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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

#121

Post by epmaybe »

e40 wrote: post #94
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Mac Pro Mid-2010 workstation with a RAID 5 Array configured to have a hot spare for redundancy. Then I had a locally attached hard drive for time machine backups + BackBlaze + a hosted repo for the work I do + I use a third party encrypted cloud file sharing service for the most important documents. The problem started when I decided to upgrade to High Sierra. The upgrade was catastrophic for this configurati…

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people upgrade to new operating systems so quickly. I never upgrade my macOS until x.x.4, but I prefer x.x.5. I'm on 10.11.6 because 1) it works perfectly, and 2) Karabiner doesn't work on 10.12.

What if you're buying a new device that's already been updated to the latest version? It can be hard to downgrade, especially with Apple devices.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#122

Post by Spooky23 »

philsnow wrote: post #84
brianwski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you really care about the security of your data at this level (or external factors force you to care!), you shouldn't be using a product like BackBlaze.

In a commercial setting, you need to control the infrastructure and security artifacts. Otherwise, old fashioned physical controls are effective, trustworthy and have more legal protections than any of these products at a cost of some convenience.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#123

Post by sp332 »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #82
xhrpost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

xhrpost said "eventually". Not now.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#125

Post by e40 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #109
e40 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people upgrade to new operating systems so quickly. I never upgrade my macOS until x.x.4, but I prefer x.x.5. I'm on 10.11.6 because 1) it works perfectly, and 2) Karabiner doesn't work on 10.12.

I routinely help others with operating system upgrades in my day to day so out of necessity I upgrade as soon as a general release becomes available. It's also why I have multiple layers of backups for my data.

That's what VMs are for! VMware Fusion on macOS is a really good product and I heartily recommend people use it.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#126

Post by cm2187 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #91
woolvalley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a Mac Pro Mid-2010 workstation with a RAID 5 Array configured to have a hot spare for redundancy. Then I had a locally attached hard drive for time machine backups + BackBlaze + a hosted repo for the work I do + I use a third party encrypted cloud file sharing service for the most important documents. The problem started when I decided to upgrade to High Sierra. The upgrade was catastrophic for this configurati…

I do twice a day, local NAS backup and it saved my life recently.

A bug in a script I wrote in .net, was supposed to iterate through a list of network directories to delete (all starting with \\SERVERNAME\) and ended up iterating through the characters of the first item in that list ("\").

That's how I learned that in Windows, "\" means the root of the current drive, and that deleting all files from a drive on an SSD only takes seconds...

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#127

Post by sml156 »

amelius wrote: post #85
brianwski wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting, your considering that your setup somehow compares to Blackblaze

Also if if he says it takes about 15 Min's for it to come online and be usable in their massive data center I would believe him.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#128

Post by rasz »

atYevP wrote: post #19
chr4004 wrote: post #6

Curious where one would buy those, directly from the manufacturer?

Yev from Backblaze here -> Most of our purchasing is done through distributors. We'd love to buy direct at some point, but for now we have good manufacturer/distributor relationships! We're getting there though!

There is a simple fix - become a distributor. I worked for local European distributors that moved less merchandise per year and had direct relationships with Samsung/Fujitsu/IBM/WD/Seagate (you can tell it was a long time ago :P).

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#129

Post by godzillabrennus »

epmaybe wrote: post #121
e40 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people upgrade to new operating systems so quickly. I never upgrade my macOS until x.x.4, but I prefer x.x.5. I'm on 10.11.6 because 1) it works perfectly, and 2) Karabiner doesn't work on 10.12.

What if you're buying a new device that's already been updated to the latest version? It can be hard to downgrade, especially with Apple devices.

Modern Apple devices I’ve used cannot be downgraded to an older operating system than what they shipped with.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#130

Post by shawn-furyan »

gamegoblin wrote: post #83
liquidgecka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.co…

Eleven 9s of durability is an utterly farcical guarantee from a decade old service. A single big durability event in the next century would irrevocably decimate that record. They really might as well claim 100% durability, because it is no less plausible.

I mean, what are the odds that S3 will even be operating in 100 years? I'll certainly put $1 against $1,000,000,000 that it won't, and that's only one many ways it could fail the standard.

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