![]() ![]() For example, the customer doesn't want to prepare a restore until they do some shopping and buy their replacement computer and hard drive - this will take about 2 weeks then they play around getting Steam installed and playing a few new video games before preparing a restore on the 29th day. It's so painful for both the customer and Backblaze and I have emotional scars over it. This is where Backblaze has their data, then the customer delays preparing a restore for too long. One of the most sad/frustrating things that can occur is when a paying customer suffers local data loss, then tries to over-think or over-optimize at that moment and ends up losing data forever. The Backblaze Best Practices declares this as number 11 on a list: You are down to only 1 copy of your data on earth, if you actually want to retain that data, you need to get it copied somewhere else and soon. The smartest thing any customer can do when they drop to only having one copy of their data in their Backblaze backup is PREPARE A RESTORE. You are now on a 30 day clock, and that clock is ticking.īut here is the deal: don't over think it, and don't try to understand every nuance of your particular situation, because there are corner cases. Backblaze is still running, and it cannot distinguish a cat typing from a human typing, and Backblaze interprets this as 28 TBytes were purposefully deleted. Let's say a cat walks across your keyboard deleting 28 TBytes out of your 30. The 30 day problem comes up when it isn't a catastrophic failure. There is no 30 day ticking restore clock - as long as you pay Backblaze we'll keep that last moment of time for basically forever. Let's say your computer suddenly disconnects from the internet (let's say it is consumed entirely in a fire), and you continue paying the $7/month. I don't have to worry about a ticking restore clock?īy the way, there are situations that ARE NOT ticking restore clocks. Honestly when single files get that large they get pretty unwieldy anyway. The maximum size of a B2 file is 10 TBytes, so you would need to somehow select 3 or more large sets of files. It creates a ZIP file restore and then shoves that ZIP file into B2. There is a feature called "Restore to B2", all on the datacenter/website side. If I ever had a catastrophic failure, like a fire at home, is it possible to switch my data backup from a Personal Account to B2, and pay the associated B2 costs, so I don't have to worry about a ticking restore clock? Just lower our averages, and we can all do Ok by this tradeoff. ![]() All that we ask is for customers with above average data sets that they know are above average to recommend us to their relatives and friends that do not have as much data, LOL. You want to backup an external drive? Totally free! You want to restore, totally free! Did Backblaze backup a little too much data due to their "backup everything if we have no dang idea what it is" philosophy? Who cares, it's free.Īlong the way we picked up some heavy duty data guys who knew EXACTLY how much data they were storing and that they were riding along on customers that stored less. We provide totally honest, care free $7/month backups to people who don't know how much data they actually have. I'm at peace with it.Īs I have said before, this has worked out really well for Backblaze (and me personally) for 16 years. I didn't really look into it that closely, but seriously, it is probably some IT guy at Google backing up at truly ridiculous speeds like 300 Gbits/sec. Better than anything we could have imagined. The same set of 5 people that trusted each other from the previous 3 startups, who wanted to do it a little differently, without the VCs this time. When Backblaze was founded in 2007, it was an evolution. Pavni stuck her middle finger up to the VCs when everything went to shit and I can never repay her for that. You never really know who your loyal friends are until they can screw you for a few dollars. That and she had my back when everything went sideways. I made enough money in 4 years from "MailFrontier" to bootstrap Backblaze without any VC funds. She asked if I wanted to partner up, and on a total lark I said "yes". The founder of our previous startup invited me to lunch one fateful day, I thought we were just catching up and having lunch. That isn't as bad as it sounds, I was super happy and living on a great boat in Redwood City California, very employable. I went from thinking I was totally "set" in Silicon Valley to being homeless living on a boat. Acquired for $120 million by which went ENTIRELY out of business after acquiring our company. The startup was called "Kendara" (not a word in any language). 2002 ate $1 million dollars of my personal net worth from a startup, poof, disappeared. I've been in the game of startups so long, I have seen some stuff. Thank you! It is a personal milestone no doubt. ![]()
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