281–290 of 300 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The storage on the network is being subsidized to the tune of $20 million per month, which means there's a massive oversupply of storage and nobody buying it, hence very cheap prices.
Who is doing the subsidizing?
I wrote Backblaze and said "I would pay to ship you a drive so I don't have to upload 500GB over my consumer internet. That is my biggest pain point." and then the customer service rep replied that it wouldn't be a good business model to do that. Why is the customer service rep making these decisions? Just forward the email to your biz dev team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a linux user, i have just setup my own backup solution to backblaze using Rclone and their S3 compatible storage.
Which is fine and all, but then you're paying per gb/month. Depending on how much you want to back up, it can cost you a lot more than the personal plan.
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All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. No, not everybody does, which is why they have to have signs saying you can't take food home. Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. "Unlimited backup (of data stored on the internal stor…
> they have to have signs saying you can't take food home I don't understand how it's possible to misunderstand all-you-can-eat buffets. The words correctly describe the service: you can eat there until you're literally full. There is no "unlimited" anywhere. Those people must be acting in bad faith. > There's a "reasonable person" standard here It's perfectly reasonable to assume unlimited really means unlimited and…
No-one is being "severely disadvantaged". The unsophisticated users backing up their regular PCs are getting exactly what they paid for - a backup of their PC without having to even know what a terabyte is - and the /r/datahoarder types with a rack of JBODs full of every TV series ever made knew full well that they weren't going to get away with backing that up on a $7/month consumer single PC plan. In the event that one among the latter really was that credulous, sure, give 'em their 7 bucks back and now they're square.
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Hey Robbie- I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer. The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it. -- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com
Is there a reason there’s a short limit on how long my Backblaze password can be? That’s what put me off using it before, because who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using if it can’t handle what my email provider is able to handle, all the while securing more sensitive data ;)
The current limit is 50 characters. There are reasons we don't let it get super long like 2,000 characters but we could easily double or triple the maximum length it if it was requested. Is there a number of characters you have in mind? I found a chart here: https://i.imgur.com/trR2u8g.jpg that says a randomly generated 17 character password would take 93 trillion years to crack. The chart doesn't even go up to 50 characters. Backblaze also supports 2-factor authentication via SMS or Google Authenticator codes which personally I would highly recommend to customers also.
> who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using
Backblaze has two product lines: "Backblaze Backup" where we wrote the app that encrypts data on your laptop before uploading into our storage cloud, and "Backblaze B2" where you use any third party tool (or write your own) so the encryption in that case is all under your control. You can see a list of 3rd party tools here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html (make sure you scroll down). There are little pictures of penguins by the software that supports Linux, little pictures of an apple for software that support Macintosh, and a little Window icon for the software that support Windows.
For "Backblaze Backup", we use a well known design where we use symmetric AES-128 to encrypt the file, but each file is encrypted with a different AES-128 key, and that key and an Initialization Vector (IV) is then encrypted by a 2048 bit RSA public/private key. You can read about the encryption flow we use in this blog post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-make-strong-encryption...
Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…
Brian is the man. Love his web page on dutch bikes in Amsterdam. Inspired me to get a real dutch bike and put 30k miles on it! https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/
Ha! That's my half second of viral fame right there.
You have no idea how blindly I stumbled into making that webpage. I haven't ridden bicycles more than a handful of times since college, and something possessed me to start taking photo after photo of bicycles without much thought. I was just travelling home from Europe to the USA with a short layover in Amsterdam when I took them. When I got home I stared at this unorganized pile of photos of bicycles and almost deleted them. I honestly thought nobody would ever, in a million years, care about a webpage about bicycles. I blasted that web page out in one continuous stream of tongue in cheek caffeine fueled frenzy, threw it up live, and went to bed.
About 3 or 4 months later my website couldn't serve enough pages to keep up with the load. I called my ISP and they said, "looks legit", I said "not possible, my website is at the ass end of the internet, nobody ever goes there". I bought an analytics package from them just to prove them wrong. All the traffic was to one web page: "Amsterdam Bicycles". A page about bicycles. (sigh)
Totally by accident, without intending to or knowing what I was doing, I stumbled upon several groups of people that are just PASSIONATE about bicycles. First of all, unknown to me there are people that are really, really into bicycles. They have mailing lists, they have websites. Who would have known?
But the group that just floored me was the Dutch people themselves. They are beyond passionate about bicycles, and there is a rich and amazing history behind it. For example, in World War 2 the Germans confiscated all the Dutch bicycles, and there is literally still a saying (in Dutch) that loosely translates to "I want my bicycle back" as an inside joke about still being resentful about this affront. And overlay that with the Dutch actually seem to have a great sense of humor and sense of self, and don't mind it if somebody pokes a little fun at them and they laugh right along. I wasn't disrespectful and mostly just expressed confusion over the situation which was completely honest at the time. So the city of Amsterdam sent me a T-shirt, a bicycle bell, and a bicycle light, and clippings from local newspapers about my silly web page. They were just so over the top great about it.
And the best part was the people from the photos reached out to me, like the woman pedaling here: https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pp9b_amsterdam_b... contacted me. In the caption for that photo I asked "Why is the guy riding, and the woman pedaling?" The answer is this: the owner of the bicycle always pedals. OF COURSE I offered to take the photo down if she wanted and she said, "Are you kidding, I love it!"
Well, I'd rather be lucky than good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't expect it to be free. But they keep raising the prices, and don't let longtime customers take advantage and extend. And on top of that, their support is terrible. I ended up dropping them for Arq - $140 vs $60. No brainer.
You are literally the exact type of bad customer the parent comment is referring to.
> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!
Anyone who has been following the recent market would only say one thing: Bullish
Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…
I liked Backblaze and paid well in advance. At the time of this issue, something like a year's credit left on my account. I migrated one Macbook Pro to another (the old one had a hardware issue) and followed Backblaze's documentation to ensure the migrated computer was still backing up, taking over the previous backup.
Cue my surprise a couple of months later when I get an email saying my account is unpaid and data will be deleted. After months (literally) of email with Support it turns out the Backblaze documentation was incorrect, and the steps to ensure the migrated computer took over the old backup also created a new, empty backup before taking over the old one (this was part of installing the software.) That backup was never used - it was created as part of installation unknown to me. But the unused, empty backup showed up in the account as unpaid. Despite a year's credit on my account, Backblaze's response was that deleting data for all other backups on the account was their best action.
I couldn't get Support to fix this. I ended up emailing Brian. He forwarded it on to someone who also didn't fix it. It's a remarkably simple problem (delete the unused backup, verify the account status is ok) but once again, Support seemed inactive.
I got desperately tired of emails that had no effect. I'm now buying a local NAS and plan to back it up via rsync.net. I wish them good luck with the IPO, but if you're a decision-maker looking for a backup solution, you have to question if you want to trust a company who's unable or unwilling to fix a straightforward issue, or if you want to trust a backup company whose default response seems to be that they'll delete your data. I don't.
