Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond

Seems like my memory was reduced to "have to give you the key". I'll be more precise in the future.

I used to have my drives encrypted back when TrueCrypt was still a thing. From what I understand I'd lose a bunch of features, like de-duplication or the ability to restore individual files without having to download the entire state of the encrypted container. But maybe my knowledge is outdated... I'd love to read how to set up good local encryption that doesn't conflict with the backup.

Only having to trust Backblaze in the moment of restore is better than no encryption. But when that drive died a month ago I certainly wasn't in the state of mind to make optimal decisions. Setting myself up for such a situation doesn't seem that great, though more routine might have helped. Actually, routine would mean sending my key to Backblaze more often as well.

I'd entrust you to pretty much "archive" my entire digital live. Getting jailed now is less of an issue, but I do worry about two or three regime changes down the line. Especially with demagogues and dictators on the rise seemingly everywhere. People with other backgrounds likely worry less about something like that. But here in germany, especially east germany, we kind of have a messy past in that regard. Right now I do not trust US intelligence to ignore an as awesome treasure trove as countless personal backups. I also do not expect individuals at Backblaze to risk their freedom/livelihood by violating NSL's, if received. I certainly would not.

But yes, at the same time I'd highly value a company taking the extra effort to require me to only trust in what is running on my hardware. And thus I could theoretically audit. Bonus points for making an audit as easy as possible, by e.g. choosing open source or an easy to reverse engineer tech without relying on obfuscation. Though I'd understand this not fitting into / being part of Backblaze's businesses plan.

May I ask why Backblaze doesn't offer client-side decryption? Is it just the design you've chosen and a change not worth the effort? Maybe to somehow prevent abuse? Or it saves a bit of traffic, like in case the encrypted blocks contain additional data that don't need to be restored?

Thanks for your reply, this is what makes HN awesome !

> Your "backup state" has exceeded 4 GBytes, which is unusual, but not unheard of (maybe 2% of our customers right now)

Not to put any extra pressure on you, but given the raw numbers, 2% of your user base affected by this issue sounds like a pretty big deal to me !

> And it is "on the rise" as more and more customers have more data, plus backup for longer and longer with Backblaze.

That's interesting : given that up until now there was no revision history or deleted files retention beyond 30 days, why would my backup state be larger as a customer of many years than if I signed up now, given the same set of files ? Do you keep metadata for all historical file activity even after the files themselves are gone ? Sounds to me more like a backup log than "state" then !

> By the way, Comcast has announced that it literally intends to offer full 1 Gbit/sec service to every last customer in the United States, so another way to go is upgrade your internet for 1 month, then downgrade it later.

I'm not in the US, but I do have pretty good symmetric 5G. Thanks for the advice, 2 weeks might be enough after all (I'll reinstall to reset the clock, for one thing). It's still a significant nuisance in terms of hogging bandwidth and leaving my laptop running 24/7 for days with fans probably going full speed. I just wonder what Backblaze would say to a customer on metered Internet (still common in many places) or simply with a slower uplink (a large part of Europe is still on ADSL/ADSL2 with 25M down / 1M up)

> And it's a fairly straight-forward fix for me to fix that, I just need to get to it. I'm sorry you got bitten by this short-coming, I will get it fixed.

Again, thanks for responding in person, I couldn't have hoped for much better in terms of a technical explanation.

I think I have 21 days left in the backup I want to inherit before the first external disks in it get deleted. I'm actually tempted now to wait a few more days, in case you manage to get this released quickly (especially if it's a server-side fix) :)

Something that could really be improved in situations like these, is that support should have discretion to help out the customer to make up for an issue that's on your side.

For example, putting backup expiration on hold until the bug is fixed (should be really easy actually now that your new offering is implemented : why did they not offer to move me to 1 year retention temporarily ?), issue an additional license so I didn't have to rely on the trial... anything that helps mitigate a problem that's not my fault. Not to mention, throwing in some free months of service for the inconvenience :)