Interesting... If i am reading this right, to store 1TB there its costs EUR2.05 per month. uploading and downloading are "free" but only from the non vault. You upload and download from a tmp storage, which, after either 7 days or when you say, gets put into permanent storage. that move is what costs EUR0.01 per gig... hence, uploading 1TB will cost EUR10.24. uploads can use FTP, SFTP, Rsync or SCP and they also an API too... might try this out... handy for photo storage...
No mention of what technology is backing the service, however I like the support for existing file transfer protocols (particularly SFTP), no need to wait for or build yourself an integration, existing tooling just works.
From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.
Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.
It says on the page that there's a 7 days window during which your data is freely accessible and mutable, after which it is permanently stored in the homemade infrastructure.
Each of the drives in a Vault has a standard Linux file system,
ext4, on it. This is where the shards are stored. There are
fancier file systems out there, but we don’t need them for
Vaults. All that is needed is a way to write files to disk, and
read them back. Ext4 is good at handling power failure on a
single drive cleanly, without losing any files. It’s also good at
storing lots of files on a single drive, and providing efficient
access to them.
We upgraded the Linux 64-bit OS from Debian 4 to Debian 5, but we
no longer use JFS as the file system. We selected JFS years ago
for its ability to accommodate large volumes and low CPU usage,
and it worked well. However, ext4 has since matured in both
reliability and performance, and we realized that with a little
additional effort we could get all the benefits and live within
the unfortunate 16 terabyte volume limitation of ext4. One of the
required changes to work around ext4’s constraints was to add
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) above the RAID 6 but below the file
system. In our particular application (which features more writes
than reads), ext4’s performance was a clear winner over ext3,
JFS, and XFS.
This looks great and seems feature-rich enough to get started with straight away! I'll definitely check it out for server backups over scp.
My only suggestion is that you have a native English speaker proofread the text on your website. There are a few grammatical and translation errors which make the service seem less professional.
With C14 you create a "safe", you upload your data, and once done (or after 7 days), they archive your safe. To retrieve data, you need to ask for the safe to be unarchived and you get access back to your data, for 7 days.
Here: "A file contains a sequence of bytes. Any file on your computer can be uploaded to B2 and stored in a Cloud Storage, as long as it's not too big. Files can range in size from 0 bytes to 5 billion bytes. "
Thanks. I was using rclone last time to upload files and that's when I had hit the file limit. So I googled and found the link I provided in my comment. It appears that rclone does not support large file upload! hm...
I tried to use B2 recently but was being forced to enter a phone number. Waiting for a response from support, but so far that's blocking me from using B2. I don't know if C14 is better or not.
Yo! Sorry, yes. To sign in to the web for Backblaze B2 you can choose to have 2FV enabled - though we require that you at least set up the phone to do this. 2FV is like 2FA except in our implementation, at the moment, the only 2nd factor is a phone. 2FA tends to have a few more options (like apps and such) but it's essentially the same thing.
>only for use on desktops
This doesn't seem true. I can use several scripting solutions from my VMs. For example, I am using rclone to sync my backups to ACD.
Whoah. I had no idea about this. That's massively cheaper than Google and Dropbox. Is there some catch about max download size limits per day or something?
Very interesting. Aside from the slight inconvenience of not being able to use standard tools like ftp, scp and rsync... Amazon Cloud Drive's $60 a year plan (https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/) is still significantly cheaper for storing more than ~2.5TB. It's also free of charges per operation and such like.
Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.
Can anyone with direct and frequent experience with Amazon Drive comment on how well the product's been working out for them overall?
I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use, but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.
Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that have subsequently been removed locally.
> The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync
note that you can use many other clients like for example "Arq Backup" or "acd_cli" ( https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli ) to transfer files to Amazon Cloud Drive.
I've been fairly happy with it... though I'm not a heavy user. I've mostly used it to backup pictures and email.
I use rclone (http://rclone.org/) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out.
Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.
Mmm... true. Though if you're truly paranoid then you'll never really trust anyone to encrypt your data. :)
I use tools like attic (https://attic-backup.org/) to create encrypted snapshots of my backups.
My experience is entirely based around using the service through their REST API, so probably not relevant to your case specifically, but perhaps useful for others. $60/yr for unlimited is impossible to beat for my use case (>4TB of data with potential for downloading most of that).
The REST API is dodgy at the best of times. About 1 in 4 requests fail with random errors (Internal Server Error, Timeout, TooManyRequests, Temporarily Unavailable, etc). The API has an aggressive authentication scheme that requires re-auth every 5 minutes or so. Detecting when re-auth is needed is done by waiting for an Unauthorized error on any request. At least, that's what the spec says. What actually happens is that it returns 401 sometimes, and other times it returns a generic 4xx or 5xx class error with the error's message mentioning that the auth token has expired (sometimes the error message even says 401 Unauthorized, even though the actual error code isn't 401).
Upload speed is quite bad, in part due to the constant errors requiring re-tries and backoff, but mostly because the total response round-trip time is slow. This is particularly cumbersome for many small uploads.
Recently I've been getting waves of TooManyRequests errors, where it will only return TooManyRequests for a day, or even a whole week, making the service unavailable to me (currently in contact with them to see if this can get fixed).
So in other words, I've been using the service for about 5 months and managed to upload only ~1TB of data to the drive (on a 20Mb/s up line). From what I hear the official client suffers similar issues in terms of sync-ing speed.
For $60/yr and no real alternative for me, I feel I'm getting what I pay for. I just wish the API wouldn't completely die for days on end.
>> Your important data are encrypted AES-256 and replicated many times then stored in our 25 meters deep underground fallout shelter, located in Paris, with no known natural, technological and military risks.
Yeah, it's pretty silly to say "no military risk" about any single location. Yes, France is as geopolitically stable location as there is on Earth, but it's also part of NATO and NATO has rivals, like Russia and China, with whom they may go to war with in the future. France has been invaded in the past, and may be again.
If you're really concerned about possibilities like that, you should be storing your data redundantly such that it's unlikely that all the locations would be on the same side of a war. France is a good choice for one location; now choose one non-NATO superpower (China?) and one unaligned nation (Brazil? India? Egypt?).
You want to be reasonably certain that at least one location would be either neutral or the victor in any war. Only then can you say you're as close to 'no military risk' as you can get.
tl;dr: a cheap data archival solution; upload is free, storage is cheap (€0.002 / GB / mo), download is somewhat less cheap (€0.01 / GB) and not instant; rsync / sftp IS supported for upload, but an API call is needed to complete the operation.
Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from, but would like to keep just in case.
(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)
It's nice that the customer actually gets to control the encryption key. I'm not too knowledgeable on secure cloud storage systems, but from what I've heard about other cloud storage systems that encrypt files, it's typically the cloud hoster who controls the keys.
On "other cloud storage systems", nothing is stopping you from encrypting your files before uploading them.
This is exactly what I do for personal files that I upload to S3/Glacier for archival purposes -- they are GPG encrypted before ever being transmitted.
You have the option with Backblaze to add an additional layer of privacy via a user-selected passphrase. This passphrase will be used to encrypt your private key. This passphrase is your responsibility to remember and safeguard. This is important: if you forget or lose this passphrase there is no way that anyone, including Backblaze, can decrypt, and thus restore, your data. When you choose to add your own passphrase there is no “forgot passphrase” mechanism as Backblaze does not know your passphrase.
The one advantage of this business nobody is mentioning so far is that they've been around since 1999. The first thing I do when I see "long-term" or "put all your data in our hands" is see if they're a recent, VC-backed company. If they're recent, then they might be inexperienced. If they have a good team, then the product and network are still new with bugs waiting to be found. If they're VC-backed, then run. The reason being they'll sell out eventually with the service and your data possibly going offline. Happens way too much.
So, for anything long-term, I always recommend going with an established company with a track record for innovation. I don't know these people but they've been hosting since 1999. That means they showed up during a hard time [1] for IT then lasted and improved until 2016. I don't know if they're VC-backed or the quality of their product. Looks innovative, though, for a 90's era company. So, altogether a nice, first impression without the sell-out risk common among storage providers that show up on HN a lot.
Note: One can still use VC-backed providers so long as they're just one among many you use. That way you yourself can exit when they do without threat to operations.
Why is regular FTP even supported for so called secure storage?
So far it reads as secure 'because we say it is secure'? I find the whole idea of putting your data on hardware other control and still consider it 'secure' a bit strange. Though that might be just my twisted mind.
Also note they charge for internal traffic (and im not sure if you can measure these yourself to make sure the invoice is correct.):
"An operation is an action between your temporary safe-deposit box and C14 infrastructure: Archiving, Unarchiving, Destruction or Verification.
Transactions are billed according to the volume of data to be processed at a price of € 0.01 / GB"
Amazon has always been extremely expensive in storage. I wanted to start a company doing online backups because every option was outrageously expensive. Like, so expensive I could just buy new disks and host them myself every 2 months for what they were trying to charge. (A disk lasts about 3 to 4 years, so that's a >2000% profit margin.)
Only Backblaze had unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month, but I wanted to upload multiple terabytes from a server and they only allowed uploading stuff through their custom, closed-source client.
I didn't have enough time to get my backup service off the ground, but prices have been getting significantly better since then (this was two or three years ago). Dropbox, Google Drive and others are now nearly reasonable and Amazon is lagging behind a bit. I'm still waiting for another price cut, and C14 seems to be doing it. Backblaze B2 is also interesting, but it has other issues again.
I honestly might pay for this service because they used the word "data" correctly (it's the plural of datum) which got me to keep reading long enough to get to the numbers.
If they hadn't hijacked my browser's scrollbar, I might have kept reading.
Can anyone compare the advantages of C14 to, say, S4 by Least Authority? I kind of like not having to trust my service providers for security when encryption does the job well enough.
It works super well with NoScript, aside from the pricing calculator (obviously). The worst sites are the ones that hijack your scrollbar and use JavaScript for layout.
Intuitively, it seems sub-optimal (for Americans and Canadians) to send your backup across the Atlantic ocean - probably slower than something on the same continent.
You have to pay a 1 € to add or get back the data, so it's more for long term storage. I don't think the speed of transfering data is hugely crucial in this case.
Their comparison section looks like an advertisement for Backblaze B2. C14 looked interesting until I got to that part. Now, I'm not sure why I would choose C14 over Backblaze.
I think there may be something missing in the comparison table.
When I look at the prices of Backblaze, https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html it is $0.05 for 1 mo but in the table on the website of C14, it's written "free"
Also I think Backblaze is geared towards backing up your Desktop with its own client software, or can I use regular scp/ftp/etc(standard transfer utilties) to do my own upload/download?
Backblaze "B2" is a separate service for blob storage with a REST API. It's currently in public beta. I presume its built on the same infrastructure. You can store about 10GB for free if you want to play around with it. (backblaze.com/b2/docs)
I am confused: what is the "Cost of Operation"? Is that a one-time fee? For 1.3 TB of data, they are quoting something like 2.58 per month and 12.88 "Cost of operation".
After reading the page the 'cost of operation' might be what happened before-your-download and after-your-upload, as you are dealing with its deposit-cache-storage, so I assume it means 'archive-from-deposit/unarchive-to-deposit'. This is the same as charging for download(so download is _not_ free), and nearly the same as charging for upload(unless you remove the uploaded content from deposit quickly).
For Glacier I believe the download is not free? You need pay for the retrieval of stored data.
For anyone else who was wondering what "80 Go" means, it's 80GB.
It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French call their bytes "octets" -- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps variant of theirs or something.
As a French, I'm ashamed at the lack of effort taken to properly translate this page. I wouldn't care so much if it was a random individual who just want to get their thing out, but here we have one of the french biggest companies in cloud offerings.
109 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadBut here we actually want the upload rate, so it would take even longer.
How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
They have since migrated to ext4, but judging by their job description they might still have JFS in use. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/seeking-data-protectors/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0rev...https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers
My only suggestion is that you have a native English speaker proofread the text on your website. There are a few grammatical and translation errors which make the service seem less professional.
What's with the downvotes?
Here: "A file contains a sequence of bytes. Any file on your computer can be uploaded to B2 and stored in a Cloud Storage, as long as it's not too big. Files can range in size from 0 bytes to 5 billion bytes. "
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/files.html
EDIT: Actually it's in progress: https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456
EDIT2: It is actually already implemented in v1.30!
If so, what kind of verification is it used for?
In any case, thanks for responding here!
Thanks again for the info!
Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.
The use of standards (rsync, sftp, etc...) makes C14 very attractive.
I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use, but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.
Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that have subsequently been removed locally.
note that you can use many other clients like for example "Arq Backup" or "acd_cli" ( https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli ) to transfer files to Amazon Cloud Drive.
I use rclone (http://rclone.org/) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out.
Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.
(unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)
The REST API is dodgy at the best of times. About 1 in 4 requests fail with random errors (Internal Server Error, Timeout, TooManyRequests, Temporarily Unavailable, etc). The API has an aggressive authentication scheme that requires re-auth every 5 minutes or so. Detecting when re-auth is needed is done by waiting for an Unauthorized error on any request. At least, that's what the spec says. What actually happens is that it returns 401 sometimes, and other times it returns a generic 4xx or 5xx class error with the error's message mentioning that the auth token has expired (sometimes the error message even says 401 Unauthorized, even though the actual error code isn't 401).
Upload speed is quite bad, in part due to the constant errors requiring re-tries and backoff, but mostly because the total response round-trip time is slow. This is particularly cumbersome for many small uploads.
Recently I've been getting waves of TooManyRequests errors, where it will only return TooManyRequests for a day, or even a whole week, making the service unavailable to me (currently in contact with them to see if this can get fixed).
So in other words, I've been using the service for about 5 months and managed to upload only ~1TB of data to the drive (on a 20Mb/s up line). From what I hear the official client suffers similar issues in terms of sync-ing speed.
For $60/yr and no real alternative for me, I feel I'm getting what I pay for. I just wish the API wouldn't completely die for days on end.
So, only one location.
If you're really concerned about possibilities like that, you should be storing your data redundantly such that it's unlikely that all the locations would be on the same side of a war. France is a good choice for one location; now choose one non-NATO superpower (China?) and one unaligned nation (Brazil? India? Egypt?).
You want to be reasonably certain that at least one location would be either neutral or the victor in any war. Only then can you say you're as close to 'no military risk' as you can get.
Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from, but would like to keep just in case.
(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)
and upload and download are both free, operations (archiving/unarchiving?, et al) are not
Unless they changed it in the space of 16 minutes, I think you might of wanted to give a closer look for making your tl;dr
Another page, the specs, does not seem to override my scrolling, so that feels fantastic indeed but it's probably not what you mean.
This is exactly what I do for personal files that I upload to S3/Glacier for archival purposes -- they are GPG encrypted before ever being transmitted.
You have the option with Backblaze to add an additional layer of privacy via a user-selected passphrase. This passphrase will be used to encrypt your private key. This passphrase is your responsibility to remember and safeguard. This is important: if you forget or lose this passphrase there is no way that anyone, including Backblaze, can decrypt, and thus restore, your data. When you choose to add your own passphrase there is no “forgot passphrase” mechanism as Backblaze does not know your passphrase.
https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html
So, for anything long-term, I always recommend going with an established company with a track record for innovation. I don't know these people but they've been hosting since 1999. That means they showed up during a hard time [1] for IT then lasted and improved until 2016. I don't know if they're VC-backed or the quality of their product. Looks innovative, though, for a 90's era company. So, altogether a nice, first impression without the sell-out risk common among storage providers that show up on HN a lot.
Note: One can still use VC-backed providers so long as they're just one among many you use. That way you yourself can exit when they do without threat to operations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
So far it reads as secure 'because we say it is secure'? I find the whole idea of putting your data on hardware other control and still consider it 'secure' a bit strange. Though that might be just my twisted mind.
Also note they charge for internal traffic (and im not sure if you can measure these yourself to make sure the invoice is correct.):
"An operation is an action between your temporary safe-deposit box and C14 infrastructure: Archiving, Unarchiving, Destruction or Verification. Transactions are billed according to the volume of data to be processed at a price of € 0.01 / GB"
Do your math before simply signing up, my penny.
Mik (Online.net staff)
Only Backblaze had unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month, but I wanted to upload multiple terabytes from a server and they only allowed uploading stuff through their custom, closed-source client.
I didn't have enough time to get my backup service off the ground, but prices have been getting significantly better since then (this was two or three years ago). Dropbox, Google Drive and others are now nearly reasonable and Amazon is lagging behind a bit. I'm still waiting for another price cut, and C14 seems to be doing it. Backblaze B2 is also interesting, but it has other issues again.
Can anyone compare the advantages of C14 to, say, S4 by Least Authority? I kind of like not having to trust my service providers for security when encryption does the job well enough.
Also, can I use this with duplicity?
Edit: this seems to be it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969786
For Glacier I believe the download is not free? You need pay for the retrieval of stored data.
It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French call their bytes "octets" -- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps variant of theirs or something.
There is no cloud, only other person's computers.