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

Hey there! Thanks for commenting. I think I commented on this aspect in a few other places on the thread, but while I glossed over the IT troubleshooting steps in my blog post, I've been in IT for 10+ years in the roles of support, sysadmin, and developer. I _of course_ did some troubleshooting. Two different PCs with internet connections that worked completely reliably both had different issues, and they were both in known stable states at the time. On each, I'd tested the internet connection, speed, etc. Nothing else was wrong with my internet connection at the time, at least in terms of things like loading web pages, downloads, and streaming HD video. In the first case, the speed seemed to drop to zero and then timeout. In the second, case the file took a long time to download and then came out corrupted anyway. I'm not saying these things don't happen; but I'm saying that, if it's a company's bread and butter, it would make more sense to put as many safeguards in place to make sure that after 12+ hours, a corrupted file doesn't happen.

Also, I'm aware that a few dropped packets can be an issue. This is why I used Backblaze's advertised downloader application -- I got the impression that it would provide better stability, checking, etc. to ensure that the zip file did not get corrupted.

I also mention the external HDDs in my post, but my point is that I pay them so that I can restore my files conveniently, not so that I can be upsold to a $189 drive. Normally, I would drop the cash, but after just spending several hundred dollars on a new motherboard, I figured I would use their download mechanism, which is offered. I think I'm allowed to have a reasonable expectation that it would work.

With all that said, this is for sure not some "grab your pitchforks!" moment. I'm doing this partly to call attention to my own stupidity at putting my faith in one cloud backup provider, and also to highlight that Backblaze's process for restoring could likely be a little bit smoother, given that this is when users would like things to be absolutely foolproof. I remain a fan of Backblaze's CEO who was responsive when support wasn't, and of the company itself which has done great things like open-sourcing its hardware.

I've since been in contact with support again and I will be sure to update my post once the matters are resolved.

The part that doesn't make sense right now is that Backblaze has been around for several years, and if they had some kind of infrastructural issue with transmitting large amounts of data, I'd expect this not to be the first such case to come across my news feed. (BB has been featured on HN a handful of times -- no reports that I know of so far with retrieving data from them.)

With all due respect to your expertise, in at least 9 out of 10 cases where I've encountered something similar to this, it's been a problem on the client's side of the link -- bad traffic shaping by the ISP, faulty modem, glitchy router or switch -- and those often don't show up in speed tests or media streaming or web browsing.

I have an idea that would satisfy my curiosity, if you're willing: how about renting a VPS on DigitalOcean (who charge in small increments), with enough storage for zipped file size + unzipped archive size, and then see if you can download the archive from Backblaze to the VPS and unzip it on the VPS? See e.g. http://victorwyee.com/shell/getting-backblaze-restores-via-c...

If it works, you can rsync over ssh. If it doesn't work, then I'll buy that Backblaze has got a problem.

> "This is why I used Backblaze's advertised downloader application -- I got the impression that it would provide better stability, checking, etc. to ensure that the zip file did not get corrupted."

I strongly suspect that their downloader just implements http resume in some slightly brain-damaged way.

> "...my point is that I pay them so that I can restore my files conveniently, not so that I can be upsold to a $189 drive."

Ah.

You're paying them $5/month to store your data. That's it. It's a bit of a nit to pick, but it's important: for $5/month, they're not guaranteeing that you can download your data. So providing alternatives to downloading is not an "upsell" (especially at those prices).