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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

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Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#61

Post by gamegoblin »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
gamegoblin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source that all other regions are "one datacenter"? All I could find on the S3 FAQ says "your objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities." which seems to contradict the "one datacenter" claim. Also, do you have a source that us-east-1 is geo-redundant between Virginia and Oregon? That was not my understanding of how it worked.

AWS considers multiple facilities to be separate AZs in the same region. If you want multi region durability (besides us-east-1), you need cross region replication enabled (from the same FAQ you read). "You specify a region when you create your Amazon S3 bucket. Within that region, your objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities. Please refer to Regional Products and Services for de…

I'm familiar with CRR.

I asked for sources about your "one datacenter" claim. Just because several facilities are in the same geographic region does not mean they are the same datacenter.

Just because something is bicoastal does not mean your data is replicated on both coasts. It could also mean that your data is stored on either the west or the east coast.

I would have trouble believing they store twice the data as their other regions but charge the same (actually a bit less!).

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#62

Post by thoughtpalette »

brianwski wrote: post #21
thoughtpalette wrote: post #18

Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets? Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket? Just curious as to why I would migrate from S3 for FE assets to Backblaze.

Yes! RIGHT NOW (during beta) we don't have the top level folder feature yet, the URLs all come from https:://f001.backblaze.com type of URLs. But this is one of my favorite uses (I have a private website I plan to move over) and we'll definitely be adding this feature soon.

Wicked! Time to start writing all those gulp-backblaze upload scripts!

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#63

Post by skrause »

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.

Arq has a Windows version now and they support many different storages targets: https://www.arqbackup.com/

I hope they add B2 support at some point.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#64

Post by [deleted] »

gamegoblin wrote: post #61
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS considers multiple facilities to be separate AZs in the same region. If you want multi region durability (besides us-east-1), you need cross region replication enabled (from the same FAQ you read). "You specify a region when you create your Amazon S3 bucket. Within that region, your objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities. Please refer to Regional Products and Services for de…

I'm familiar with CRR. I asked for sources about your "one datacenter" claim. Just because several facilities are in the same geographic region does not mean they are the same datacenter. Just because something is bicoastal does not mean your data is replicated on both coasts. It could also mean that your data is stored on either the west or the east coast. I would have trouble believing they store twice the data as…

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#65

Post by mentat »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #60
BillinghamJ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect on almost all points. All AWS AZs are physically separated facilities with redundancy on all their infrastructure, although they're obviously in the same general area. us-east-1 is not geo-redundant. It is entirely on the east-coast, as the name suggests. Although S3 does have geo-redundancy in all regions. You may have been thinking of "US Standard", but it is the same as "us-east-1". http://docs.a…

> This is a feature for EU and US-West. US Standard is bi-coastal and doesn’t have read-after-write consistency. Quote from Jeff Barr @ AWS: http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write-consistenc... .

Their documentation is really inconsistent on this...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#66

Post by DinkyG »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #54
DinkyG wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. If you look for news articles about Amazon constructing data centers or buying facilities you'll notice that they have multiple data center facilities in each region.

Have a citation? My data is directly from AWS docs and speaking with AWS staff.

The docs you quoted specifically call out "multiple facilities".

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#67

Post by graniter »

The price is being heralded as the thing to get excited about, but I'm also very concerned about the security and availability of my data. I suppose those details are somewhere, but they're not in this article which is quite lengthy.

I would like to know more of the implementation of this and more information on policies to protect access to my data. And I would like to know where the data is stored. I suppose I got read the manual, but maybe some info tidbits could be included in the announcement.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#68

Post by Osmium »

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 scheme is, for example (though it seems pretty simple - https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt). I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure. It's probably good enough for my use, given that I'm not storing state secrets or anything, but it's still a little unsettling to 'lose control' of one's data.

From Backblaze's point of view, I guess this is either smart (diversifying themselves–people can use other backup software if they like, and Backblaze still profits) or less smart (turning themselves into a commodity), but it seems like their software is still first rate, so I guess it'll work for them.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

#69

Post by brianwski »

devit wrote: post #56

Finally some more reasonable prices in this space. Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.

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 is a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.

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