According to the email I got from BackBlaze today, they have finally made an upgrade that solves my single biggest issue with BB!
My biggest concern with BB is and has been that after 30 days, files that appear to BB to have been deleted from the source (your computer) are removed from your BB store. Having had the experience of looking for some “dead storage” files that turned out to have been accidentally deleted 6 months earlier (but being able restore them from Amazon Glacier via ARQ), this has always been a deal-breaker for me.
My current solution has been to have both my files themselves backing up to BB, AND to have ARQ create backups to an external drive which is itself then backed up to BB as well - and that provides me with the ability to restore files deleted more than 30 days ago. The process is cumbersome, however - I would need to first either download (or have shipped by disk) the entire ARQ backup (over 2TB and growing) or move the ARQ backup into a B2 bucket, and then retrieve the needed files from the ARQ archive.
You can now set your account to retain backup versions AND deleted files for either 30 days (the current state), 1 year (new), or forever (new). The cost is, at least for me, entirely reasonable. For an extra $2/month you add either of these two new plans. If you go with the “keep forever” plan, than there is also an additional charge of $0.005/GB/month for any versions that are >1 year old. Given that, at least for me, this is likely to be a relatively small amount of data (and 1TB of such data would cost $5/month, which is not actually all that awful compared to what I was previously paying when I had ARQ keeping a copy in B2 just for this purpose, but then I had a backup in B2 of my entire 2.4TB data store, but here I would be paying only for versions not on my computer in the last year which means a very small percentage of that 2.4TB) this is a real improvement.
Adding $24/year to keep files for a year is to me at least a no-brainer, and even if I added another $20/year for really old data, this is still a great deal, and much easier than my current hybrid system.
Thanks, BackBlaze!
