Yup, there were serious flaws in our backup plans here. In my defense, we hadn't been dating long enough at the time for me to really get things set and we were on our way to burning man ;-)

I am not claiming to be without fault, but I do think that Backblaze is on the lower end of the reliability spectrum when it comes companies that do this, which is why I bring up these issues. I've switched over to Crashplan and have external harddrives doing local backups.

I should also point out that this isn't the only issue that's come up with this company. Apparently their client side GUI is also not completely truthful about when it's backed things up, and will claim to have backed up files when it's really only backed up the indexes. It then spreads the real backups out in order to increase performance. Although this is a cool feature, it's one people should be aware of and not hidden. I have less knowledge of this though, as I only saw it in a few blog posts (google around instead of taking my word for it).

"Lower end of spectrum" - of precisely two companies that I know of, CrashPlan and BackBlaze, that do "Whole Disk Backups at a fixed rate".

I'm a big fan of using a combination of Arq (Love It), Dropbox, BackBlaze, and SuperDuper, but - crashplan/backblaze are both pretty similar, and both have their pros/cons, and, likewise, hundreds of anecdotes from the user community of each.

For what it's worth, I'm in my fifth year of Backblaze, and I've always been able to recover all my files - but I've also kept my subscription paid up.

And, I don't believe I've ever seen your "real backups happening spread over" claim - I am frequently in the field, so I am very aware of exactly when backblaze is sending data (frequently over my iPhone using Roaming Data) - and when backblaze says it's done backing up - that's pretty much exactly when data is no longer sent out.

Yev, the same dev who is commenting here, has admitted to the claims about back up times. You should read through this reddit thread, it shows that Backblaze does not do things as you'd think-

http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1q14ca/ysk_th...

> If you boot up real quickly and want to do a scan one thing you can do is open up the control panel and hit "Alt" + "Restore Options", we'll do a small-file rescan immediately and schedule a large-file scan.

>Small is files under 30MB or so, it's a quick index, the larger files take a bit longer and we try to spread those out over the course of a few hours so as not to be too heavy on your system.

Yes, that's accurate. The program was designed to be light on systems so we are not constantly scanning and indexing your hard drives. In our best practices we tell people to leave their machines on for a few hours. We cannot run when the machine is off, so if the machine is constantly being turned on and off it'll disrupt our scans. The "Alt + Restore Options" method forces a scan, but you'll still need the machine to be turned on/connected to the internet in order for us to transmit the data. Just pressing "backup now" will start pushing the data that has already been queued for upload during a previous scan (if there was anything left over), but will not necessarily initiate a scan (unless there was nothing left over from the previous uploads).

So, to be perfectly clear, it is more than possible for you to sync the photos from your computer, hit the "backup now" button, have Backblaze respond back that a backup is complete, and then find out that all of those photos you thought you had backed up were not there.

All of this to make it look like your application is performing better than it actually is.

On top of that you keep doing that infuriating thing where you ignore what people are saying and respond as if they're idiots or by trying to deflect the issue. No one expects you to run when the computer is off, and pretending like that's what's being said is downright insulting. What they do expect is that hitting the "backup now" button, and having your application respond that their files have been backed up, should actually mean that the files are backed up.

The more you talk the more you try to twist this around into something it's not- a visual glitch, misreading your policies, or people turning their computers off when they shouldn't- rather than trying to understand why your customers are upset and actually deal with it. That's why this issue has grown, and why we keep having these conversations- you guys have zero concept of responsibility and would rather insult your customers than actually make a viable product.

No, we should display the last time you were fully backed up in the console. If you turn on your computer, move photos to it, and turn it off, even if you press "backup now" likely they won't be included in the scan. In our best practices and introductory email we say that if you want at least a "daily" backup, you have to let us run for at least 3 hours so that we can fully index your new/changed files and back them up. If you added a lot of files it'll take longer, if you only add a few, it can be pretty quick.

If your complaint is that the Backup Now button does not do a full-system scan, that is totally valid and after the reddit thread our engineering folks are looking in to changing the "backup now" button's behavior. One of the reasons it doesn't do that now is because a full-scan will hang your system, where uploading the remaining files is very light and unnoticeable. Like with any functionality decision it's tough to say what is the best answer, hanging someone's system each time they press a button, or kicking off a remaining files upload and gradually scanning the drive over the next hour.

I sincerely apologize if I am not communicating well though, I am not trying to talk down or assume you or anyone else is an idiot in any way. I've tried to address everything that you bring up on here and on reddit. As far as expecting Backblaze to run when the computer is turned off, you'd be surprised at how many of our support tickets ask, "If my computer is off, are you still working?" so we do see that quite a bit. I don't bring it up to try and dig at anybody. I also think we've taken responsibility for the bug that mislead you in to believing you had data on our system when it had already been removed. Once we realized what had happened in your case we offered a refund and have since fixed it so that it does not happen to anyone else.

We're in the business of backing up data. When customers lose data, whether it's something they did or something that occurred on our end, we feel badly about it and try to make it right. We do have a viable product. We've restored over 4 billion files for the customers that have accounts with us. We take it very seriously.

We do recommend having a 3-2-1 backup (3 total copies, 2 local (1 original, 1 local external), and 1 offsite (where Backblaze comes in). In Tedivm's defense though, he did find an actual glitch in our UI that occurred in edge cases, and we've since fixed it. The unfortunate part is that he lost data when we no longer had a copy, and we're actively working on additional ways to avoid that in the future.