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Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

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Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#21

Post by Faark »

CharlesW wrote: post #13
scarface74 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. They’ve said repeatedly that unlimited storage for $5 wouldn’t be a sustainable business model if they supported NAS. For that there are third party solutions that support backing up to B2.

Thank you, I know the history and what they've said in the past, and also know about their B2 product. I'm hoping for a real answer from Yev, but if not I've been reasonably happy with CrashPlan (which is a NAS-friendly solution).

Crashplan is more than twice the price, so you'd even have the budget for an extra device.

Did you ever have to restore a significant amount of data with CrashPlan? Its been more than a month since a 3tb drive died on me and I'v only got 1/3 of it restored so far. I don't see any local bottlenecks. Its restore-or-upload, so recent data in unsecured as well. :(

CrashPlan does supports client side encryption, making Blackblaze not really an option for me.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#22

Post by atYevP »

tpmx wrote: post #8
atYevP wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev here -> try it now. We've spent the last few updates honing in the way we handle uploads and have introduce threading to make the process more efficient. We'll always be bottle-necked by the available bandwidth to your machine and latency, but it's worth trying again if you haven't for a while!

Sure, but you surely you have stats? And why is latency a factor - surely you can work around that by improving your network protocol (think less TCP, more QUIC or something similar, etc)? Anyway, okay, I'll test your trial again. :)

This speedtest is somewhat accurate and is pointed to our data center so should give you a decent idea of speed -> https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/. The reason latency is a factor is that it affects how quickly data leaves your computer and gets to our data center, so if you're far away, it can play a factor!

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#23

Post by renaudg »

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client.

Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation could not complete, please contact support" each time. Support advised me to wipe /Library/Backblaze* , reinstall, then inherit the existing backup.

Well, we never managed to get the inherit process to complete : it failed with "ERR_error_unknown" every time. And I started freaking out.

That's where things get interesting : I became frustrated with the canned responses from support and decided to delve into the client logs myself. I quickly found a potential smoking gun (in bzbmenu.log) : a spelling mismatch in an XML attribute name between the server response (support_inherit="true") and what the client was expecting ("ERROR could not read attribute named supports_inherit"). Notice the extra "s" ? Pretty obvious typo and one that could definitely explain the failure (client can't confirm that the selected backup is eligible for inheritance, bails out)

I was rather happy with my findings and shared them in plenty of details with support (including log excerpts), but instead of a "thank you and here's some free months of service !" response, I got "meh, this log file is irrelevant", and worse: no promise to escalate the issue (until I insisted a second time). They suggested updating to the 6.1.0.372 beta, which turned out to have the exact same bug.

Now, I'm left wondering if should try upgrading to 7.0 and inheriting my 6.1 backup from there. But the point of this message is to share my disappointment with this support experience. I went out of my way as a customer and spent a couple of hours researching and finding something potentially useful to the company, but had no appropriate way to report it. I even tried security contacts, but was (rightfully) told it wasn't a security issue. No word on whether they were going to pass it on to the relevant team.

EDIT: I've just confirmed that the same issue is present in 7.0.0.386. Still can't inherit my existing backup.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#24

Post by atYevP »

renaudg wrote: post #23

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation c…

Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue.

I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#25

Post by renaudg »

atYevP wrote: post #24
renaudg wrote: post #23

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation c…

Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue. I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).

Wow thanks Yev ! It's #499226

No hard feelings at all against the support guy, who probably has to deal with dubious customer claims all day. But it was pretty frustrating when he told me the log file I looked at couldn't possibly have anything relevant in it, when I had in fact just showed him plenty of relevant things from it :)

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#26

Post by sib »

atYevP wrote: post #24
renaudg wrote: post #23

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation c…

Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue. I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).

Hi Yev - sorry to jump in here; I've been a customer for a long time and would like to understand the best way to move some particular directory structure from an internal disc to an external disc (both of which are backed up by Backblaze) without causing that entire directory structure to be fully uploaded again. This has happened more than once and it's not pleasant.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#27

Post by inovica »

zomg wrote: post #4

i've been a customer of backblaze for a about a decade now. everyone has their opinion, but for me, it's always just hummed along in the background, doing it's thing. i've had to restore almost a terabyte of data (on more than one occasion, derp) -- and had no issues. it's up there (again, for me) as one of the annual software subscriptions that's worth every penny, if not more.

Same here. It's on 3 machines at home and was put on when I nearly lost all my photos of my kids. It's wonderful. Even did a 'drive by' when I was on holiday in California. I did Apple, Google, Facebook and.... Backblaze. Wonderful product and company.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#28

Post by eliog »

atYevP wrote: post #24
renaudg wrote: post #23

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation c…

Yev here -> I'm reading! If you're able, please send me the ticket number so that I can review that exchange and escalate it. I'm sorry that support didn't appear grateful for your debugging efforts, but I'll make sure that it gets in front of the developers who can examine the issue. I would update to v7.0 - it does have a lot of minor fixes in there as well (not sure if inherit is addressed, but worth trying).

I also ran into the same exact problem today. I installed Backblaze this morning and tried to adopt a previous backup and got the same error. I just restarted as a new backup and moved on.

But now reading what renaudg mentioned I took a look at the log files and I see the same error:

20191008161659 - ERROR could not read attribute named supports_inherit

The XML is also shown in the log and the attribute is called "support_inherit".

+1 vote for a few free months for renaudg. :)

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#29

Post by douglasfshearer »

renaudg wrote: post #23

In case someone at Backblaze is reading this : I had a less than ideal experience in the past couple of days, trying to report through normal support channels a potentially critical bug breaking the "inherit backup" feature in the Mac client. Here goes : a few days ago the Backblaze Mac client started prompting me to upgrade urgently to the latest version (6.1.0.370). I went ahead and did that but got "Installation c…

I had this same experience in regards to support interaction. Starting from scratch is a less than ideal process IMO, so much so I have not done it in the hope that a future update fixes this, and I don't have to jump through all the hoops.
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