Posts by @YevP

Backup a sec – is hard drive reliability improving? Annual failure rate from Backblaze comes in at its lowest yet

Re: Technically great, but

Totally understand and you should have at least gotten a "we have no way to fix this, sorry" message from support instead of them going dark - I'll let their managers know so they can do proper training. I'm not sure there could be much done in terms of mitigating that issue in this case (we can't just take a Venmo payment and credit the account for example) - but it's a good for us to know this occurred so we can work with our payment processor and let them know what happened.

Re: Technically great, but

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's definitely very strange. I can't speak to why support would go silent, but I can say that we did have to update our billing rules in order to comply with VAT and other tax laws that were going in to effect, so we had to add new checks to verify the card/person were in the same location. It certainly shouldn't have been that hard on you though - if you'd be willing to toss me your ticket number I can take a look and see if I can come up with a suggestion to make it easier for you to update your payment in the future should you get a new card or address!

Blimey, did you know? It's World Backup Day. But... surely every day is world backup day?

Yev from Backblaze here -> It's always on March 31st so you can "back up your data and not be an April Fool". ;-)

Nifty website claims to make comparing cloud costs simple. Good luck with that

Yup! Looked like there was a glitch the first day or so, now we're showing up as anticipated. Might have been server load :P

Yev from Backblaze here -> So, uh. Anyone figure out how to get Backblaze to show up on this list?

Adobe issues patch to nix its Mac-killing Creative Cloud update

Yev from Backblaze here -> The data was being deleted from Mac user's drives, not Backblaze drives. Also Backblaze user's backups were not affected, just a Backblaze file on the drive.

'Adobe Creative Cloud update ate my backup!'

Re: More CloudFog...

Yev with Backblaze here => We're in America :P

Backblaze big data restore. Get this: it involves disk drives

Yev from Backblaze here -> Great to hear that! You can also encrypt the drive restore during transit (you can do that upon check-out), so if you're worried about the data traveling unencrypted, we have that covered as well (though it will add time to the restore).

Re: Backblaze has attitude!

Yev from Backblaze here -> Thanks! :D

Re: Hmmm

Hey! Yev from Backblaze here -> Encryption is an option for physical restores as part of the check-out process, though it does add some time to the restore duration.

Behold, Backblaze’s public B2 beta blast off

Re: Backblaze is an amazing company

Yev from Backblaze here -> We decided not to have a Linux client for our unlimited service, but B2 already has integrations w/ Duplicity, which does run on Linux. Have at it ;-)

Re: They need a linux client

Yev from Backblaze -> We may not have one for the online backup client, but with B2, there's already integrations with Duplicity, which does run on Linux. It's already up and running!

And the winner of the most reliable disk drive award is ...

Re: @YevP 120%

I believe that was from one batch, but I do not know for sure. The reason I'm guessing one is because each of our pods contains 45 drives, so the sample size of 51 leads me to believe it was one pods worth.

And thank you for the kudos! We love being open. If we can get the HDD manufacturers to produce better products, and get some exposure for ourselves as a backup company out there, it's a win-win-win all around (third win being consumers who purchase these drives as well).

Re: 120%

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's the annual failure rate. What that means is, none of the drives that we had made it to a year. The majority failed at the 10 month mark. It's quite...not awesome. But that's also why we don't use them anymore and went with a different model!

Re: Two types of disk drive

Yev from Backblaze here -> Absolutely correct. It's not a matter of if, but when. We designed our storage pods and backup system to account for hard drive losses, so we don't fear them. But drive deaths are inevitable. The main concern for us is cost, so we try to strike a fine balance between cheap drives and lower-failure rates. It's a shame those Hitachi's are hard to find now.

Server, server in the rack, when's my disk drive going to crack?

Re: 4 years not long enough

Yev from Backblaze -> We're currently trying to gather enough data to see if we have enough on the manufacturer/make/model to report on that. Stay tuned to the blog!

Re: … disk-makers' claims for longevity

Yev from Backblaze here -> We are currently trying to gather stats by manufacturer to see if we have enough for a scientific study. If we do, or when we do, we're looking forward to publishing that as well. We have a variety of drives in the data center, so there's a lot of stuff to work through!

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

Not all cloud tech is bad

Yev from Backblaze here. Not all American cloud tech companies are involved in this. Backblaze is an online backup provider based in the United States and we have NO involvement in the PRISM program. . We don't allow anyone but our customers access to their own data. We're working on a few blog posts over this weekend that address this, and will be publishing them soon on our blog (blog.backblaze.com).