Ask HN: Alternative to Backblaze

2 points by adrianomartins 2 years ago | 5 comments

I'm looking for cloud back up service to seamlessly backup a 8TB external drive. Backblaze does this perfectly, but you have to plugin your HD every 30 days (otherwise the backup will void) and the whole experience is a bit dated (pretty much the same experience from 10 years ago).

Some context: I've been a user of Backblaze for 10 years. It's impressive how very little the product has change. I guess it's a testament of how good the product was back then, and how good it is today at solving this specific pain. I'm sure a lot as been changing behind the scenes, but the user experience is 95% the same. My opinion is that in 2023 the standard for UX/UI is much much higher than 10-15 years ago and Backblaze is falling being, by a lot.

The current experience and price point are OK, OK enough that I don't change to other online backup provider, but also only OK enough that every once in a while I make a quick search for `Backblaze alternative`. Although the product works as intended I feel the experience is very outdated and that there's a LOT to improve on the app and website.

I'm a hobby photographer and every month I have several more GB to back up to the cloud in fear my local HD(s) will break down, as happened before. Backblazed already saved 10% of my catalog once before.

night-rider 2 years ago |

https://filen.io/

adrianomartins 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the share. Too bad that service only goes up to 2TB... I'm at 8TB already, and going up.

elmerfud 2 years ago |

It's difficult to make a recommendation when you're not sighting any problems that you're having or new features that you want or think would be valuable. The main criticism you have appears to be able to be summed up as it's not new and shiny. As if your backup provider is some bauble that you wear around your neck for others to see.

You do say that you feel that there's a lot that can be improved and you feel the experiences dated but there is not one example provided of what you believe an improvement would be. Not in workflows not in features not in anything. Products like backblaze rarely change unless there is obvious sellable features. I imagine they don't get a lot of feedback on actionable features and improvements that they could make.

This type of product is not sold based on feelings it's sold based on function. Is your backup provider functional, are the workflows intuitive and functional, does the UI work in the sense that it allows you to do things in a way that you're used to. Updating things to just be new and shiny without meaningful feature or workflow improvements absolutely destroy businesses. There is a reason places like Amazon still have a website that looks very dated compared to the modern browser lagging garbage that people think is so hot. When you have a UI/UX that's established and your users are used to it changing it is the best way to chase them away. Unless of course that change comes with very meaningful enhancements to how the work is done.

Is your backup provider supposed to be a trendy thing you can brag about to your friends? Honestly I don't know any backup provider that feels trendy and gives me the feels when I look at their apps or their websites. Mostly something like that would actually turn me off from them because generally places that invest heavily in front end spit and polish lack horribly in the back end. While I personally don't use backblaze I do believe that they are one of the more robust and better backend providers.

Last time I communicated with them it was very easy to get a hold of people in the executive team and they were open to suggestions and ideas. I imagine if you have actionable suggestions about improving the look and feel in a meaningful way to make the product easier to use they would consider it.

Personally I use SpiderOak for my backup. I think backblaze is a fine product it just didn't have the features that I wanted and SpiderOak did. It is also something that has not been updated in quite some time because it is functional as it is currently. I would actually take the opposite approach of you if my backup provider all of a sudden updated their app and changed it to look more trendy and modern it would be frustrating because my first thing would be now where do I go to select additional files for backup or do a restore or check on status and so forth. That would make me look to another provider because if I have to relearn a UI but not have any new functionality, I can just as easily relearn a UI on a different provider.

adrianomartins 2 years ago | |

I intended to make this submission about an alternative and not so much criticism about Backblaze. But you're right, I vaguely made some criticism and I definitely think it warrants a better explanation.

I also 100% agree with what you say about product updates, I want my backup provider to be relatively static and slow in changing their product as long as it is robust and it does the job.

On the more specific reasons I think Backblaze is a little far behind in UI/UX: - It's very hard (or impossible) to know if you're 100% backed up after you add new files to your HD. - When you go to the website to check if your new files are backedup, the web page is extremely slow and outdated (I'm talking windows xp style interface iframed into a modern page). - When you get a new HD, because you're constantly filling this things up, the transition process is very sketchy, to say the least. Technically you go through the same process as when you loose an HD, which might make sense, but the process is very slow and the user doesn't get much feedback as to the progress and state of it. Which is particularly nerve-racking when you're dealing with a huge and priceless treasure trove of information.

That said I do have to make a caveat in favor of Backblaze. Not only it is reasonably priced (100$/year, new pricing), Backblaze seems to be design to run continuously on computers with lots of storage and with their HDs connected at all time. That's why they don't bother giving the information about the completeness of your backup, or even making a good web UI for it, because I guess their target user just turns on Backblaze and never really looks back at it. And forget about sharing files through Backblaze, it is 100% a backup tool, not a modern cloud file tool.

It should be said that I fall a bit off their target user, I want to backup my external drives that are connected only when I add new files, and not my whole computer, all the time. This is also the motivation to once in a while look for an alternative in hopes of finding a better solution.

Thanks for the tip on SpiderOak, I'll have a look into it.

elmerfud 2 years ago | | |

I can see that being a very large gap if it is not easy to see if your files are actually backed up or not. That kind of surprises me a little bit that back blaze doesn't have that but again it's been many years since I've used them and I only did briefly.

That is one of the features that is very easy to see in spider oak. The UI opens to a dashboard that tells you the number of items and bytes that are outstanding and waiting to be uploaded. One other thing about spider oak is there's not an automatic retention like I believe you said 30 days you have to plug in the hard drives to keep them refreshed. In spider oak I've had systems that have been offline for years and the backup is still retained until I manually go delete that system to have its data purged. One of the other features I do like about them is their hive that allows you to synchronize between systems as well. So depending on your requirements you can back up things to their cloud for redundancy and maybe things that are of a lower priority you can simply have it synchronized between various systems.

The One singular feature that sold me on spider oak as opposed to every other provider I looked at was their Linux support. How they don't really treat Linux or even a Windows servers as different from any other thing you're backing up. You purchase your amount of cloud data and they don't care.

Just doing a little more looking at my spider oak and their UI I feel can be a little bit slow at times especially navigating large amounts of files but I did double check this and nothing gets automatically purged from their system based on time. Even files that are deleted from your local system simply go into their deleted items bucket and they are there in perpetuity until you manually go purge it to free up space.