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Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

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Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#101

Post by atYevP »

brianwski wrote: post #66
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #12

Love these articles! Thanks for writing it. Must feel so good to buy that many HDDs at once...something really gratifying about that.

As the guy who signs the check, "gratifying" isn't quite the right word. :-) Some stress, some amazement that everything got this large. When we started 10 years ago, we could only afford to rent a quarter of one cabinet at the datacenter at 365 Main Street, San Francisco. We had "right of first refusal" on the rest of the cabinet we occupied. We could pile all of the hard drives ever deployed in that cabinet on my k…

Yes, something taking 10 years to sneak up on you is very sneaky.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#102

Post by atYevP »

niftich wrote: post #36
chiph wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've talked about this before -- despite orders like this, they're still not a big enough customer to be on the manufacturer's radar. So they're ordering from a middle-man. Back during the hard-drive crisis after the tidal wave that disrupted production ... they were buying from anyone that had drives to sell, including people going into their local big-box store to source drives.

Link to their blog post on mad dashes to Costco after the floods [1]. It's an engaging read. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

Yev here -> it was a pain to drive around the Bay, let me tell you :P

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#103

Post by BillinghamJ »

elfchief wrote: post #89
brianwski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll answer these in reverse order: > 2. Why are zip files being created? We actually offer two forms of restore: A) Zip File Download, and B) External USB Hard Drive FedEx'ed to your home. In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to A…

I would really like #2 to have the option of sending encrypted files on disk or zip, and y'all providing a client that will decrypt them using my passphrase, locally. Nothing personal, but I really don't want y'all seeing my data, even if I need to restore. (context: I've been a Backblaze user for years and love the hell out of you. I've never really thought of how the restore would work with my encrypted data, thoug…

Yeah, I don’t see how they would impact usability in any way. Just have the client software perform the decryption process.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#104

Post by BillinghamJ »

brianwski wrote: post #68
monochromatic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, thanks for the response. (4 days and counting still seems excessive though.)

Definitely seems excessive. We'll look into it. There are some things that can affect it. We have a "pool" of restore servers that do this task. The oldest ones in the pool are 9 year old computers with slow hard drives. The newest restore servers are built on SSDs and are blazingly fast and have newer processors. So based on which restore server was assigned the task, plus other things like the size of each file can…

Presumably you mean faster than the non-hardware solution you were working on?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#105

Post by BillinghamJ »

comboy wrote: post #95
jstrassburg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second on the linux client. I have a linux machine with a zfs volume that I've been backing up to crashplan. Since they've announced they're dumping their consumer market I have no cost-effective place to go. Most likely, I'll be more picky about my backups and use S3 life-cycled to Glacier.

> Since they've announced they're dumping their consumer market Could you link some source? I'm also backing up my linux machines with them and would prefer to plan ahead.

They have emailed a few times about it.

Some info here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/23/crashplan_ends_cons...

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#106

Post by unixhero »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #55
atYevP wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's definitely not normal, how much data/files do you have (are you doing a .zip or a USB restore)? We're currently QAing a dramatic increase to the restores, but right now only available internally until we are confident in it. In the mean time though you can download mission-critical files in smaller-sized restored, that might help you get up and running faster while the mega-restore c…

It’s nearly 500GB of data. Email me Hn strapr.com if you want more details

Which is nothing

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#107

Post by ensignavenger »

linsomniac wrote: post #32

I've watched Backblaze closely, and I love their detailed reports of drive stats. I've always been curious about their choices of manufacturers though. In my past I found that Hitachi/HGST drives were far more reliable than others. We had a couple people doing hardware and software support on ~120 machines, and hard drive replacements were expensive (in man-hours) for us, so whenever possible we got Hitachi drives. T…

The last I heard, I understood that Backblaze doesn't go around replacing single drives that fail in a pod, rather, their software marks that drive bad and only once a certain percentage of the capacity of the entire pod is gone, do they yank it our and rebuild the pod. That probably helps a lot versus an environment where had to have technicians replacing single drive failures randomly throughout your data center.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#108

Post by infogulch »

elfchief wrote: post #89
brianwski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll answer these in reverse order: > 2. Why are zip files being created? We actually offer two forms of restore: A) Zip File Download, and B) External USB Hard Drive FedEx'ed to your home. In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to A…

I would really like #2 to have the option of sending encrypted files on disk or zip, and y'all providing a client that will decrypt them using my passphrase, locally. Nothing personal, but I really don't want y'all seeing my data, even if I need to restore. (context: I've been a Backblaze user for years and love the hell out of you. I've never really thought of how the restore would work with my encrypted data, thoug…

This would be the ideal situation. It would require the capability for the desktop application to be able to restore encrypted data from a USB drive, but it would be a good midpoint between #2 and #4 that I think many security-conscious users would find acceptable.

Bonus points for open sourcing a tiny "backblaze decrypter" command line utility that can do this manually. Though maybe that's a stretch.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#109

Post by godzillabrennus »

e40 wrote: post #94
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a Mac Pro Mid-2010 workstation with a RAID 5 Array configured to have a hot spare for redundancy. Then I had a locally attached hard drive for time machine backups + BackBlaze + a hosted repo for the work I do + I use a third party encrypted cloud file sharing service for the most important documents. The problem started when I decided to upgrade to High Sierra. The upgrade was catastrophic for this configurati…

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people upgrade to new operating systems so quickly. I never upgrade my macOS until x.x.4, but I prefer x.x.5. I'm on 10.11.6 because 1) it works perfectly, and 2) Karabiner doesn't work on 10.12.

I routinely help others with operating system upgrades in my day to day so out of necessity I upgrade as soon as a general release becomes available. It's also why I have multiple layers of backups for my data.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#110

Post by explainplease »

brianwski wrote: post #80
explainplease wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is confusing and concerning to me as a potential customer. Having used CrashPlan and other proprietary and FOSS backup software, I don't understand this description of how restoration works with Backblaze. 1. Why is the data being decrypted server-side instead of client-side? The server should be sending the encrypted data to the client, and the password should never leave the client machine. 2. Why are zip file…

I'll answer these in reverse order: > 2. Why are zip files being created? We actually offer two forms of restore: A) Zip File Download, and B) External USB Hard Drive FedEx'ed to your home. In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to A…

Thanks for your detailed answer!

> In the case of the Zip file download, we chose the format of zip because both Mac and PC (the most common desktops) natively understand it with no additional software needed. In other words, if you just lost your computer, go to ANY COMPUTER ANYWHERE and you can fetch your files with a web browser. Zip preserves the file hierarchy and the last modified time, so it's "pretty good".

Security issues aside, from a space and time perspective, that's much less convenient for both you and me: it takes time and space for you to prepare the zip file, and space and time for me to save it and extract it. It would be better to install a simple client and restore the files directly into a directory. In the case of a few files, it doesn't matter much, but in the case of gigs of files, it definitely becomes a problem.

Is there any chance of you implementing a more CrashPlan-like restore option in the future?

> Longer Answer: To clarify, Backblaze produces four different products/modes for different customers with different needs and requirements. We want customers to choose what is appropriate for them. One size does not fit all:

I wish this explanation were on the Backblaze web site, because this makes it very clear. :)

Is there any chance of implementing a hybrid of #2 and #4, a client-based, zero-knowledge option? i.e. basically, CrashPlan's client in the private-key mode.

If Backblaze were to implement this, and add a Linux client, I'd seriously consider switching.

Thanks for your time.

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