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Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

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Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#31

Post by tpmx »

atYevP wrote: post #22
tpmx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks.

> 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!

Not to be an ass.. but.. uh, there does exist ways to defeat latencies in order to bring up throughput. But Backblaze isn't aware of them after more than a decade in the business?

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#32

Post by renaudg »

renaudg wrote: post #25
atYevP wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Well, not trying to turn this into a support forum any further, but I've just upgraded to 7.0 and right now SMS 2FA seems broken ("The verification code is invalid" every time)

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#33

Post by ryanmercer »

tpmx wrote: post #31
atYevP wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks. > 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! Not to be an ass.. but.. uh, there does exist ways to defeat latencies in order to bring up throughput. But Backblaze isn't aware of them after more than a decade in the business?

Not to be an ass but.. but..

>Maybe don't do this on HN? (Again, keep in mind I mentioned TCP/QUIC.)

I have no idea what QUIC is and the onyl reason I recognizes 'TCP' is because back in 1994 and 1995 I had to see "TCIP/IP" every time I wanted to connected to the internet, not everyone on HN is a network engineer and/or software dev and you're not having a private conversation, you're having a conversation that might be stumbled upon by anyone that may or may not have the slightest clue what you are talking about.

If someone wants to simplify things, even greatly, in a public discussion thread then good, the rest of us might be able to have a rudimentary idea of what is being discussed.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#35

Post by pfranz »

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.

I'm curious how you did the restore and roughly how it went? I've done a few restores years ago. I don't know if this reflects the current process, but my experience was a bit rough. However, I'm still a long term customer with little interest in going elsewhere.

In late 2016 my laptop's drive died suddenly. I tried to restore everything via a shipped drive. I'm not sure if it was because of copy on their website (at the time) pointing out that they overnight USB drives or me just expecting that's the fastest way to get my data, but I was disappointed at the turnaround. Because it was a relatively large amount of data (a few hundred gigs?) there was a "staging" process that took a day or two. It got interrupted and had to start again (a server reboot on their side?). After receiving the drive everything went smoothly; I believe the data had been encrypted in transit, but wasn't onerous to restore from. I even think I was outside of their 30-day return and it wasn't an issue (the problem wasn't my hard drive, but a cable...with no hot spares and a special cable it took longer to resolve). At work I had a similarly annoying experience with Amazon Snowball where physically locating it and "testing" it took a few days longer than expected when expecting tight turnaround...maybe I need to adjust my expectations for physical logistics.

Many years previous I noticed my music files were showing up as 0-size--my hard drive was failing. Thankfully I could pull my collection from 30 days previous and I chose a download option. It was a bit annoying that they had created a series of zip files (which makes sense), but I believe I was restricted to the web interface for downloading them which made managing it difficult.

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#37

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).

FYI I've just confirmed that the issue is still present in 7.0.0.386 (I've seen the same error messages in the log and the inherit process has failed silently)

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#38

Post by pieterhg »

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…

Same here, it's happening on an older version of MacOS on my dad's Mac Mini if that's any help.

Weirdest is that updates are normally automatic but now it told my dad to download the new DMG on your website, why?

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#39

Post by atYevP »

renaudg wrote: post #25
atYevP wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Just spoke with support you'll be getting an update soon (part of the delay is every time it gets updated by the requester it automatically gets moved to the bottom of the queue due to the way they are ordered - it's a weird quirk).

Support should give you more details but it is indeed the case that some of the logs we have aren't tied to every process - so the transmit logs are paramount for debugging inherit backup state issues, but other log files wouldn't be. That said, we should totally fix the typo in the other log files, I've let the devs know about that!

Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

#40

Post by cweagans »

atYevP wrote: post #19
maikhoepfel wrote: post #10

Cool changes! Any plans to ever add Linux support? That’s a dealbreaker for me. I need to backup both Linux and Windows machines. I wanted to use B2, but restic seems not ideal on Windows.

Yev here -> No plans on the Computer Backup side. We haven't been able to come up with a way to do it affordably and in a way that makes sense for us - so we recommend folks use B2 Cloud Storage and any of the integrations that work for both. Cloudberry and Comet backup work pretty well. You can see more on: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... (I set it to use Linux + Backup as the paramet…

B2 isn't really a solution for people that are looking for a robust computer backup service like Backblaze currently offers for Mac and Windows. I went down that road and ended up very frustrated.

I ended up buying a Synology NAS (which does offer the same computer backup features + revisioning and all that), and then syncing the backup out to B2. It's not an ideal solution by any means, and I would get rid of my NAS in a heartbeat if there were a real solution for Linux desktops.

It really sucks to have had to go through all of that setup (+ have another machine to maintain) when I just wanted to get things done and know my data was safe.

Would you consider working with the community to find a better solution? Maybe offer a closed source library (a la libspotify, but for Backblaze) for the storage bits + get the community pointed in the right direction for an open source frontend for Linux or something?

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