Recognizing the limitations of cloud drives

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-google-drive-dropbox-and-onedrive-more-than-you-think/

by miles • 2 years ago

93 108 2 years ago

backblaze.com

donmcronald• 2 years ago

Microsoft calling OneDrive a backup and putting it alongside security features in Windows has always pissed me off.

velcrovan8• 2 years ago

In what way is OneDrive not categorically a backup of the files stored there?

thmsths• 2 years ago

I an curious too since that's exactly how I use the product: to keep my documents safe. I always assumed OneDrive keeps a local copy AND sends another copy to the cloud.

balls1873• 2 years ago

As noted in the article, OneDrive acts as a file sync. It does have version history, but if the file is deleted locally, it will eventually be deleted from OneDrive (after a period of time).

A backup is a binary equivalent of all the source data. True backups cannot be modified, and exist as a point-in-time reference snapshot.

asdff6• 2 years ago

Well its a little misleading considering they also have Windows Backup which is actually a proper device backup service.

senectus1• 2 years ago

One example is: OD uses stubs to save you local disk space. when you want the copy local you click it and it reaches out to the internet to get it.... If you lose the internet copy, you DONT HAVE a local copy... you only have a stub.

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Onedrive seems to be a badly wrapped Sharepoint and is quite annoying.

wjnc• 2 years ago

There is a lot of money on the table for Backblaze or any other party to organize more user friendly software that fills the gap between sync and backup, preferably both. Dropbox syncs my iPhone photos and all machines seamlessly. Compared to Backblaze, my backup storage, I’m paying $ 11 for sync software that works and does iOS photos. The other $ 1 is storage and backup. Pretty clear win for software.

mac-mc2• 2 years ago

I agree, a merged dropbox with borg backup / time machine style deduped history going back as far as you want to pay for, with a resolution control. One example: Save every version for the past few days, every hour for the past month, every day for the past 3 months, every week until 6 months, every month for the past X years, etc.

Will also need something to control software that goes really wild with new versions, or some specialized rule sets for software repos, video editing, etc.

Ransomware & compliance escrow would also work great for this, you could have contracts that wont allow deletion after X months no matter what the other organization says to help prevent social engineering or account take over attacks.

daft_pink2• 2 years ago

the problem is we all have macs with no hard drive space and we need thse services

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

I do not have a Mac anymore but I do have several computers and a phone and being able to access my documents from anywhere is very handy

nusl4• 2 years ago

Apple has iCloud natively that works mostly fine

skydhash2• 2 years ago

iCould is for syncing, not backup. Handy when you have multiple devices, but you should invest in a 3-2-1 solution. (which can be done easily by buying an external drive, and some space on another cloud provider). For better retention, get some software that can do snapshots.

asdff6• 2 years ago

2tb for $120 a year for the rest of your life. You might as well be paying the mob.

daft_pink2• 2 years ago

The issue is... how do you backup iCloud when it gets larger than your mac's hard drive, because of the massive number of photos you took on your iPhone?

zinodaur• 2 years ago

The article makes a big deal about ransomware/old data restoration, with the implication that backblaze backup supports it while the others do not. This is untrue - I think all of the competitors mentioned support rollbacks to specific points in time.

They do make a good point about full computer backups though. Id like to see support for automatic Time Machine ingestion by these clouds

velcrovan8• 2 years ago

Indeed, the content in those parts of the article is just flat wrong. I’m a longtime Backblaze customer and fan of their hard drive stats. This is the first time I’ve read something from them that felt at all “off”, let alone as wrong and gross as this.

jiveturkey• 2 years ago

I would take it as a pretty strong signal that their growth is slowing. Except that their Q4 was apparently good. The stock is suddenly down 15% in the last week, but I doubt they could or would react so quickly to that. It's still well above the 1mo and 6mo levels. IOW the recent uptick was a reaction to their Q4 but now it's regressing to their business as usual.

TLDR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

whoisthemachine2• 2 years ago

Object Lock serves as a digital vault, making data immutable for a specified period. It creates a virtual air gap...

"Virtual" and "air gap" is quite frankly an oxymoron. The two concepts are just at odds with one another. This article gives me misgivings about Backblaze as well.

CPLX• 2 years ago

Yeah I have the Dropbox packrat plan which I think covers basically everything discussed here.

a_gnostic• 2 years ago

Both Google and Microsoft, leading providers in this space, have announced the discontinuation of their unlimited storage plans.
Additionally, it’s essential to note that cloud drives, which are primarily sync services, do not offer comprehensive data protection.

There is no cloud. It's just other people's computers, and they don't care about your data except the parts useful to them.

Time to fire up the old RAID.

NoPedantsThanks• 2 years ago

Or just the toaster dock and some bare drives.

lostmsu2• 2 years ago

That's what I do. + another one like it offsite. With software RAID (Windows Storage Spaces).

redrove• 2 years ago

Obligatory RAID is not a backup.

3-2-1 is a backup strategy.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

Parity RAID disk setups have lost me more data then encrypted drives over the years. They seem to lead to eventual corruption and data loss, way earlier than straight doing nothing.

at_a_remove• 2 years ago

Counter: RAID is the backup between your other backups. A backup is, in the end, anything you turn to when you have some kind of failure. Which is appropriate depends on the type of failure. RAID is there for your hardware failures; "tape style" (how does one phrase this?) is there for your data deletion. (One could argue that a missing tine of the trident would be checksums, for data corruption)

Example: A small company with data they find important but it isn't a great volume and they don't have a huge budget. They do a backup of everything once every week or month (it doesn't matter).

Should a drive fail, the backups could be handy, but who wants to lose days of work? And so people turn to RAID.

Note that as your strategy/need evolves toward continual backups, backup and RAID begin to merge, expensively.

endisneigh• 2 years ago

Hot take: I’d rather buy another set of disks than use raid (0). And have manual backup.

conqrr• 2 years ago

Backblaze is cloud and suffers the major limitation of being expensive for an individual. The case for NAS for personal backup is getting stronger every day. For anything > 1TB, for personal backup or sync, a NAS is $400 investment whereas cloud would be $400 recurring cost which is ever increasing and has risks of ransomware etc.

awskinda• 2 years ago

It’s the same argument for the cloud. With Backblaze, I pay $x/month and someone else deals with OS/Software updates and hard drive failures. If I don’t outsource, I handle it myself for less.

It’s just a trade off based on how much time and comfort you have as a personal user.

gruez• 2 years ago

The typcial NAS doesn't offer geo-redundancy. You can colocate it to get that, but that also significantly increases cost, which makes cloud competitive again.

foobiekr4• 2 years ago

For a very long time neither did backblaze.

secabeen• 2 years ago

If this is personal backup, you can usually find another tech-savvy friend who will co-locate a secondary NAS for free.

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

Anecdote: I was desktop client lead for Syncplicity, a major competitor to Dropbox, ect.

One day a ticket was sent my way. A customer complained that some files were missing. Once I got logs from that customer's computer; it was clear, someone, or something, deleted those files... Four months ago.

A recent cost-savings initiative bumped the deleted file retention to ~3 months. The retention window had come and gone, and we deleted the customers' files from their recycle bin.

My response was basically: We need a longer retention plan if we're going to call ourselves "backup." The point of "backup" is to restore in cases like this, where someone (or something) accidentally deleted files.

I even had that lesson with some important music files. I shared them with the person who originally recorded the files, and they dragged and dropped them out of the shared folder. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized I needed to restore them. Because I had the VIP flag, I was able to restore them.

skydhash2• 2 years ago

My response was basically: We need a longer retention plan if we're going to call ourselves "backup." The point of "backup" is to restore in cases like this, where someone (or something) accidentally deleted files.

I'm using local backup software and it's pretty clear to me that versioned and trashed files still occupies space until I delete them permanently. If you provide 1TB of storage space, make it clear that the trash and versioning occupies some of that space instead of a random retention period. Ditto if it's unlimited and priced by usage.

refulgentis• 2 years ago

In your experience, at what point is the retention window sufficient? Naively, infinite must be the wrong answer, and any other answer from there seems like bikeshedding, but of course it does to me, who has 0 experience in the space

mac-mc2• 2 years ago

You charge for deleted file retention like it's any other thing that takes up space and let the customer decide how much they want to pay for. Some will want to pay for "5 years" worth, others won't care. To be extra good about it, maybe do it like borg backup and others and save the changes with dedup and compression. You can have literal years of file retention and have it take up less space than you think it would.

MyFedora2• 2 years ago

If you can recover everything, then the data retention is too high. If you can't recover anything, then the data retention is too low.

Find a sweet spot where you can satisfy most clients at a manageable cost. Offer problem clients a higher data retention for a premium.

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

A lot of responses in the thread say that deleted files should be counted in the quota. (And then stored until the user purges.)

I'm general, I think this is a good approach.

The consequence is that there is a certain class of user that won't understand this and will get confused when their account hits quota, but they don't see those files on their computer.

Another consequence is that we don't sync recycle bins, so it wouldn't be straightforward for users to purge it.

I personally think that moving deleted files to something like Glacier, (slow and cheap, think tape in the cloud,) and then having a separate recycle bin quota, is the best approach. (https://aws.amazon.com/pm/s3-glacier/?trk=75fef084-bf49-48b4...)

treflop• 2 years ago

As someone using cloud storage, the only answer is the amount I pay for.

I pay for one year with Backblaze (on the cheaper plan, it’s much shorter but they’re explicit about it) and I expect one year and they hold themselves to that one year. It’s a number we both decided on ahead of time.

For something like Google Drive or Dropbox, I expect no retention at all tbh. It’s a plus if I need it and they have it.

justinclift• 2 years ago

Isn't the retention window something that should be chosen by the customer?

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

Possibly, but:

That's confusing for non-technical people, and it makes the product more complicated.

Corner cases were the source of (almost) all of our bugs. (A configurable retention window will add corner cases.) What happens is that one customer will have a particular combination of corner cases that no one else has, and then that customer hits a bug that no one else will hit.

blop2• 2 years ago

Just use syncthing ...

jjice• 2 years ago

Was this a layup for the classic Dropbox comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

I really just want a nicer `borg-backup` that doesn't involve an SSH server. And to finally dust off my home server. And... and...

blop2• 2 years ago

Syncthing on at least one server with zfs or btrfs snapshots

AgentME• 2 years ago

Restic supports a similar feature set to Borg (open source, locally encrypted backups, content-addressed snapshots instead separate incremental+full backups, etc) but also works with dumb file hosts (S3, Backblaze B2, a local drive, etc).

asdff6• 2 years ago

These announcements on business limits have caused a lot of chaos at my workplace. People would abuse these unlimited plans and have terabytes of data on these services; IT put out an email to everyone to cut down to like 150gb. Even our own internal server is having issues with the filesystem filling up and people having to clear their directories or have their project be billed for more rack storage. It might be time to buy some stocks related to storage media, considering how much purchasing is probably about to happen this year from all these departments in all these businesses in the world today in need of storage space, although I guess I'm late on that looking at Hitachi's 5 year chart.

Kwpolska• 2 years ago

This is a badly written Backblaze advertisement. It’s full of incorrect information about the competitors — Dropbox and OneDrive do keep old versions of files, for at least 30 days (Google probably does too, but I couldn’t find a number.)

relyks2• 2 years ago

Dropbox also has options for version history to be kept a lot longer than 30 days: https://help.dropbox.com/delete-restore/extended-version-his...

chillfox• 2 years ago

30 days is way too short. In my experience, people either realise that they accidentally deleted a file immediately or after 3+ months. The day 2-90 period is rarely where a file needs to be recovered from.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

A recycle bin isn't a backup solution. 30 days is plenty and anything beyond that is ridiculous. If you need backups, implement backups.

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Dropbox has paid add-ons or higher priced tiers to bump your retention to 1-year. I have the add-on and I have used it just once (so far) but I feel happy that I can go back and look for a file that I might have deleted within the last 1-year.

This comes in handy when my local Time Machine go as far as just about 6 months or so. I might need to upgrade to a NAS and hook up a larger capacity drive.

xela79• 2 years ago

indeed, how can this article be impartial, at least they didn't "sponsor" a random site to post the content, and they themselves post it on their blog. But it is very clear that it is hard to take anything written on the blog as truth, seeing as the solution is their own product...

extr• 2 years ago

I use OneDrive on Mac and I find it a great tool. The bottom line is as a user I want two things:

* Enough storage at a reasonable price such that I "don't have to think about it"

* Some kind of online-aware virtual file system such that I can see my "online only" files right next to my "offline" files, and only download the online ones if I explictly download or try to access them.

I find many "hardcore" techy backup solutions recommended on HN and elsehwere miss this second bit. I don't particularly want to manage uploading a perfect byte-for-byte replica of my filesystem every month or whatever. I just want it to be magic. Perhaps occasionally I'll put things on my own external SSD. I guess if Microsoft data centers get nuked or whatever I'm SOL on the last 3 months of data updates. I don't really care. I just want the cloud to function as an extension of my local hard drive in the most seamless way possible.

fsmv2• 2 years ago

Have you seen syncthing?

scumola• 2 years ago

syncthing blows. Don't trust your data to it. Tons of posts on the forums about "out of sync" and no real answers other than "delete the database and start over". I've given syncthing a try over and over again for > 10 years and every time it fails to sync.

Use rsync.

jorvi• 2 years ago

* Enough storage at a reasonable price such that I "don't have to think about it"

Sadly for me only iCloud offers this with their 50GB for $1 tier. I basically need cloud sync to be a USB stick that’s plugged into all my computers simultaneously.

masa331• 2 years ago

Don't get me started on Dropbox web app... the worst cluster*uck of an user interface:

- super slow; scrolling often leaves you in a blank space for seconds when it's catching up; elements showing up on the page after you navigate there pushing things away from or under your cursor

- breadcrumbs in the folders sometimes showing, sometimes not

- different directory tree browsers in different parts of the app

- folder settings split between multiple different places. For something you have to go to Admin console, for something you have to go back to normal viewer

- multiple types of flash messages, showing after different actions, often doubling themselves

- actions in dropdown menus for the same thing ordered differently based on where you currently are

I'm so happy that we are migrating away to our own solution

relyks2• 2 years ago

The web interface used to be so much better. Why does everything always experience bloat and enshittification over time? :(

layer8• 2 years ago

Why would you use the web app though?

ghshephard• 2 years ago

As a Dropbox user of about 12 years, I started with the thick-client, but, working on 5 separate systems (work, home windows, home linux, home macbookAir, Travel NUC) - I just .. stopped installing the thick client. I'm 100% webapp user, even on the one (two?) systems where the thick client is present.

bluedino• 2 years ago

The limitations of cloud drives, for me, is the simple fact that they are seriously restricted by any company with cybersecurity policies.

Our only choice is the lord and savior, Onedrive, since our BIG_COMPANY is all-in on Microsoft. S3 is allowed as well but that's mainly because it's used in so much other than file sharing.

Dropbox is the devil. Google drive is virus central. Backblaze, Box.com, and the rest aren't even on the radar, but blocked by category.

k__• 2 years ago

For some use-cases ArDrive could be a reasonable alternative.

Pay once, store forever.

https://ardrive.arweave.dev

ukuina• 2 years ago

Interesting idea, but 1TB of storage would cost $13k!

bityard2• 2 years ago

I currently have 2.2 TB of personal data on my NAS. If I wanted to get it all into the cloud, ArDrive is quoting me $28,902. It will break even against Backblaze B2 in 133 years.

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

It will break even against Backblaze B2 in 133 years.

I'd say an even better comparison is glacier deep archive. Let's say an average of one retrieval per decade. $2.18 per month for storage, $210 per retrieval (which is 90% egress cost that you might be able to avoid), 600 years at current pricing.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

I've got a Nextcloud humming away in my attic. It gets backed up to my office systems. NC has a recycle bin too.

Self hosted is not for everyone but at what point is your stuff important enough for you to really take responsibility for it. Do you simply Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever or do you do it yourself and self host or get a family member/friend do it or engage someone to do it for you.

You do have choices. Even if you lack the skills to self host you can engage someone to set it up for you. You probably don't plumb your own bog 'n' bath and yet you own a toilet and bath/shower/whatever that works. A trade has fixed that up for you in return for some consideration.

So, do the calculus for yourself: How important is your data, what sort of losses if any are sustainable. What are the risks ... have you done a home fire risk assessment - do one, its not hard. Fire blanket in the kitchen (ban towels drying on the oven), one shot ladders (that sit in the bottom of a wardrobe - inform guests - make a joke of it) for upstairs bedrooms, foam fire extinguishers - one or more per floor. Plan for escape. £500 or so per five years is a very rough budget for hardware. By law you probably should also have battery backed, mains powered smoke detectors already, so I don't count that in the budget. If not, then get some and test them.

UPS ... get one, especially if your storage does not include a battery backed RAID controller. File systems are rubbish with holes in them. APC and others do several small units for home use with domestic plugs (in the UK we get our fearsome three pin plug sockets). Get PoE+ switches - Netgear and others do reasonably cheap switches. That smart doorbell really should be PoE powered with UPS backup ...

If you are reading HN then there is a good chance you are either an engineer of some sort or the sort of person who thinks like one. Once you have worked out the risks and costs and yes, some of those costs might include being kicked from here to tomorrow by a partner (where are my photos?), then you can create a plan. I'll leave it up to you how you squirrel away the costs but please ... pretty please ... do a proper plan for this sort of stuff and whilst you are at it do a reasonably wide risk assessment. You might want to cover "everything" as you might at work - it can be quite cathartic.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

Why Nextcloud over something simpler like Syncthing?

nine_k• 2 years ago

Maybe it offers not just a backup?

BTW Syncthing is not exactly a backup solution; it's a sync solution, with an ability to have staggered versions of changed files.

Something like Restic or Kopia is a proper backup solution, with encrypted versioned data good for off-premises storage, and an ability to mount a point-in-time backup.

gerdesj2• 2 years ago

I run several Nextclouds including one for safety critical docs for several 1000 people. I know NC quite well.

Ironically, I have a snag with my personal photos syncing from my phone which will probably involve some SQL but I did try to go off piste in a way that your average user doesn't.

NC is very reliable and since a few years ago, the phone clients have stabilized nicely. The desktop clients have been pretty decent for much longer.

Across the various systems I manage I think I've seen most or at least several corner cases. My home instance has few users with a large number of files. My wife's photo collection is legendary. The instance with the safety docs involves a lot (lot) of PDFs generated by a few people on PCs, that are shared with many tablet/phone based users over variably connected links. If the docs are not there, some things are not allowed to happen.

I've got some instances behind HA Proxy and some behind whatever MS's Azure proxy offering is called. One is behind Apache only and another nginx only but they both do have quite a lot of log file watcher (OK call it an application firewall) and network traffic analysers.

Syncthing has its place but I need rather more in most of these cases and NC has a lot of modules. For example the safety useful system has rather a lot of logging for doc creation, amendment and access. My life becomes briefly rather miserable if my wife's photos are not available for posting on FB. NC has an "impersonate user" thing which cuts through quite a lot of the IT to end user confusion. You can look at their account as they see it. I also have Mesh Central ...

geor9e• 2 years ago

Summary: This is an ad for Backblaze. It adds unlimited versioning backups for your Google Drive etc. Nothing in it was news, if you're already familiar with the difference.

foobiekr4• 2 years ago

On Christmas Day, iCloud drive's 2TB plan decided to roll back some of my important files to a version from mid October.

I know this because I am meticulous about backups and these particular files are encrypted private records. I don't trust software but I especially don't trust that backups will correctly handle sparse disk images since they are spread out over hundreds of files; so I always keep the output of mtree in that directory for the current version. I had checked the mtree file, edited some of the files contained therein, and regenerated it the night before; SOME but not all of the sparseimage subfiles had rolled back to October. Changed timestamps, changed hashes, the image did mount but the enclosed files were from October (they have date-stamped rows).

So when I went to open the disk image, the next day, and ran mtree to test the directory first, it noted the changes above.

I moved to icloud drive about two years ago. I'd previously had some problems with Apple's sync blowing away some notes in notes.app so when I moved everything from Dropbox (where my paid account for 7 years never lost or corrupted a file to my knowledge - and my knowledge is good because this mtree habit I just described goes back a decade!) to iCloud, I kept this habit up, and good thing.

To this day I don't know how it decided October or ended up replacing them. Maybe there was some local cache, I don't know. I did not revert the file in iCloud and nobody else has access to my account. Further, it only partially rolled the image back.

I had never had a problem up to that point, but I will say, with storage, once is too many times. Back to dropbox.

bombcar3• 2 years ago

The ATP podcast was mentioning someone who had a similar issue.

Apples cloud is drippy.

foobiekr4• 2 years ago

Yeah. Weird paranoid habits massively saved me. I no longer trust icloud drive at all.

My backup discipline is excellent because back in the early 2000s we lost a drive which I had not been backing up and it had months of contract work on it; I ended up paying $2500 plus $30 per _CDROM_ burned for the content from that drive... it was just barely worth it.

kccqzy• 2 years ago

Apple has lost my data in iCloud Photo Library as well as in Contacts Sync. I don't trust that for anything important.

znpy• 2 years ago

If you use iCloud for backup you’re not meticulous about backup.

foobiekr4• 2 years ago

If you would reread you would see that it’s for online files, not backups, you know, what iCloud is for, but feel free to ignore the actual content to pretend be smart.

Recognizing the limitations of cloud drives

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