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"It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

seankilleen.com

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Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#41

Post by howellnick »

SeanKilleen wrote: post #24
howellnick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from working in IT support, it's frustrating to me that you've made a big public ordeal over something that, firstly was fixed by rebooting your PC, and secondly you haven't tried downloading the file a second time. I'm not necessarily defending Backblaze here, but posting this when it doesn't work quite right the first time seems a bit harsh. I feel like we need more information before we all grab our pitchfo…

I agree with your point to a certain extent -- I've spent many years in IT Support as well. With that said: * I went out of my way to avoid Pitchforks, merely calling attention to an issue and also ensuring I blamed myself enough * A 6GB download took 12+ hours. How many times am I supposed to wait for critical data that long to have it fail, and what happens when I try my 340 GB restoration, wait weeks, and it fails…

I don't use Backblaze, so I don't know what kind of upload speeds they have on restores, but 12+ hours for 6gb seems very slow (or the bottleneck is your download speed). It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for someone that's storing 340gb to download 6gb twice. Of course, and it's been stated already, that if this is critical data you should really keep another backup.

I see that you've made some effort to be transparent and fair, but I think this should have stayed as conversation between yourself and Backblaze until there's more substance to the issue at hand.

With that said, it sounds like there could be some good discussion on their restoration process.

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#42

Post by acdha »

crazygringo wrote: post #33
goldenkey wrote: post #5

Please don't singly use cloud backups. Your first line should be a local backup solution like a Time Capsule or other NAS device. Blind trust in a black box backup is not prudent.

If you're going to only have one backup (which is the case for most people, realistically), your first choice should be cloud, not local. As far as I know, the chances of something physically happening to your local backup (the hardware fails, someone knocks it off the shelf, it gets lost in a move, there's a fire) is vastly greater than the chance that your online provider loses your data. Yes, obviously it's better…

> the chances of something physically happening to your local backup (the hardware fails, someone knocks it off the shelf, it gets lost in a move, there's a fire) is vastly greater than the chance that your online provider loses your data.

This is the key part: almost all of the failure modes affecting local storage also endanger local backups. Cloud backups are intrinsically less risky in that regard, although a local provider might still be affected by a massive natural disaster.

The remaining class of errors, however, are nasty ones like bit rot, human error or malice – all of which are tricky to prevent.

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#43

Post by kalleboo »

SeanKilleen wrote: post #24
howellnick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from working in IT support, it's frustrating to me that you've made a big public ordeal over something that, firstly was fixed by rebooting your PC, and secondly you haven't tried downloading the file a second time. I'm not necessarily defending Backblaze here, but posting this when it doesn't work quite right the first time seems a bit harsh. I feel like we need more information before we all grab our pitchfo…

I agree with your point to a certain extent -- I've spent many years in IT Support as well. With that said: * I went out of my way to avoid Pitchforks, merely calling attention to an issue and also ensuring I blamed myself enough * A 6GB download took 12+ hours. How many times am I supposed to wait for critical data that long to have it fail, and what happens when I try my 340 GB restoration, wait weeks, and it fails…

> a little more finesse than merely using 7-Zip, etc.

RAR works great for this type of situation. Download the data, if decompression fails, download the required parity files. This is how binary downloads on Usenet work (where random articles may be missing from server retention).

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#45

Post by SeanKilleen »

manishsharan wrote: post #40

Backing up your data is not enough; you must also occasionally restore your data ( to a temp location )just to make sure your backup media or its governing database are not silently screwing up your backed up data.

Agree 100%. In the future I plan to do this with both my local and cloud personal backups. (I would always do this with any business-related backup; I don't know why I my standards be lower for my personal data.)

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#46

Post by SeanKilleen »

howellnick wrote: post #41
SeanKilleen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point to a certain extent -- I've spent many years in IT Support as well. With that said: * I went out of my way to avoid Pitchforks, merely calling attention to an issue and also ensuring I blamed myself enough * A 6GB download took 12+ hours. How many times am I supposed to wait for critical data that long to have it fail, and what happens when I try my 340 GB restoration, wait weeks, and it fails…

I don't use Backblaze, so I don't know what kind of upload speeds they have on restores, but 12+ hours for 6gb seems very slow (or the bottleneck is your download speed). It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for someone that's storing 340gb to download 6gb twice. Of course, and it's been stated already, that if this is critical data you should really keep another backup. I see that you've made some effort to be tran…

I appreciate this comment. And you have a great point that I could have waited longer to post this. I've never posted to HN before with any sort of results; my goal wasn't really to rush this out there. It just seemed like a conversation that was worth having, and I didn't think through the fact that it would look like a very ranty customer before posting it here. Your perspective has been very helpful in that regard.

As a (minor) side note, regarding the download speeds, the bottleneck wasn't my speed I don't think (though I do have Comcast and so I'm sure the mileage varies). Right now I'm pulling 56mbps down and even when when my laptop was dealing with slow internet it was still 13-15 mbps.

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#47

Post by SeanKilleen »

A question, because I'm unfamiliar with the way HN works in this regard. My article was #2 on the front page for a brief spell.

Now I look, and it's nowhere to be found.

Is this by design? I don't need it to be on the top page and this isn't about the page views, I'm just not sure how it would disappear. Did a moderator somewhere frown upon it?

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#48

Post by SeanKilleen »

SeanKilleen wrote: post #47

A question, because I'm unfamiliar with the way HN works in this regard. My article was #2 on the front page for a brief spell. Now I look, and it's nowhere to be found. Is this by design? I don't need it to be on the top page and this isn't about the page views, I'm just not sure how it would disappear. Did a moderator somewhere frown upon it?

Haha, nevermind, I'm an idiot. Just hadn't considered that the sheer amount of content would knock it off rather quickly (which makes sense, given that this is not nearly worth the focus that some other topics are.)

Re: "It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

#50

Post by thaumaturgy »

There doesn't seem to be any attempt to confirm that this is actually a problem on Backblaze's end -- it's just as likely to be a problem with Sean's internet connection. One of the problems with downloading large zip archives is that a few scrambled bits or dropped packets can scratch the whole archive.

Backblaze offers the ability to get your data in the form of a flash drive or external drive (https://help.backblaze.com/entries/20224632-how-can-i-restor...). It's not free, but if your data is important, it's a pretty reasonable cost-of-hardware-and-handling price.

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