> No More Connecting Your External Drives Every 30 Days<p>Or maybe just don't be so eager to purge your paying customers' backups in the first place? It's not like we stop paying your subscription fees as soon as we disconnect a drive.<p>I was a happy Backblaze customer until one day when I went on a month-ish long vacation, took my external hard drive with me, and came back to find the entire backup gone. If the drive went bad or if I were to lose it during the trip, I'd have been shit out of luck.<p>Switched to Crashplan and never looked back. Even now that they're double the price of Backblaze (since they discontinued the consumer plan, I've moved to their business plan) I still find it a much better value proposition because of their _much_ more flexible versioning and retention policies:<p><a href="https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_version_settings" rel="nofollow">https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Configuring/Specify_v...</a><p><a href="https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_download_deleted_files" rel="nofollow">https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...</a><p>None of this "we delete your backups if we don't see them for 30 days" bullshit.<p>Versioning and retention is _the_ core value proposition of a backup product imho, and Backblaze is laughably inadequate in this area. Stay away.
And it is still very much Desktop based, I wonder if Blackblaze will one day have a Consumer No Fuss NAS along with B2 Subscription model. ( Something I wish Apple had done with Time Capsule and iCloud )<p>So I just set, forget and pay monthly knowingly the Data should be safe.
The reason why Backblaze and Crashplan have various restrictions is due to being all-you-can-eat. At some point, they have to create an arbitrary cap. So, the snapshot is a curious feature, but seems to be implemented poorly.<p>It doesn't seem to be snapshot system, but an archive system. A snapshot is usually a point in time represented by a series of changes. By being a series of change, it would deduplicate redundant files between snapshots. It appears that this is a full archive backup, which is fine but have some limitations:<p>* Need to upload the whole archive every time.
* No deduplication.
* Need to have double the space to restore (download then unzip).
* No partial restores.
* No encryption of personal files.<p>If you have any technical willingness, consider restic. It is a command line utility that has the ability to backup to many backends, including B2. Being a CLI, it can be scripted. Files can be arbitrarily backed up and restored. It has encryption that the servers can never see. I also hear Duplicati is similar, but have never used it.<p>If you want an easy way to just make archives locally and store it on B2 for cheap, consider a cloud mounter, like Mountain Duck. You can treat B2 as a drive and upload/download files as needed. Note: B2 is a _very_ simple store, so simple that it doesn't support renaming files (must download, rename, and upload). But, it is fast and inexpensive.
I see BB pushing B2 more and more and it makes me sad. Instead of a Linux client (which I can’t imagine would be that difficult, ultimately, after this many years) they’re putting all resources on the pay-for-utilization model. Good for them, bad for us waiting for a Linux client.<p>CrashPlan is garbage. Bloated client, keeps breaking down and I get reports my devices aren’t backed up but then they say they are, after backing up 30+ TB (it took years) it says my original backup had to be reset so I had to restart the entire thing, just not a lot of confidence with them. But it is the only unlimited Linux option out there.<p>Also, they just removed their personal plan and do business only and per device now. If they could make their client not suck, and give better confidence in their platform, I wouldn’t complain.
This is a pretty useful feature. It goes some way towards solving the problem of keeping a backup of my photos. Rather than having to keep buying more physical storage I can archive off photos in batches to B2 from my regular Backblaze backup.