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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

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Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#161

Post by EvanAnderson »

brianwski wrote: post #137
bedros wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form. Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all that data I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google. Another question, what's the max number of buckets ca…

> Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form. Yes. In our traditional 8 year old product line of online backup, you can order a restore on an external USB hard drive for $189 (you keep the hard drive, and the cost includes world wide shipping). We FedEx the restore to you anywhere in the world. (We ship to Europe all the time, but add an EXTRA 24 hours for that to arrive.) Oh, if you only h…

I'm really glad to hear this. I haven't kept up w/ Backblaze, other than to read blog posts on hard drive reliability and the storage pod designs. This comment made your services vastly more interesting to me, and much more applicable to my Customers. Gonna go read about your product offerings now.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#162

Post by PhantomGremlin »

acdha wrote: post #14
budmang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brianwski below shares a good link...but you make a good point jrnkntl that we should talk more about it on the site. We'll plan to add more content around that on the Why B2 page. Thanks!

Please go into detail about how failures are detected and handled – e.g. how often is the archive scrubbed, will bitrot be detected on access, etc. Those details are really important for comparing services.

This is a very important point. A lot of these products gloss over those "details". Because the numbers might not look good.

E.g. on B2 if you wanted to retrieve data to do your own scrub/validation it would cost you the equivalent of 10 months of storage just to do one retrieval: $0.005/GB/month to store, $0.05/GB to download.

Google Cloud Storage Nearline has the same problem: $0.01/GB to store, $0.12/GB for egress. But at least in this case you can egress for free to Compute Engine, so you would only need to pay $0.01/GB for retrieval.

So it's not possible (at reasonable cost) to do your own validation of what's stored in B2. In Google's case, as long as you're willing to use their cloud computers, validating your data once a month doubles your cost.

In conclusion, you're trusting the vendors to handle failures, it's very expensive to check your data yourself.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#163

Post by tedunangst »

Osmium wrote: post #120
Freaky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The 64 bit block size is a (minor) problem if you're storing lots of data because you start seeing duplicates.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#164

Post by dragontamer »

Freaky wrote: post #128
Osmium wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, but it's not exactly putting them in a good light is it? Dressing up obsolete stuff as state of the art "same as your bank uses", while either being unwilling or unable to migrate to something more era-appropriate. Calls into question their competence, their honesty and their architecture all at once.

Wait, what about Blowfish is insecure? BCrypt is built on top of Blowfish.

Blowfish supports key-lengths up to 448-bits. And I've never heard of a single criticism of the function. Its just kinda... less used than Rijndael because it didn't "officially" win the contest. But otherwise, it is a fine function.

EDIT: Confused Twofish with Blowfish in the AES finalists.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#165

Post by khc »

daemoned wrote: post #139
jhardcastle wrote: post #37

Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.

AltaVault sounds like the thing your looking for. http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection-software/altava...

AltaVault is a backup target, but not a backup product that the OP was likely asking for. But many companies use products like Arq, BackupExec, or NetBackup in combination with AltaVault to achieve what the OP described.

Disclaimer: I worked on the predecessor to AltaVault at Riverbed

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#167

Post by brianwski »

2bluesc wrote: post #104
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

> Would love to hear ... what you might do with B2. B2 finally creates an option for Linux users to use BackBlaze for back-up (at minimum) at work and at home. I look forward to that.

A python command line tool that should work on Linux to send folders to B2 is available for download here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/quick_command_line.html

CAVEAT (PLEASE READ): this does NOT encrypt data yet!! This is just a quick technology demonstration, it isn't a polished backup client. Give us another month for that...

We expect Linux servers (and desktops) to make up a significant percentage of the things communicating to B2, so you can expect a lot more support than you have been getting from the traditional Backblaze Online Backup product line.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#168

Post by kyledrake »

falsestprophet wrote: post #17

For context, OVH offers object storage with 3x replication for $.01/GB [1]. [1] https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml

I like this, but I've gotten mixed messages from the people running it. I tried to email them asking if they're actually working on the project and didn't get a response. I've also heard that they be migrating this to "OVH Public Cloud", which is a service that isn't available yet.

I like this offering, but I'm not getting good signals on it's seriousness. It may be something they're going to sunset soon. I would need some reassurance as to what's going on here.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#169

Post by hobs »

brianwski wrote: post #12
ComputerGuru wrote: post #10

In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth. There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as…

> as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled Brian from Backblaze here: no it is not throttled (by us). If you only have a 10 Mbit/sec upload capacity you are throttled by your ISP. Also make sure you visit our "Performance" tab in the online backup client and tweak a few settings, like increase the number of threads.

When I was a customer of BB I noticed no issue with the uploads, but actually when I had a flood and my hardware was destroyed, redownloading all my information was order of magnitudes slower.

I tried from multiple physical locations but I could not increase my downloads past 1-2mbps, and for TB of data, that seemed like it was throttled by BB considering I was easily uploading 20mbps.

I contacted BB support and they ignored me, so I switched to a competing services and have had no issues ever since.

This really made me sad because BB's blog is amazing and their tech is really cool, but when you see people saying "its throttled" its because of real experiences out there, and not just ones limited to an ISP issue.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#170

Post by inopinatus »

jagger27 wrote: post #99
brianwski wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download your data to analyze it. What I'd really like…

Amazon might not be open to it, but I would bet Digital Ocean would be.

I would rate the likelihood of AWS offering free, multi-path, multi-Tbps connectivity into their AZs to a competitor to be effectively nil.

If the alternative cloud ecosystem wants to compete effectively against AWS, it desperately needs a more sophisticated authorization scheme. Don't forget that IAM/STS is a major enabling factor in applications integration of EC2 and S3.

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