2016 edition : How Backblaze Personal Backup lost me 2TB on purpose !tl;dr : Backblaze uses file checksum to their advantage, so their customers can loose easily most of their previously uploaded data when changing hard drive (or moving a big folder inside a new partition) !
Dear all,
Instead of using the 30 days data retention policy to the customer advantage (by transferring automatically ALL the files already uploaded previously), Backblaze software is designed to lose most of its customer updated data when the customer remove an old drive and add a new bigger one (with the same data).
Logic would be that they first find all the already uploaded files whatever their size and then starts uploading the missing ones ! After all, their software does a file checksum for something. But, in fact, it ranks the files by size and then starts to upload the smallest files first. So if a customer has uploaded a lot of big files before (max 2GB zip files in my case), they are lost IF all the smaller files are not uploaded during the 30 days lapse.(*) For years, their client has also some on purpose bugs : 1) It does not tell you that when you add a new drive in your computer you have to manually add it in their client settings.
2) And when you do so, it again silently removes all the exclusion list that you ave added before ! And you have no choice but to again add manually all the folders you need to exclude !
3) Caution: their new client version (v 4.20) added a "stupid feature :
" exclusions now work across all attached drives. " Too bad for those that have the same folder name on different drives. Now you can't exclude only one in all drives or in none ! I just can't believe you did that ! ;("
It is why : - Their support team always answer: "Backblaze client needs time to find already uploaded data" ! They acknowledge this but it is hidden in their help file :
"Backblaze prioritizes smaller files, and uploads larger files later." https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666728-How-does-Backblaze-handle-large-files- - They sell it as unlimited but recommend in initial backup in 30 days : "(...)3. Ideally, Backblaze should be able to complete your initial backup in 30 days. If your initial backup is estimated to take longer due to a lot of data or slow internet connection, then Backblaze is not the best solution for you.(...)"
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664608-Best-PracticesI like them a lot (see their blog) and I understand that they need to stay profitable (from memory 250GB threshold in 2012? 1TB threshold in 2016) but their customers must know that they should upload their files also elsewhere (Amazon Drive, ..etc..) where, contrarily to Backblaze Personal Backup, they can move the uploaded files very easily thanks to APIs (with for instance cloudhq.net or a cheap VPS and rclone).
(*) in my case: Win 8.1 64bits running 24/24 7/7 - 16GB RAM - DSL (upload max speed 10GB/day). Customer since 2011. About 3TB uploaded in July 2016. About 2TB lost as of today and only 1TB recognized (30 days period ended). ;( I have tried to add many folder exclusions (note: you can't just remove C:\ !) so backblaze could find easily my previously big files. Alas for me they were in 2 big folders previously. And I have added them into one big folder in my new drive. And could not remember or check easily within the 30 day retention period. Note2: I also lost about 2 weeks in order to realize that the new drive was not added automatically by Backblaze client) which exact many parts were previously uploaded. ;( Hopefully for me I use other storage services (Amazon Drive...). See here :
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=41873update: 2016, Mid December : Backblaze lost me all my backup again! This time I did not add any new hard drive to my computer. I just put it on "run once every day at 10pm" for about one month. Then, I changed that again back to "continuous" and the 1.2 TB of data that I had there disappeared ! I just recovered 300GB since that day. ;(