Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Has this policy changed at some point? It is more complicated than just "after 30 days" (and always has been). If your laptop is entirely offline (or you simply uninstall the client from your laptop), then the policy is ACTUALLY that we keep your backup for 6 months as long as you keep paying your bill. But to be honest, it's more like a year or two. The 6 month policy is we guarant…
> HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into. I'm glad to hear that Backblaze has finally made such an option available. However: > For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. As someone who once almost lost his PGP key an…
When I think about a backup, I'm thinking in terms of recovering last good state after a drive failure or catastrophic filesystem corruption. I don't tend to think of a backup as implying a deep history unless that part is explicitly stated. That distinction was easier to notice back in the days of backing up to tape or optical discs - you don't expect each tape/disc to contain a version history, just a single snapshot, and you don't expect your collection to retain long-gone files unless it's an ever-growing pile of tapes/discs.
In that mindset, it's not reasonable to expect that a backup service necessarily provides the full historical archive.
