[brianwski]

Hey Robbie-

I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer.

The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it.

-- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, [e-mail]

[argc]

This conversation makes me think you care about your users and inspired me to go look at pricing for personal laptop backup, and it appears that linux is not supported. Any plans to support it in the future? EDIT I might have not looked hard enough and there are potentially options out there, I just found https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d...

[teraflop]

For many years, they were consistently and very diplomatically saying that they had no plans to offer Backblaze Personal Backup to Linux users, because Linux users would use a disproportionately large amount of storage and it wouldn't make sense to offer them a flat-rate alternative to the pay-per-GB B2 option.

e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_...

It seems that they may be changing their tune, at least as of a few months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m3xynu/backblaze...

[selestify]

Is there a reason there’s a short limit on how long my Backblaze password can be? That’s what put me off using it before, because who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using if it can’t handle what my email provider is able to handle, all the while securing more sensitive data ;)

[brianwski]

> Is there a reason there’s a short limit on how long my Backblaze password can be?

The current limit is 50 characters. There are reasons we don't let it get super long like 2,000 characters but we could easily double or triple the maximum length it if it was requested. Is there a number of characters you have in mind? I found a chart here: https://i.imgur.com/trR2u8g.jpg that says a randomly generated 17 character password would take 93 trillion years to crack. The chart doesn't even go up to 50 characters. Backblaze also supports 2-factor authentication via SMS or Google Authenticator codes which personally I would highly recommend to customers also.

> who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using

Backblaze has two product lines: "Backblaze Backup" where we wrote the app that encrypts data on your laptop before uploading into our storage cloud, and "Backblaze B2" where you use any third party tool (or write your own) so the encryption in that case is all under your control. You can see a list of 3rd party tools here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html (make sure you scroll down). There are little pictures of penguins by the software that supports Linux, little pictures of an apple for software that support Macintosh, and a little Window icon for the software that support Windows.

For "Backblaze Backup", we use a well known design where we use symmetric AES-128 to encrypt the file, but each file is encrypted with a different AES-128 key, and that key and an Initialization Vector (IV) is then encrypted by a 2048 bit RSA public/private key. You can read about the encryption flow we use in this blog post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-make-strong-encryption...

[tinus_hn]

But what about the part where you said you were going to delete their files in a week? I don’t understand why someone would say that.