I quit Backblaze

06 March 2012

Three reasons I quit Backblaze, the cloud backup service that lets you back up an unlimited amount of data from a single computer:

  1. Poor Backup Bouncer test results. When I restore files to my Mac, I want all the metadata too. I’m a programmer so ownership, permissions, timestamps, and symlinks are important to me on my development machine.
  2. They say they won’t store my private key anywhere, but I have to enter it on their site in order to restore files. They may keep the files decrypted for up to 7 days. I don’t want decrypted files anywhere but my computer.
  3. I’ve switched to SSDs and needed to move some infrequently-used photo libraries to an external hard drive. I can’t be sure I’ll plug it in every 30 days. The idea that my backup of those precious photos would be deleted if I forgot to plug it in scares me.

I tried out Arq and generally liked it. It has the benefits of Backblaze plus performs well in the above three areas. Amazon’s S3 reduced-redundancy pricing is a little more expensive for the amount of data that I have (85GB), but the improved peace-of-mind is worth it to me.

If Backblaze ever fixed those things, I’d probably come back because it was otherwise a good service.