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.