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Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

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Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#91

Post by godzillabrennus »

woolvalley wrote: post #87
godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

This is why you always want the onsite & offsite backup, because offsite cloud backups will always be fairly slow to fully restore. I use a local NAS to achieve automatic onsite backups myself. It's part of the 3-2-1 backup rule.

I had a Mac Pro Mid-2010 workstation with a RAID 5 Array configured to have a hot spare for redundancy. Then I had a locally attached hard drive for time machine backups + BackBlaze + a hosted repo for the work I do + I use a third party encrypted cloud file sharing service for the most important documents.

The problem started when I decided to upgrade to High Sierra. The upgrade was catastrophic for this configuration of Mac Pro. I have been on the horn with an Apple Senior Advisor within Apple Enterprise Support who has escalated my specific issues to Apple Engineering. I decided to roll back but in the process of restoring the machine from the time machine backup the locally attached drive failed.

Apple has yet to tell me if they will even support the Apple RAID controller even though this version of the Mac Pro is listed as compatible. In the meantime I need to get back up and running. This is why I pay for a cloud backup in addition to having a local backup.

Fortunately, I also have a MacBook Pro laptop that I keep a duplicate copy of some of the data on.

My productivity will not take a hit.

It's just that most people are not me and it seems like it should not take more than four days to create a restore so that I can download my data.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#92

Post by MattSteelblade »

dzdt wrote: post #70
atYevP wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We have relationships with manufacturers but don't directly buy from them (yet - fingers-crossed). It really is a combination of price/reliability. At our scale we can afford slightly higher failure rates if it means less expensive drives, so our #1 data point for purchases is the cost per gigabyte. After that we do look at failure rates, but unless it's something wildly out of "normal" we…

If a 10's of petabytes isn't enough scale to talk to manufacturers directly, I wonder what is!

After the order mentioned in the article, I wonder if it will be. Since they mention a mix of 10 an 12 TB hard drives, we can assume the order was for around 9000 drives. At a cost of $0.03/GB (not taking into account shipping or taxes), you're looking at a 3 million dollar order.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#93

Post by atYevP »

burnte wrote: post #75
biomene wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you reckon the increase in restores has anything to do with APFS? I also lost my computer and Time Machine this week after upgrading to High Sierra, had to restore from backblaze. Btw, unlike parent comment, I had a great experience with the restore and couldn't be happier with the decision to go with backblaze.

HE means they're QA testing a new method of restoring that will dramatically increase restore speed, not that there's a sudden uptick in restores. It's unclearly written, I had to read it twice before I got it.

Sorry - yes, you're correct!

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#94

Post by e40 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #91
woolvalley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you always want the onsite & offsite backup, because offsite cloud backups will always be fairly slow to fully restore. I use a local NAS to achieve automatic onsite backups myself. It's part of the 3-2-1 backup rule.

I had a Mac Pro Mid-2010 workstation with a RAID 5 Array configured to have a hot spare for redundancy. Then I had a locally attached hard drive for time machine backups + BackBlaze + a hosted repo for the work I do + I use a third party encrypted cloud file sharing service for the most important documents. The problem started when I decided to upgrade to High Sierra. The upgrade was catastrophic for this configurati…

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people upgrade to new operating systems so quickly. I never upgrade my macOS until x.x.4, but I prefer x.x.5. I'm on 10.11.6 because 1) it works perfectly, and 2) Karabiner doesn't work on 10.12.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#95

Post by comboy »

jstrassburg wrote: post #67
ericfrederich wrote: post #20

I love the articles from Backblaze. I enjoy them publishing the failure rates of drives and anything else on the blog. Two things missing from them in my opinion 1) a Linux client and 2) a second location I guess I could get away without a Linux client if there was an unRAID plugin for B2.

Second on the linux client. I have a linux machine with a zfs volume that I've been backing up to crashplan. Since they've announced they're dumping their consumer market I have no cost-effective place to go. Most likely, I'll be more picky about my backups and use S3 life-cycled to Glacier.

> Since they've announced they're dumping their consumer market

Could you link some source? I'm also backing up my linux machines with them and would prefer to plan ahead.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#96

Post by giobox »

086421357909764 wrote: post #90
giobox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 plus rclone works well, but for many it's potentially significantly more expensive than the standard "all you can eat" $5 a month plan. In my case B2 would workout at roughly 4x the monthly cost and that's before factoring in the fact B2 charges for downloads as well as uploads. An official Linux client would be significantly better value.

As they've said though, the usage of most linux users isn't on par with Windows / Mac users. They simply would crush themselves with people attempting to backup 200TB nas devices for $5.00 a month. If you want any perspective on how crazy the fringes are with data storage and how they impact providers (such as amazon, google, backblaze, etc.) simply read the stories on reddit /r/datahoarder and you'll quickly see why…

Very small numbers of people already do this on Mac/Windows using tricks like mouting the NAS as an iSCSI device to backup absurd amounts on the $5 plan. The business model is clearly that the legions of small users subsidize the "whales" and Linux desktops are a drop in the ocean vs the Windows/Mac world too. Do you have a source for where Backblaze claimed the usage of most Linux users isn't on par?

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#97

Post by x4d66a5ce »

ac29 wrote: post #81
x4d66a5ce wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took the GP's remark about how he "went with s3 as s3cmd had a path of least resistance to storing backups" to mean that he considered B2 but opted for S3 since the latter offers a backup utility, but the former supports neither a "native" (e.g., git or rsync over SSH) backup interface, nor does it have a Linux client—the approach for backup on B2 from desktop Linux is to roll your own backup solution or use somebo…

rsync.net is 18x as expensive as B2. Have you ever used rclone? Its surprisingly good, though might not be a perfect replacement for rsync, depending on your usage.

> rsync.net is 18x as expensive as B2

I'm aware, but B2 is not the reference point. He said he went with S3, so that's what we're comparing to. I.e., if S3's prices are palatable, then rsync.net might be, too.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#98

Post by atYevP »

brianwski wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Or is every pod constantly in use? Would it help if smart algorithms repartition the data on storage pods, to optimize power use?

Brian from Backblaze here. > Have you ever computed how much power you would save if you turned them off when not needed? Electrical power is a gigantic part of our datacenter bill (like 60%). However, we cannot really ever turn off the hard drives. If they were powered down, it would take too long to retrieve data. It would be like Amazon Glacier where it can take 15 minutes to get a single image back. > is every po…

Yev here -> I'll piggy-back a little and say that not all the pods HAVE to be powered on in order for access to remain rapid. Our Vaults system spreads shards of the data out, so if one or two pods go in to maintenance in the same Vault at the same time, it doesn't really impact performance.

Re: Backblaze has ordered 100 petabytes of hard drives

#100

Post by dexterdog »

conception wrote: post #86
godzillabrennus wrote: post #34

I’ve been a customer for years and recently had a catastrophic failure of a computer and it’s direct attached backup drive. I have spent the last four days waiting for backblaze to create a restore a backup for a computer on and last I checked it was at 9%. I chatted with support and they said this is normal. That progress may jump to completed any time because the restore only tracks file count. I wish I could say I…

I Note: They recently released a new website and software version that's supposed to address some of these issues but fool me once and all...

Assuming you are paying $50/year to store well over 10TB of data I don't think you are the typical use case. I know they say that it's unlimited, but nothing ever is.
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