"It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."

Please don't singly use cloud backups. Your first line should be a local backup solution like a Time Capsule or other NAS device. Blind trust in a black box backup is not prudent.

I wanted to post this here to bring attention to what happens when trusting a cloud backup provider with your data, as well as to spur Backblaze to hopefully pay more attention to this part of their business model.<p>Again, while I say it in the post, I think it&#x27;s important to state again that the CEO has been great in allowing a dialog via Twitter. This is not a post meant to diss Backblaze as much as it is to share concerns and put the thought out there for consideration.<p>As the CEO Mr. Budman notes in the Storify link, they no doubt do hundreds of successful restores every day. But when I have two working systems fail for Backblaze restores but nothing else, it&#x27;s still a cause of concern for me personally.

Their selling point is &quot;Unlimited data backup for your Mac or PC, just $5&#x2F;month.&quot; If you&#x27;re in tech that should tell you it&#x27;s not for storing &quot;mission critical data&quot; (paraphrasing the blogpost).<p>For $5&#x2F;month you can also not expect round the clock, seven days a week personal attention.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Backblaze seems like a kickass service for an off-site backup of my personal data.

I also lost a drive recently and found that while uploading to them was a breeze, the download was coming in at 14KB&#x2F;s. I thought I was the one having a problem, but maybe not.

FYI I left Backblaze for Crashplan for the same reasons.<p>I believe Blackblaze also removes the backup after some number of hours, so if you don&#x27;t download the backup by then, you&#x27;re in big trouble.<p>Crashplan also allows external and network drives to be backed up.

I had the exact same situation three years ago with Carbonite. Had 80GB of data that I was never able to be restore. Their only means of amending the situation was offering a year for free. Never again. I had a local backup but it was unfortunately 3+ months out of date. Now I keep everything locally backed up with a NAS and a mix of dropbox&#x2F;google drive.

There doesn&#x27;t seem to be any attempt to confirm that this is actually a problem on Backblaze&#x27;s end -- it&#x27;s just as likely to be a problem with Sean&#x27;s internet connection. One of the problems with downloading large zip archives is that a few scrambled bits or dropped packets can scratch the whole archive.<p>Backblaze offers the ability to get your data in the form of a flash drive or external drive (<a href="https://help.backblaze.com/entries/20224632-how-can-i-restore-my-files" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.backblaze.com&#x2F;entries&#x2F;20224632-how-can-i-restor...</a>). It&#x27;s not free, but if your data is important, it&#x27;s a pretty reasonable cost-of-hardware-and-handling price.

My current backup strategy:<p>MacBook &amp; Mini -&gt; Time Machine on Mini (second hd), everything is using FileVault<p>Pictures -&gt; Bitcasa &amp; local copies<p>Personal Documents -&gt; TrueCrypt Volume on Dropbox with local copies, coding projects are on dropbox also, obviously I have code in SVN&#x2F;GIT repositories.<p>I have 2 local copies, one in the safe deposit box and rotate them about every 3 months. This is pictures + personal files on a FileVault volume.<p>Currently I don&#x27;t backup my windows gaming pc aside from game saves on Bitcasa.

This is a little disconcerting. I have 3 computers backed up with Backblaze. I had a successful 350 GB restore last week. I hope that wasn&#x27;t an anomaly.

A question, because I&#x27;m unfamiliar with the way HN works in this regard. My article was #2 on the front page for a brief spell.<p>Now I look, and it&#x27;s nowhere to be found.<p>Is this by design? I don&#x27;t need it to be on the top page and this isn&#x27;t about the page views, I&#x27;m just not sure how it would disappear. Did a moderator somewhere frown upon it?

One other note: I think it&#x27;s important to say that I&#x27;m a HUGE fan of what Backblaze does in terms of open-sourcing their storage box designs and how they accomplish things. I think that&#x27;s a noble thing to do, and have always thought highly of them for that.

Wired or wireless connection? I would always do bit sensitive data over a wired connection.<p>This goes without saying.

Backing up your data is not enough; you must also occasionally restore your data ( to a temp location )just to make sure your backup media or its governing database are not silently screwing up your backed up data.

I wonder whether it&#x27;s a header or an index on the compressed file, or the data itself that&#x27;s damaged. Still not something you want from your backups.

Does anyone have restore experience with Tarsnap? Tarsnap seems like a great service, but I&#x27;ve never had to do a restore.