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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

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Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#111

Post by Freaky »

Osmium wrote: post #68

Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual. Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though, so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup schem…

> I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure

They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES.

I can only assume they do this because migrating would cost them money, and being able to advertise "448 bit encryption" actually sounds like a plus to most people and not the glaring red flag it actually is.

> it seems like their software is still first rate

What, like their backup client that can't actually do restores? It's still all "log in to our website and let us decrypt your data for you" :/

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#112

Post by icelancer »

degenerate wrote: post #39

Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most useful announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead " we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z " -- nice job.

Backblaze generally does this very well with their product offerings and white papers. Would that the rest of the self-absorbed tech community do the same...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#113

Post by mentat »

samstave wrote: post #95
brianwski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5 petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any issues. As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a co…

> we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it. Whats the lead time in your case? In my historic experience doing this regardless of if I was even in MAE-West... cross connects and provisioning were eons in internet time...

It's a pretty different world now, both price and speed-wise.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#114

Post by IanCal »

brianwski wrote: post #82
IanCal wrote: post #30

Great stuff. What's the setup for file permissions? Can I have multiple people writing to the same bucket? Can I restrict deletion & write rules?

Brian from Backblaze here. It's pretty simple for now. You can have as many people reading and writing to the same bucket, but they would all need to share the same credentials. Buckets are either "allPublic" or "allPrivate" (and you can flip them back and forth at any time between those two settings). But that's it at this point. We're actively looking for feedback in this area, so as developers ask us for something…

That makes sense, release and iterate!

Personally I'd like to use some access management, and there's one case that I've not seen solved particularly well (though would appreciate anyone chiming in with things I've missed):

Distinct write and create permissions.

I'd like to be able to grant someone permission to create files but not allow them to modify or delete them later. I end up generally adding this externally.

I think B2 is really close to this, as you've got the file ids for multiple versions, so I can effectively ignore the filenames and use the file ids instead. It'd need a difference between "upload new version" and "delete version" though.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#116

Post by lucb1e »

paimpozhil wrote: post #109
lucb1e wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another Linux user here who would love to use a command line Python tool to backup my data to Backblaze: with Python I can see how my stuff is encrypted. That's the only reason I'm not using Backblaze right now: closed source client. My only interest in B2 is backing up for a lower cost than the ridiculousness of S3: at $0.022/GB, I might as well buy a 3TB hard drive myself, put it at a friend's and push my data ther…

You are ignoring the Electricity/BW costs spent by your friend which would raise your costs I use backuplizard for personal data/photos which works out more like cost of a one 2 TB disk per year to me and to me Its easy to pay it instead of owning disks and worry about them breaking,etc

I did the math properly once, the S3 costs still didn't work out by far. I have a server here at home and an external hard drive for it, so I know how much power it draws. Bandwidth is free, but in the calculation I did assume I would pay for bandwidth.

All in all, it's by far the cheapest option to store it at a friend's. Storage providers could also cheapen things a whole lot by offering reduced redundancy and whatever else it is they do to make it so expensive (glacier storage is also more expensive than the price I got). It's a backup after all, I don't need my backup to have five copies on spinning (versus offline, non-powered) disks. If my backup dies, I'll upload it again...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#119

Post by scott_karana »

jafitc wrote: post #76
budmang wrote: post #4

I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2. Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/ Gleb

Is it me or there's no mention of durability? Is this only for noncritical, reproducible data as S3 reduced redundancy?

Yeah, I'm really concerned about this too. I assume it's fairly good storage if they're dogfooding this for their backup product, but explicit is better than expectations in this case :)

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#120

Post by Osmium »

Freaky wrote: post #111
Osmium wrote: post #68

Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual. Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though, so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup schem…

> I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES. I can only assume they do this because migrating would cost them money, and being able to advertise "448 bit encryption" actually sounds like a plus to most people and not the g…

> They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES.

Not defending it, because I know it's old and there are weaknesses, but aren't Blowfish and 3DES both still technically secure? This is a genuine question. It was my understanding that if implemented correctly, with a random key etc., that neither has been formally broken. 3DES is 2^112 no? which is still not practically accessible by brute force. Not that this means anyone should use them, of course, AES is a standard for a reason...

As you say, I had just assumed the migration cost was too high to move to something newer, but I don't think it necessarily means data stored there is unsafe?

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