
As I've mentioned above - it was about the functionality and not the look and feel.
And, imho, it will really be good if you could move the "restore" functionality to the main BackBlaze app:
- where I can see my files and hopefully available versions too and select version > file at that version or version > then files at that version (some apps first let a time to be selected and then files at that time are available for restore - and some apps do the opposite)
- or, at the least I can do all that on the web and the BackBlaze app starts restoring when it connects to the Internet again in a folder designated by me (
- restores retain the same folder structure. e.g., I am restoring a.png which was at ~/MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png and restore function dumps it like this ~//a.png. Ideally it should give me option to either dump just the file or give me the restore like this: ~//MyFolder/A/B/C/Z/B/A/CoolPics/a.png or at least recreate it where it was and if another copy with the same name exists, rename the other file but this (latter) option will be a mess in case of many files
> I can ALMOST guarantee you the Backblaze data retention policy is about to change
That's very good to hear. Probably the best thing I head since yesterday :-)
PS. Please make sure this retention is something really cool and preferably not something like "well, let's make it 2 or maybe 3 months from 1" :-)
Because, as you must be knowing, the point of backup is that if I am looking for an important Excel sheet file after 7 months and somehow it was corrupted or deleted I'll turn to my backup and with a short retention it would have been gone forever defeating the purpose of my backup.
While we are at it, here's another feedback: Maybe start warning users when Backblaze sees some files (it was backing up previously) deleted before actually deleting them from archive (mark for deletion in a month or so). Maybe let the user do some action like "yeah, go ahead get rid of them", or "Uhuh, didn't mean to delete them - please restore it or put it where it should have been".