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Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

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Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#51

Post by stefan_ »

brador wrote: post #35
Animats wrote: post #18

Financial failure or service shutdown by the provider is the highest risk for long term storage. The backup services CrashPlan, Dell DataSafe, Symantec, Ubuntu One, and Nirvanix all shut down. Nirvanix only gave two weeks notice for users to save their data.[1] [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Nirvanix-failure-a-bl...

I would add a third risk of an account ban by some type of future automated copyright content ID. Especially if it is silent/without warning.

Forget account ban, there is a nonzero risk a false positive of the automated kiddie porn search all the cloud storage providers do has your home searched and puts you in handcuffs.

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#53

Post by mikeryan »

shub wrote: post #46

Just one missing piece: the actual loss rate.

There’s another piece too. Practically they’re a backup service so knowing how often someone needs to recover their data and not had an opportunity to reset their backup based on their current state. I’ve used Backblaze for years and only needed it once. (I also back up to a time capsule as well since data recovery is more Practical/Easier from that)

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#54

Post by atYevP »

anderspitman wrote: post #52

Off topic but I just want to say how happy I've been as a Backblaze customer. B2 is a fantastic product for my backup needs, and their hard drive stats have always been handy when selecting drives.

Yev from Backblaze -> Thanks! Glad you're enjoying it :D

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#55

Post by pixl97 »

schoen wrote: post #3
garettmd wrote: post #2

This was an interesting read, both the points made about durability, as well as the in-depth math. However, what stood out to me most was the line: Because at these probability levels, it’s far more likely that: - An armed conflict takes out data center(s). - Earthquakes / floods / pests / or other events known as “Acts of God” destroy multiple data centers. - There’s a prolonged billing problem and your account data…

I wonder if there's a general term in engineering for the case where a particular risk has been reduced well below the likelihood of more serious but exotic risks. I've heard about this most in cryptography where we can sometimes say that the risk of, say, a system failing due to an unexpected hash collision is drastically less than the risk of the system failing due to cosmic radiation or various natural disasters.…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#56

Post by the8472 »

brador wrote: post #35
Animats wrote: post #18

Financial failure or service shutdown by the provider is the highest risk for long term storage. The backup services CrashPlan, Dell DataSafe, Symantec, Ubuntu One, and Nirvanix all shut down. Nirvanix only gave two weeks notice for users to save their data.[1] [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Nirvanix-failure-a-bl...

I would add a third risk of an account ban by some type of future automated copyright content ID. Especially if it is silent/without warning.

That's one of the reasons to encrypt locally and only store encrypted data on backup services.

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#57

Post by Johnny555 »

catwell wrote: post #37
Johnny555 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be a power surge taking out a whole rack This failure mode, at least, is already accounted for by sharding data across cabinets: Each file is stored as 20 shards: 17 data shards and 3 parity shards. Because those shards are distributed across 20 storage pods in 20 cabinets, the Vault is resilient to the failure of a storage pod, or even a power loss to an entire cabinet. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vaul…

Multi-region redundancy was on the roadmap for their B2 offering 10 months ago, not sure if it has shipped yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125643

I poked around their pricing page a bit before I posted to see if I could find multi-site redundancy options, but couldn't find anything.

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#58

Post by brianwski »

eloff wrote: post #5

This was an interesting read from a technical point of view, but also well written and refreshingly transparent. I found the discussion about why it doesn't matter when you start talking about 11 nines of reliability to be hilariously true. At the end of the day we're still flawed humans living in a hostile universe, and no matter how foolproof we make the technology, there are some weaknesses that just can't be elim…

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the blog post. :-)

> well written and refreshingly transparent

Thank you! In the interests of full transparency, the blog post was a collaborative affair and was proof read and edited for clarity by several people at Backblaze.

> discussion about why it doesn't matter

One of the philosophies Backblaze uses is to build a reliable component out of several inexpensive and unrelated components. So combine 20 cheap drives into a ultra reliable vault. We have two or three inexpensive network connections into each datacenter instead of buying one REALLY expensive connection for 8x the price. Etc.

Personally, I recommend customers do the same. Instead of storing two copies of your data in two regions in Amazon for 2x the price, store your data in one region of Amazon and put one copy in Backblaze B2 for 1.25x the price. We believe this will result in higher availability and higher durability that two copies in Amazon because Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 don't share datacenters in common (that we know of), don't share network links, don't share the software stack, etc. For bonus points, use different credit cards to pay for each, and have different IT people's credentials (alert email address) on each. That way if one IT person leaves your company and you don't get an alert that the credit card has expired, hopefully your other copy will be Ok.

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#59

Post by pbhjpbhj »

brador wrote: post #35
Animats wrote: post #18

Financial failure or service shutdown by the provider is the highest risk for long term storage. The backup services CrashPlan, Dell DataSafe, Symantec, Ubuntu One, and Nirvanix all shut down. Nirvanix only gave two weeks notice for users to save their data.[1] [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Nirvanix-failure-a-bl...

I would add a third risk of an account ban by some type of future automated copyright content ID. Especially if it is silent/without warning.

How about USA government instruct the owners to cease access or take ownership like with Kim Dotcom's New Zealand (?) based storage company.

I don't recall hearing about anyone recovering access to their data in that case?

This makes every additional user an increase in risk, as even without a warrant it seems if USA TLAs consider someone a valid target then those servers are going down (or getting taken over by people with unknown service standards in order to run a sting, or ...).

tl;dr you have to worry about accusations (of law breaking or copyright infringement) against others too as some jurisdictions have a strong overreach in such cases.

Re: Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s – And Why It Doesn’t Matter

#60

Post by pbhjpbhj »

stefan_ wrote: post #51
brador wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add a third risk of an account ban by some type of future automated copyright content ID. Especially if it is silent/without warning.

Forget account ban, there is a nonzero risk a false positive of the automated kiddie porn search all the cloud storage providers do has your home searched and puts you in handcuffs.

Surely the far greater risk is one other person using the service does something the feds don't like (justified or otherwise) and they take every server that person's file fragments have touched.
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