221–230 of 237 posts
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Now with B2 we immediately support Linux and provide a client for it out of the box (written in python). Granted, it is only a command line interface so give us a little time to polish it up and add some features.
Get me access to the private beta and you'll have a ruby gem very quickly. kyle@kyledrake.net
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Ok, so let's say you forget to pay your Glacier bill because the IT guy left and the credit card changed and the alert emails go nowhere. Bye-Bye-Glacier! No payment, no customer data, Amazon might delete your data due to a tiny administrative screwup. My point stands: if you don't mind losing your data, store it in one vendor. But if you would REALLY lose your business and put 10 people out of work if the data is lo…
But... let's say you have three accounts with three storage companies. Now let's say you outsource the management of those accounts through one company... or even, equivalently, delegate it to a subsidiary or partner of your company. And then you accidentally stop paying them , or they can't requisition the budget necessary to pay the providers, or whatever. Now you're still stuck, even though you're nominally doing…
Do you have a solution in mind for the case of a company where email is going to /dev/null and nobody is reading the output of their cron jobs?
I mean, if I can't contact someone, it doesn't really matter if I wait a week or a month...
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But... let's say you have three accounts with three storage companies. Now let's say you outsource the management of those accounts through one company... or even, equivalently, delegate it to a subsidiary or partner of your company. And then you accidentally stop paying them , or they can't requisition the budget necessary to pay the providers, or whatever. Now you're still stuck, even though you're nominally doing…
7 days is probably reasonable in the case where there's an active IT staff who will notice when, say, servers stop backing up. But if nobody's watching for that... Do you have a solution in mind for the case of a company where email is going to /dev/null and nobody is reading the output of their cron jobs? I mean, if I can't contact someone, it doesn't really matter if I wait a week or a month...
• Ask people to provide optional contact information for an "executor of their estate"—a person who can make decisions about what happens to their data on their behalf if they cannot be reached.
• Ask people for a secondary credit card that can be charged as a backup: specifically, suggest that this be the personal card of Someone Important in the company, who will be likely to notice the charge and flip out.
• Ask for a flat-fee deposit to enable a secondary "long-term storage, no uploads, no monthly billing" mode of usage. Make it enough money to be motivating when you imagine just schlepping this hunk of data around for the rest of your life. If the user has paid this deposit, and their regular card gets declined, switch them to this mode and consume the deposit. If they close their account, refund the deposit if it hasn't been consumed.
And so forth.
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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 :)
Also, we are the only company we know of that releases our drive failure rates. We release them quarterly, here is the most recent failure analysis: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-...
And for the record Backblaze only has one datacenter. This bothers some customers deeply so if it is a show stopper definitely don't use Backblaze B2. We just want to be transparent about what we do and what we don't do. One idea is you could use B2 as a primary copy of the data, and make another copy into Amazon Glacier in case the Backblaze datacenter is hit by a meteor (or a terrorist attack or an airplane crashes into it).
Oh, I said this elsewhere but I have a lot of confidence we won't lose your data, we've been perfecting that for 8 years. What Backblaze DOESN'T have much experience in is serving up viral videos and the CDN (Content Delivery) layer. I'm looking forward to that layer, I think it will be fun to polish, but especially over the next few months of invite only beta anybody using B2 needs to be able to work with us to get the kinks worked out.
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It is certainly interesting how OVH undercuts the competition by quite a large margin in everything. We use them for dedicated servers, but I wonder why they're not as well known as AWS...
For me, there's a combination of reasons. First, they weren't in North America until recently. Having a server in France means high ping times for me and latency for the vast majority of my visitors. OVH started operations in Québec in 2013. So they've had less than three years to establish themselves. EC2 is 9 years old. Second, it's hard to figure out what to buy. With EC2, they're all Xen instances and you decide…
Their current "10 days" delivery time is quite unfortunate, but I believe that's explained from the fact that they just started upgrading all their machines to DDR4 (and unfortunately, as I've been hit with it, a price increase for dedicated servers still on DDR3).
In the past I have used their 120 seconds delivery time extensively, but it has a few problems: 1. You have to verify your account first. 2. That's only guaranteed for one single server, try ordering 20+ of their top of line servers and it'll take a few days to get all of them.
Their control panel is also very confusing and feels very sluggish, and I'm talking about the one they released quite recently.
They also have tons of country specific domains (perhaps for tax reasons?).
They're pretty great on hardware, but I've experienced a bit of downtime with them, but as long as you have enough redundancy, you should be fine. I'm hosting game servers in there, with an automatic fallback to some cloud providers if those go down, so I'm not too worried about that. Still, seeing some servers randomly lose connectivity like this: http://i.imgur.com/9uMOHnH.png doesn't inspire confidence.
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Apparently, SHA-1 is pretty slow compared to others, about 20x slower than the fastest hash algorithms out there. https://github.com/Cyan4973/xxHash You would think, that if it's just being used as a checksum, anything that passes https://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/SMHasher with high marks would be sufficient.
Why would you want 'just' a checksum? I want something I can rely on. If I have to dedicate half a core per gbps of internet-crossing upload, that's not a big deal.
Hi Robert,
I don’t know whether or not Arq will be integrated with B2.
- Stefan
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Why would you want 'just' a checksum? I want something I can rely on. If I have to dedicate half a core per gbps of internet-crossing upload, that's not a big deal.
The purpose here is not to secure your data against an attacker (that's what TLS is for), or even against errors in transmission (as others have noted, TLS has you covered there as well) - you need something simple and inexpensive to secure against errors in hardware/memory before/after it enters that pipeline. While you shouldn't under-solve a problem, there are real costs to over-solving the problem as well.
For example, I might have md5-colliding files on my hard drive somewhere, that someone else made as a proof of concept. I honestly don't know. But I would worry about using a storage system that depends on md5, because what if it deduplicates without checking every byte?
For the same reason that UTF-16 has encouraged so many broken implementations, at least in a pre-emoji world, it's a bad idea to almost but not quite support convenient features. Either clearly don't support something, or fully support it.
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Up to the first 4 TBytes it is only $189 which includes you keeping the hard drive. I'll make it even better - if you ship us back the hard drive within 30 days (you pay return shipping) we'll refund the entire $189. The info on the program is published here: https://help.backblaze.com/entries/67512970-How-to-order-a-r...
Thanks for the information, I didn't know those drives were refundable! I was always turned off by having to download a huge zip file from backblaze when I wanted to restore something, but this actually sounds really nice of you guys for large datasets.
