Any plans to restore an encrypted backup without having to send the private key to Backblaze servers?
Looks like yes, but it's not a particularly high priority, based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21205948
Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
121–130 of 130 posts
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thank you. 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 contai…
> May I ask why Backblaze doesn't offer client-side decryption? Kind of a historical accident mostly. When we built the very first product, we just thought we would build a web based restore process, and the ability to view your files online with a web browser, which means you have to hand us the private key ONLY FOR the web session to view your files, and it is only stored in RAM. What followed (12 years ago) was th…
> 1% - 2%
I'm not surprised. Disappointed after getting certainty, but not surprised. Hope you'll get around to it non the less. Will keep an eye out.
Again, much thanks for such a detailed response.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thank you. 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 contai…
> May I ask why Backblaze doesn't offer client-side decryption? Kind of a historical accident mostly. When we built the very first product, we just thought we would build a web based restore process, and the ability to view your files online with a web browser, which means you have to hand us the private key ONLY FOR the web session to view your files, and it is only stored in RAM. What followed (12 years ago) was th…
Strangely enough, I was slightly worried about Backblaze adding features that I knew would cost BackBlaze more until I saw the pricing. The last thing I wanted was for you guys not to be sustainable without venture capital. VC funding rarely leads to a good outcome for customers.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yev here -> yes, under our ToS you need to be a customer in good standing in order for us to provide service. We do want to see your computer ping home every now and again to make sure its running up-to-date and supported versions. The Computer Backup service is a backup, not an archive. If you need to put your data somewhere and have it be there forever until YOU remove it, we recommend our B2 Cloud Storage service…
Thank you for your response. With all due - I'd argue with the statement: "Computer Backup service is a backup, not an archive". It's like saying that banking is a process of sending money to the bank but there is no guarantee that money will be there unless "customer is in good standing". Computer backup is a process (backup) AND storage (archive). Without BOTH of these components in place the customers will be faci…
I think what's at play is definitions of Syncing, Archiving, and Storage (I wrote this up a while ago, but could use a refresh - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/sync-vs-backup-vs-storage/). It's important to know what your services do. In your case it sounds like you want more of an archival storage solution - which you can do with our B2 service. On the computer backup side, we try to be pretty explicit about the 30 day version history (now 1 year and forever is available) - so that customers aren't caught unaware - and if we don't see an external drive or your computer for a while, we'll send a notification alert to try and make sure you know what's going on. We know we'll likely not be the right service for everyone, but we try to good enough for most!
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backup means that if it takes me 6 months to realise that the 2014 finances folder had been accidentally deleted, I can still recover it. I'd love to see BackBlaze offer the option to select "mission critical" folders that have super-long-life (Time Machine-like) version retention. Give everyone a few gigabytes of this for free, charge a premium to increase that space.
Though that sounds tricky to set up all the UI for. For now you can set up a separate backup of that stuff. Set B2 as the backend and you get 10GB free.
Maybe—and the UI could be little more than a script that does exactly what you described.
The point of making it a UI is, first and foremost, to get people thinking about this question. And it gives people the option to acheive what you just described without stumbling upon a post like yours on Hacker News.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into. I'm glad to hear that Backblaze has finally made such an option available. However: > For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. As someone who once almost lost his PGP key an…
What's your criteria for backup? I completely agree that something like RAID is not backup, but 30-60 days seems comparable to other backup services and covers most scenarios. The old-school manual process of swapping a USB drive at work every week/month has the similar retention. The only consumer-facing system I've used with multi-year retention is Time Machine. Every few years it has trouble "verifying" the backup…
> What's your criteria for backup?
Something like Attic, Borg, CrashPlan, Restic, etc, that allow snapshot retention periods, like "1 per year for the last X years, 1 per month for the last X months, one per day for the last X days".
> I completely agree that something like RAID is not backup, but 30-60 days seems comparable to other backup services and covers most scenarios.
That doesn't protect against bitrot. e.g.
1. File is backed up (snapshot A).
2. File is slightly corrupted by bitrot, cosmic ray, etc.
3. File is modified by user, corruption is unnoticed.
4. File is backed up again (snapshot B).
5. "Backup" service deletes snapshot A.
6. User discovers corruption.
7. User looks to restore earlier versions until an uncorrupted one is found.
8. User discovers that all available snapshots were made after corruption happened.
Or replace "file" with "directory" and "bitrot" with "accidental file deletion" and the user still suffers from data loss.
Mirrors are not backups, and a few revolving snapshot slots is effectively a mirror.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HOWEVER, with this new 7.0 release you can pay a little more and increase that retention time to one year, or forever. This was a highly requested feature for the situation you ran into. I'm glad to hear that Backblaze has finally made such an option available. However: > For cost reasons, Backblaze purges the files that you deleted from your local drive after 30 days. As someone who once almost lost his PGP key an…
What you're referring to, I'd call a historical archive, containing many backups. When I think about a backup, I'm thinking in terms of recovering last good state after a drive failure or catastrophic filesystem corruption. I don't tend to think of a backup as implying a deep history unless that part is explicitly stated. That distinction was easier to notice back in the days of backing up to tape or optical discs -…
> you don't expect your collection to retain long-gone files unless it's an ever-growing pile of tapes/discs.
Rule number whatever of backups: Don't discard old backups. Bitrot occurs, and people make mistakes, and newer backups can have flaws that older ones don't, which will go undiscovered until it's too late.
We're not talking about piles of tapes, we're talking about virtually unlimited disk space. State-of-the-art backup software chunks and deduplicates data and stores snapshots of directory trees. For most cases, there's no reason not to keep a subset of old snapshots, and many reasons to keep them.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though that sounds tricky to set up all the UI for. For now you can set up a separate backup of that stuff. Set B2 as the backend and you get 10GB free.
Maybe—and the UI could be little more than a script that does exactly what you described. The point of making it a UI is, first and foremost, to get people thinking about this question. And it gives people the option to acheive what you just described without stumbling upon a post like yours on Hacker News.
A post like mine? But it's your post that has the idea...? The only thing I said about how to make it possible is "separate backup", which anyone can think of in two seconds and is only a hint of a tenth of an explanation. I don't understand.
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#129Are you (BackBlaze) still happily deleting user's backup files if user's computer does not contact BackBlaze servers within some arbitrary time? Yes/No? Source: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-... This is malice. If you are still doing this to your users - your service is a non-starter. Backup service that deletes user's valuable files under some TOS excuse should not exist.
> [...] within some arbitrary time? It's 6 months - and you receive notifications after 14, 21, 28, 60 and 90 days. It should be possible for the backup machine to connect to the backblaze server twice a year. I think it's reasonable.
Is it reasonable to expect that paying recurring fee for backup service is enough to keep my data safe?
Or should I pay for service AND do some time critical technology acrobatics to comply with confusing fine-printed TOS to keep my data safe?
Re: Backblaze 7.0 – Version History and Beyond
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The MacOS market is big enough to support that - they prob manually call out the outliers.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > manually call out the outliers We have never (yet) ejected anybody or asked them to leave for having too much data. What we do request (politely) is that customers with a large amount of data recommend Backblaze Personal Backup to their friends and family with less data to help bring our averages back down.
Oh, hey, thats really nice of you. I'll buy Yev a beer for it.