Upon the write up and coverage of BackBlaze yesterday on TechCrunch, I decided to download and try BackBlaze, the online backup tool. As writen by others, its entering a bit of a tough arena as there are quite a few established competitors, all of whom are probably trying to grow the space. At $5 a pop for unlimited data storage and transfer, however, its a deal I had to check out, particularly as they had a 15 day trial period.
… Man, did I want to like this product.
There are one big problem I had with the trial that made me stop “trying” it out.
You don’t select the files you want to back up. You *exclude* the ones you *don’t*. The problem, I think, is that the well meaning folks behind BackBlaze assume that you have your files organized into a well organized architecture. That way, its *easy* for their users to *deselect* the files or media they don’t want. They would just — for example — go to the “video” folder and unselect that.
If you’re like me, the reality is that you probably don’t. I have different file types of varying importance scattered across my hard drive. For me to find the one’s I *don’t* want to back up, is a such a colossal hassle, its a deal killer, because I obviously don’t want to include every single file on my hard drive (excluding windows and operations-type ones).
The result? On default, BackBlaze *tries* to upload everything it sees, and I got a screen that says that it will “only” take about 82 days to upload all my junk.
The irony, of course is that because I’m too lazy to exclude the files I don’t want to upload, the time it takes to upload vastly exceeds the 15 day trial. In fact, I was hoping to just *include* a few directories (or a few gigabytes of storage) to see how the rest of the service goes.
Sadly I won’t get that chance, as my gerbil-like attention span just killed any desire to do so. If and when Backblaze changes this, I won’t be coming back to it. As it stands there are too many other competitors to try at the moment.
September 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pm | Permalink
Tony, thank you for trying out the Backblaze service. I wanted to share our thoughts on why we went with the “exlude” model and how you can try the service.
Despite “include” type solutions existing for a decade, 94% of users do not regularly backup. When we asked why, the response we got was “it is too hard.” And the primary reason was exactly what you said - their files were scattered and they didn’t have time to organize, find, and decide which ones to backup. So they just didn’t.
Since our mission was for everyone to backup, we wanted to make it 1-click easy, which led us to our approach: backup everything.
In terms of your 82 days. I assume that means you have hundreds of GB of data, far above the average as most users are backed up in a week or two. If there are media types on your system that you do not want to backup, you can simply exclude them by file type. If you have lots of movies, one or two file type exclusions may bring you down to a couple weeks to backup.
Finally, the 15-day trial was meant to try the service - not to finish the backup. You can try the entire service end-to-end, including doing a test restore at any point.
Again, thank you for trying the service and I hope you’ll consider using it to backup your data. (If not, I just hope you use something.)
Thank you,
Gleb
September 17th, 2008 at 4:40 pm | Permalink
@Gleb — I agree that the problems I have may not be the same as the majority of your customers, and if that’s the case, that’s great for you.
On the other hand, to reframe the issue I was trying to bring up, the problem is that I would like to back up *some* video files, and *some* audio files, but not all of them.
Since they’re scattered across a few hard drives, and i’m too lazy / busy to collage them into easy-to-find folders, it is quite difficult for me to “exclude” everything else.
And you’re right about the size — its in the hundreds of megabytes. I don’t think that this is an unreasonable size, however, given how many “critical” pieces of data for most families are probably photos and video.
Cheers
t @ dji
September 18th, 2008 at 12:37 pm | Permalink
I haven’t tested the system, but just based on these comments … why the hell isn’t there an *option* for exclusion or inclusion?
September 18th, 2008 at 2:11 pm | Permalink
Matt and Tony, our first prototype was actually the inclusion model, but most users rejected it because they didn’t know how or didn’t want to take the time to find all the files they wanted to backup and were constantly concerned they would miss or forget one. The whole point was to make backups happen in a hands-off fashion.
Matt, we considered adding an option for both, but since every option adds complexity, we decided to leave it off for now. At some point we may add that.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Gleb
September 21st, 2008 at 7:28 pm | Permalink
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