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Life after CrashPlan: why they sucked, why Backblaze & B2 suck, Glacier vs Others
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Life after CrashPlan: why they sucked, why Backblaze & B2 suck, Glacier vs Others

raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
edited October 2017 in General

With Crashplan's recent finger to the consumer market, I'm looking for a replacement. Really, two replacements:

(1) At home my family has various laptops and desktops. Macs backup to a central Synology TimeMachine but there's still Windows to consider. Right now, windows boxes backup to a central file server via Crashplan (so local protection but not disaster protection).

(2) The Linux file server itself has various shares which is what I backup to Crashplan.

Crashplan was nice because you could do computer-to-computer backups without having to pay them, but alas that's going away.

For (1) I'm not sure there is a good solution. I may just have to tell my family that Windows machines are considered expendable...save your work to the file server.

Backing up my Linux box is the main concern as thats what I need disaster protection for. There's CP Business which at $10/mo isn't bad for unlimited storage. But overall I haven't been entirely happy with CP:

(1) The client is a horrible poorly engineered pig. My file server has 20GB of RAM - 16GB of that is purely for CP's ridiculous Java client. The thing crashes all the time (I have a cron job to watch and restart it) and every time it updates, it nukes all my custom settings which means it'll fail constantly until I go back and edit them. Just crappy code.

(2) More critically, my CP archive goes offline for 3-5 days every 28 days. If you have a large archive, yours does, too - CP won't tell you. During this time, adds to the archive or restores are impossible. I once waited 9 days to do a single file restore because my archive was in "deep maintenance mode"...that was a very long ticket with support before they admitted how it works.

(3) I've heard CP restores are slow...never restored enough to really find out. Upload has been meh.

(4) Oh an I owned the longest-running feature request in the history of the Internet which had hundreds of votes...going on 7 years in "planned" state when they finally admitted they were killing consumer. That made me laugh.

Now admittedly, I have 7.4TB on CP, which is a lot. I don't really need 7.4TB but when you say "unlimited" I just point the client at root. Why not?

I do have about 2TB to backup. Before you assume that's all tentacle porn, it's not hard to get to that size: 500GB is previous 3D art projects, 300GB is 15 years' of family photos, 300GB is music and ripped CDs, there's 40GB of video classes and stuff I've taken, about 120GB of Logic Pro audio, 200GB of camcorder raw, etc.

So if we set CP aside, that leaves...who?

Carbonite? Win/Mac only. And they reputedly suck. And, well, CrashPlan recommends them.

Backblaze? Win/Mac only, and while they publish cool papers on hardware, their software is...um, well, while the backup client is nice for uploading, it doesn't support restores. Uh, what? No really, your only options for a restore are:

(1) web download of a zip

(2) they'll mail you a drive

Are you kidding me? It's like Backblaze quit after getting 3/4 of their work done. If you write a backup client...guys, you also need to be able to restore with it. If I lose 300GB of family pics, that is never going to succeed as a web download (multiple blogs say you can't get more than 50GB or so this way). So my only option is to ship a drive? Ridiculous. I'm not saying drive shipping is a bad thing but the cutoff is far too low. I could download 100GB far faster than shipping a drive.

Combined with their intransigent refusal to support Linux, I kind of want Backblaze to go bankrupt.

Mozy? Are they still around? Had a bad experience and so have many others.

SpiderOak? When I tried them on a VPS several years ago, their client sucked up all my RAM and constantly crashed. They're a lot pricier than other options at $12/TB. I know @Nekki likes them.

Maybe instead I should handle my own client. I could get a VPS or dedi with a big disk, but no way I'm going to approach the $5/TB/mo that cloud storage offers. I've been playing with rclone which seems to work well. So I started looking at which cloud services rclone supports (alas, not Amazon Drive anymore :-)

Some options in this space are Backblaze B2, Amazon Glacier, Azure, and Google Drive.

B2 starts with a strike since it's Backblaze. But they have some Glacier-comparable pricing.

AWS Glacier: $4/TB/mo to store, but if you ever need to restore that, it's $90/TB in network costs.

Backblaze B2: $5/TB/mo to store, a complete restore is $40

Azure Blob Storage (using archive): $1.80/TB/mo to store, restore is $90/TB in network costs.

All of these offer 1GB or something for free download if you just need a single fiile.

I don't know...I'm torn. Restores are very rare, and given that Backblaze seems to take almost a special pride in saying "fuck you" to Linux, I kind of want to go with Amazon Glacier or Azure. Azure is cheaper but then I have to deal with that godawful Azure portal...

Google Drive is too expensive. $10/TB though any restore is free.

I've also thought of getting a big VPS or dedi and then rcloning from there for tertiary support, but now we're getting really expensive.

There are more cloud services I could look at, but I don't want to invest a month in uploading (my internet is 200 down, 10 up) only to find they're unreliable or going out of business.

Still weighing pros/cons...opinions/experiences welcome!

Thanked by 2rm_ szarka
«13456

Comments

  • doghouchdoghouch Member
    edited October 2017

    Why not use on-site backups? I personally have a NAS on a 10 gig line to my switch. SSD-cached + around 15TB of available storage.

    I'm probably going have to replace the motherboard because I'm ouuuuut of SATA ports.

    On another note, since you have such a great connection, why not set up backups with Google Drive? 1TB is around $14 CAD/mo ($9-10 US/mo). GDrive may be expensive, but it's consistent and reliable.

    Google isn't offering unlimited for consumers, rather defined storage plans. They have no policy on you filling the 1/10/20/30TB allotment that you pay for.

    Edit: I have family pics stored on DVDs for long-term storage lol :)

    Edit 2: My NAS and PC run macOS. For my Windows devices, they connect through a different SAMBA share.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    doghouch said: Why not use on-site backups?

    Because my house might burn down, flood, etc.

    doghouch said: why not set up backups with Google Drive? 1TB is around $14 CAD/mo ($9-10 US/mo).

    Right...$10/TB/mo. Whereas others I mentioned are $5/TB/mo. So for 2TB, $120/yr vs. $240/yr with Google Drive. I like Google Drive but they're 2x the cost. OTOH, restores are free.

    doghouch said: Edit: I have family pics stored on DVDs for long-term storage lol :)

    I wouldn't trust them for long term storage. E.g.: http://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-last-400-discs-put-to-the-test/

    Thanked by 1Aidan
  • Have you considered using Google Suite for their unlimited?

    Caveat being it’s technically not advertised to be unlimited until 5 users. But I have my 5.2TB backed up there so far.

    You’re capped at 750GB per day of upload but downloading 5TB at once wasn’t an issue for me just last week.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran
    edited October 2017

    If you get cheap storage servers from OVH/SoYouStart you can get arround 5$ a TB.

    https://www.soyoustart.com/ie/server-storage/

    2TB cost 12EUR which is 6EUR for a TB.

    Get two of these, setup replicate with GlusterFS.

    Restore? No costs.

    You can easy add more/remove nodes with glusterfs.

    Or wait for cheap Kimsufi deals, where 1TB cost you only 4EUR.

    Just wait for Black Friday.

    I would never put any private data into the Cloud, not even encrypted.

    Thanked by 1rm_
  • If it's all about cheap and time doesn't matter nothing beats OVH hubic.

  • M66BM66B Veteran
    edited October 2017

    @Tion said:
    If it's all about cheap and time doesn't matter nothing beats OVH hubic.

    That is, if your requirement is turtle speed.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Neoon said: 2TB cost 12EUR which is 6EUR for a TB.

    Get two of these, setup replicate with GlusterFS.

    Restore? No costs.

    I think Gluster actually takes three, or at least a witness. I haven't run Gluster on ARM so not sure how it'd perform.

    Nonetheless, they're all single-drive machines so you'd need to have at least two, which makes the pricing unattractive.

    I realize they're "just backups" but in this case a drive failure means "you now have no backups, and because of upload times, you won't have any backups for about a month". Ouch.

    Neoon said: Or wait for cheap Kimsufi deals, where 1TB cost you only 4EUR.

    Kimsufi are also single hard drive.

  • M66BM66B Veteran

    @raindog308 I have tried Backblaze B2 for a short while and it seemed to not totally suck. Your miles may vary though.

  • Why not OVH cloud archive? Only caveat is they charge for inbound bw as well. Otherwise it's ca. $2.50/TB/mo. We use it for loads of stuff.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Thanks @iwaswrongonce - how's ul/dl speed?

  • @raindog308 said:

    >

    Azure Blob Storage (using archive): $1.80/TB/mo to store, restore is $90/TB in network costs.

    archive?

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
    edited October 2017

    deluxe said: archive?

    It's in preview. Go here:

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

    And set your region at the top to "East US 2". There may be other regions.

    Thanked by 1deluxe
  • @raindog308 Oh, I'm not in a flood/tornado prone area. Fire is an issue, but I keep monthly backups of the NAS on an OVH server.

    Secondary backups go to GDrive (expensive, but works).

    I've tried Azure for a bit, and it honestly works fine. I have no reason to not be using it apart from the ugly control panel.

  • WebProjectWebProject Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2017

    OVH Hubic speed is awful even so cheap - no thanks, much better to get the storage box at hetzner and link to any cheap VPS (control panel as front end) or direct via windows share directory

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    raindog308 said: There are more cloud services I could look at, but I don't want to invest a month in uploading (my internet is 2000 down, 10 up) only to find they're unreliable or going out of business.

    Your internet is 2 Gbit down, 10 Mbit up? Is that even enough to send all the TCP ACKs on a 2 Gbit download?

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    rm_ said: Your internet is 2 Gbit down, 10 Mbit up? Is that even enough to send all the TCP ACKs on a 2 Gbit download?

    Sorry, 200 down, 10 up :-)

  • BackBlaze have a threaded download client.

    I think the openness of the Linux OS prevents them going anywhere near it. They only allow directly attached devices to be backed-up to prevent abuse. I don't think they would be able to enforce that on Linux without somebody finding a work around.

  • @rm_ said:

    raindog308 said: There are more cloud services I could look at, but I don't want to invest a month in uploading (my internet is 2000 down, 10 up) only to find they're unreliable or going out of business.

    Your internet is 2 Gbit down, 10 Mbit up? Is that even enough to send all the TCP ACKs on a 2 Gbit download?

    Actually, No :D

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I'm back to wishing BackBlaze would go bankrupt. OMG.

    image

    Thanked by 1rm_
  • iwaswrongonceiwaswrongonce Member
    edited October 2017

    @raindog308 said:
    Thanks @iwaswrongonce - how's ul/dl speed?

    Only use it for work stuff, so our gear is colo'd with the object store in Gravelines and it's plenty fast. OpenStack/Swift based makes it easy and annoying to use at the same time. We mirror all our stuff to B2 as well, which has considerably poor peering across the pond.

    I am LHR based but I just did a test for ya and I get about the same performance as I do uploading to our dedicated boxes (which is ca. 6-7 MBps from my 100m home connection, see below using test file in cyberduck)

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Thanks @iwaswrongonce . One thing I always fight with OVH in france is that they come over to US Comcast on Cogent and I think Comcast pays for only so much transit...some days it flies, some days it's KB/sec.

  • @raindog308 said:
    Thanks @iwaswrongonce . One thing I always fight with OVH in france is that they come over to US Comcast on Cogent and I think Comcast pays for only so much transit...some days it flies, some days it's KB/sec.

    Within Canada, it's even faster. I can push over 300 mbit/s from DigitalOcean Toronto.

  • bsdguybsdguy Member
    edited October 2017

    Edit: TL;DR - do not read this if you are a tld;dr reader. Just buy some cloud storage...

    "Cloud" (imo) translates to "under the control of someone else" and to "most probably I shouldn't trust them". The very things against which I desire to protect may happen to them as well and we had enough cases where reality was much less dandy than what their web site made believe...

    So: Iff remote by wire storage then definitely through a vps (and not some cloud storage).

    But: Why by wire remote storage, particularly as you mention the use case "disaster"? My look at it is as follows: There are three basic sizes of disaster, namely a) global or at least continental, b) large region like "multiple states" or "turkey", c) local or small region. Plus, there are three types of desasters, namely a) major devastation (think "yellowstone goes active"), b) medium (which are about the worst a normal person can prepare for), say an R7 earthquake, and c) relatively small (e.g. hurricane). Another way to classify that would be the question "who can protect against or what kind of player is needed to mitigate/recover?". For a) the answer is "nobody", for b) it's state players and only for c) it's local or regional players incl. oneself).

    Ergo one of the most important factors is location of both you and your remote backup. Obviously the remote backup location should be beyond your greater region but not at the other side of the globe. Far enough away to highly likely to be outside your b and possibly c zones yet near enough to get at your backups (I wouldn't bet on the internet working after yellowstone blowing up (hint, e.g. transformer stations)).

    Another reason why I dislike remote by wire backups is that there are 2 sides needing working electricity and internet (which e.g. after an EMP is highly unlikely). For the same reason I don't like magnetic type backups btw. Anyone having the term "disaster" in mind should definitely go optical. "cloud" and the like should be left to the 98% of "average users" (read: prefer coolness over thinking).

    Another factor is psychology and type of situation. In other words: Which of my data that I consider, oh so valuable, would turn out to be utterly worthless in/after a disaster and which ones really are valuable and important? My answer: 3 types: a) fucking important stuff (important papers, my source code, business database, etc), b) really nice to have (some things better/more important than (c) and c) games, most videos and music, etc. When classifying I imagine to stand inmidst of rubble of what once were houses, abusing my small moped as emergency generator to load a stack of batteries in my garage, internet and phone not working, etc.

    My personal (old style and very uncool) way: a couple of M-disks (about 15$ per 100 GB disk) for type a stuff (actually I never needed more than 1). Next, a stack of blue-ray disks for type b and type c stuff, the difference being that I send (by post) only type a stuff to relatives (some 500 km away) about every 3 months. In parallel I have another, local, set in my office, so the set at my relatives is a backup backup for the worst of cases. And, of course, I have a raid array for the normal everyday backup. Btw only the latter was ever needed.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    You have 7TB of CP? Banned.

    Thanked by 2raindog308 ValdikSS
  • jarland said: You have 7TB of CP? Banned.

    Below the threshold?

    Thanked by 1v3ng
  • @jarland said:
    You have 7TB of CP? Banned.

    Nuh, in his case CP is for "CrashPorn" - which sheds a strange light on him but is perfectly legal.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • @bsdguy Nice tl;dr. <3

  • iwaswrongonceiwaswrongonce Member
    edited October 2017

    @raindog308 said:
    Thanks @iwaswrongonce . One thing I always fight with OVH in france is that they come over to US Comcast on Cogent and I think Comcast pays for only so much transit...some days it flies, some days it's KB/sec.

    It should be available in BHS. I used to live in NYC and speeds into BHS were pretty stellar via Comcast.

    It's cheap enough that it's worth doing some benchmarks.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    @raindog308 said:

    Neoon said: 2TB cost 12EUR which is 6EUR for a TB.

    Get two of these, setup replicate with GlusterFS.

    Restore? No costs.

    I think Gluster actually takes three, or at least a witness. I haven't run Gluster on ARM so not sure how it'd perform.

    Depends on how risky you want it, you can run 2x replica but you risk a brain split.

    A disk could corrupt a file and glusterfs stops until you solve it manually.

    You could do 3x replica without using 3x times the storage.

    Its called arbiter, kinda Raid 5/6, just need a some spare vps.

    You need to calculate in at least 2x the Storage you need.

    Still cheaper then google drive anyways.

    Nonetheless, they're all single-drive machines so you'd need to have at least two, which makes the pricing unattractive.

    4EUR for 1TB is a good price, try to ask around, most people want 15-20EUR for a single TB.

    I rather have multiple boxes with a single drive, in case the hole system gets fucked, I only loose one drive, not 2 drives or more.

    I realize they're "just backups" but in this case a drive failure means "you now have no backups, and because of upload times, you won't have any backups for about a month". Ouch.

    Always go with at least 2 replica, so you still can get your files.

    Doing 0x replica aka Raid 0 is a very bad idea.

    Neoon said: Or wait for cheap Kimsufi deals, where 1TB cost you only 4EUR.

    Kimsufi are also single hard drive.

    Thats good yea, I kinda do like servers with a single drive.

    Thanked by 1rm_
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