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Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

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Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#81

Post by ac29 »

x4d66a5ce wrote: post #65
ac29 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theyve repeatedly said no -- it breaks their business model to allow Linux machines (often servers) to backup "unlimited" data for $5/month. People with multi-hundred TB NAS machines would end that business model, quickly (see Amazon Cloud Drive, Crashplan, and others). But if youre using S3, just switch to B2, its per GB pricing, much cheaper than S3 and supports lots of Linux tools. I use rclone.

I took the GP's remark about how he "went with s3 as s3cmd had a path of least resistance to storing backups" to mean that he considered B2 but opted for S3 since the latter offers a backup utility, but the former supports neither a "native" (e.g., git or rsync over SSH) backup interface, nor does it have a Linux client—the approach for backup on B2 from desktop Linux is to roll your own backup solution or use somebo…

rsync.net is 18x as expensive as B2. Have you ever used rclone? Its surprisingly good, though might not be a perfect replacement for rsync, depending on your usage.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#82

Post by dna_polymerase »

xhrpost wrote: post #77
teach wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. B2 is currently about half the cost of S3 for outbound data and 1/4 the cost for data at rest. What do you mean "stay competitive?"

I mean that prices in the cloud space tend to drop regularly, they can't stay at this price point forever.

But why would they lower prices now? They are already the cheapest.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#83

Post by gamegoblin »

liquidgecka wrote: post #73
plantain wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not equivalent. B2 is singly homed.

So is S3. You have to pick the region (home) for the data when you create the bucket.

From https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ and https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/

    Data is automatically distributed across a minimum 
    of three physical facilities that are geographically
    separated by at least 10 kilometers within an AWS Region
    
    Designed for 99.999999999% durability and 99.99%
    availability of objects over a given year.
    
    Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.
From https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

    Uptime: 99.9% SLA

    Reliability: 99.999999% durability
So S3 is 10x more available, 1000x more durable, and datacenter redundant.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#84

Post by philsnow »

brianwski wrote: post #80
explainplease wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is confusing and concerning to me as a potential customer. Having used CrashPlan and other proprietary and FOSS backup software, I don't understand this description of how restoration works with Backblaze. 1. Why is the data being decrypted server-side instead of client-side? The server should be sending the encrypted data to the client, and the password should never leave the client machine. 2. Why are zip file…

I'll answer these in reverse order: > 2. Why are zip files being created? We actually offer two forms of restore: A) Zip File Download, and B) External USB Hard Drive FedEx'ed to your home. In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to A…

> At this moment you are opening a window of SLIGHTLY lowered security that slams shut after a few hours. For those few hours of preparing your 4 TByte restore, if an undetected hacker had compromised the one restore server in the Backblaze data center that your job was on, that hacker could possibly get access to your files. But then the reduced security window slams shut, we NEVER write your passphrase to any disk so it has now vaporized and we do not remember it, and if a hacker hacks into our system the following day you are STILL completely impervious.

This is the part that security people get hung up on.

We have to trust Backblaze [0] to not hang onto the password longer than you say you will, either intentionally (say, "to improve the user experience") or unintentionally ("oh that memory got written to swap and happened to persist on disk for a long time, whoops").

So that's the "malicious" case (maybe some of the above described cases are "benign malice", doesn't matter). There's also the "subverted" case: if the decryption password enters your infrastructure, we have to trust that you have not been popped by an attacker.

Whereas, if Backblaze has zero knowledge, and only serves encrypted bits, the _only_ concerns customers have are with durability and availability, which it sounds like you have pretty well in hand from your description of how bits are distributed around your datacenter(s).

[0] not just Backblaze but 5-years-from-now Backblaze: people and businesses change.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#85

Post by amelius »

brianwski wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Or is every pod constantly in use? Would it help if smart algorithms repartition the data on storage pods, to optimize power use?

Brian from Backblaze here. > Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Electrical power is a gigantic part of our datacenter bill (like 60%). However, we cannot really ever turn off the hard drives. If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back. > is every po…

> If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back.

Well, speaking for myself, I don't mind if I have to restore a backup, and have to wait 1 minute extra for a system to come online (that's about the typical boot time of a Linux system, so I suppose for a storage pod it would be about the same).

By the way, it seems possible to power down an individual SATA drive if it is not in use: [1].

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112117/shutdown-my-...

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#86

Post by conception »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

I Note: They recently released a new website and software version that's supposed to address some of these issues but fool me once and all...

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#87

Post by woolvalley »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

This is why you always want the onsite & offsite backup, because offsite cloud backups will always be fairly slow to fully restore. I use a local NAS to achieve automatic onsite backups myself. It's part of the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#88

Post by volkl48 »

linsomniac wrote: post #32

I've watched Backblaze closely, and I love their detailed reports of drive stats. I've always been curious about their choices of manufacturers though. In my past I found that Hitachi/HGST drives were far more reliable than others. We had a couple people doing hardware and software support on ~120 machines, and hard drive replacements were expensive (in man-hours) for us, so whenever possible we got Hitachi drives. T…

It is worth considering that the use-case of Backblaze is different from the average end-user.

No power on/off cycles, no physical impacts to worry about (even most desktops occasionally get bumped into), but non-stop operation and presumably near continuous read/write operations.

You'll likely get different failure patterns as a result.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#89

Post by elfchief »

brianwski wrote: post #80
explainplease wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is confusing and concerning to me as a potential customer. Having used CrashPlan and other proprietary and FOSS backup software, I don't understand this description of how restoration works with Backblaze. 1. Why is the data being decrypted server-side instead of client-side? The server should be sending the encrypted data to the client, and the password should never leave the client machine. 2. Why are zip file…

I'll answer these in reverse order: > 2. Why are zip files being created? We actually offer two forms of restore: A) Zip File Download, and B) External USB Hard Drive FedEx'ed to your home. In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to A…

I would really like #2 to have the option of sending encrypted files on disk or zip, and y'all providing a client that will decrypt them using my passphrase, locally.

Nothing personal, but I really don't want y'all seeing my data, even if I need to restore.

(context: I've been a Backblaze user for years and love the hell out of you. I've never really thought of how the restore would work with my encrypted data, though. Turns out the story is ... not what I had hoped)

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#90

Post by 086421357909764 »

giobox wrote: post #69
mshook wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 1): rclone does the job. That's what I use with B2. https://rclone.org/

B2 plus rclone works well, but for many it's potentially significantly more expensive than the standard "all you can eat" $5 a month plan. In my case B2 would workout at roughly 4x the monthly cost and that's before factoring in the fact B2 charges for downloads as well as uploads. An official Linux client would be significantly better value.

As they've said though, the usage of most linux users isn't on par with Windows / Mac users. They simply would crush themselves with people attempting to backup 200TB nas devices for $5.00 a month. If you want any perspective on how crazy the fringes are with data storage and how they impact providers (such as amazon, google, backblaze, etc.) simply read the stories on reddit /r/datahoarder and you'll quickly see why this decision makes sense from a business perspective.
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