I wish I had heard your episode that mentioned that Blackblaze had an option when you hit the 30-day limit, or at least I wish that the tech support person I emailed knew that they had that option.
I backup, or at least I used to backup my Drobo with Backblaze as well as my computer. As someone who has been known to travel for 4 weeks at a time, I have almost hit the 30 day limit before. But I ran into a problem in spade in September when not only did I travel for 3 weeks out of 4 but also my Drobo stopped working reliably rather suddenly. Not the time to lose your backup but that is exactly what happened to me.
If I had been smart I probably should have paid for a copy of the data on a drive to be shipped to me but did not think of that in time. I was able to backup most? some? all? of the data from the Drobo to a large portable disk using Carbon Copy Cloner and my wife’s laptop. The Drobo would periodically just fall off of USB but I setup Carbon Copy Cloner to back it up whenever it remounted.
So now I am back in the tedious process of backing up that drive to Backblaz but that will literally take months.
Backblaze 7.0 has just been released, allowing users to pay a bit extra for longer version history.
$2/month for a year of history, with forever also an option.
What am I missing here, and I say that with all sincerity.
Now, first of all, I am coming at this from a non Mac user. I am IOS / iPadOS only. Yea, I get it, ICloud is not a backup, but now that we can connect external hard drives to these devices, shouldn’t that be a good backup? Rotations of course.
In my opinion, this is seriously broken behaviour on the part of Backblaze. As long as you’re paying them, they should only remove files from their service if they’ve been absent from your active backup process for x days. That is, if you don’t run a backup then your archived files should remain in stasis as long as you’re paying them.
What they have no sounds insanely dangerous for a backup service, if I understand it correctly. If for some reason you’re unable to back up your device for 30 days, they delete all the files unless you apply a manual intervention? Yikes!
Not quite. “While files are expunged from the servers after 30 days if they’re removed from a computer, your most recent backup snapshot will be retained for 6 months if your computer is completely unable to contact our servers (either it’s shut off, or no internet connection). As long as your computer can contact Backblaze at least once every 6 months and perform a full Backblaze file scan operation, you don’t delete or transfer the backup and you retain active billing, your most recent snapshot will be retained.”
