I cancelled their account. It has a weird policy of deleting backups from hard drives that have not been connected within the last 3 months. Very weird policy.
It’s one month, not three, but the policy is totally reasonable since they charge one flat rate to back up your whole computer (not everything your computer has ever seen). If they didn’t delete disconnected drives, they’d be offering unlimited storage for $50/year which is obviously unsystainable. The plan is already as impressive as it is considering how much data you can easily connect to one computer.
I also have plenty of complaints about the service (posted above), but there’s nothing weird about this policy as written.
What’s weird is when permanently connected drives get classified as disconnected (see my other post).
Whilst I agree the policy is reasonable given the amount they charge per month, it's something I've only learnt about from reading comments and not from their marketing.
In fact, their marketing claims "Never lose a file again. Get unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC. Just $5/month."
Only on reading the help does it seem that if the client doesn't connect with the server within 6 months, then all your backups are gone. I'm not saying this is unreasonable, but it seems a bit counterintuitive given you are still paying for the service. I just still haven't found the bit about disconnected drives.
I really like Backblaze's articles on HDDs and they really seem to be customer focused, but I had to dig in the help to find this.
Slightly tangential. I usually don't trust any company that offers something "unlimited" for a limited amount of money. I usually suspect, and believe, that they're overselling their capacity and then have the low volume users subsidize the high volume ones (so the former are paying a lot more than they should be). Such companies also tend to have undocumented limits that you'd know only when they tell you that you've hit them (and that limit would be dynamic).
For something as critical as data backups, I prefer that those companies stay in business and charge something that's a bit more proportional to their underlying costs. That's honesty and fairness, in my view.
Yev from Backblaze here -> We do have a 30-day retention window. So if the data is on your computer, or the externals are connected we'll keep a copy of it, but if the drives are removed and/or the data is removed from your computer, the 30-day timer starts. For an archive solution that keeps data for as long as you want we built out Backblaze B2, which is $0.005/GB!
aikinai|8 years ago
I also have plenty of complaints about the service (posted above), but there’s nothing weird about this policy as written.
What’s weird is when permanently connected drives get classified as disconnected (see my other post).
dpwm|8 years ago
In fact, their marketing claims "Never lose a file again. Get unlimited cloud backup for your Mac or PC. Just $5/month."
Only on reading the help does it seem that if the client doesn't connect with the server within 6 months, then all your backups are gone. I'm not saying this is unreasonable, but it seems a bit counterintuitive given you are still paying for the service. I just still haven't found the bit about disconnected drives.
I really like Backblaze's articles on HDDs and they really seem to be customer focused, but I had to dig in the help to find this.
newscracker|8 years ago
For something as critical as data backups, I prefer that those companies stay in business and charge something that's a bit more proportional to their underlying costs. That's honesty and fairness, in my view.
atYevP|8 years ago