[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I'm the engineer you are commenting on, I just want to straighten out one mis-understanding.

> This quote especially seemed childish and immature to me:

>

> > "And this one makes me actively angry, because both Microsoft and Apple will happily throw away portions of your files and not tell you about it"

>

> No, this is NOT Microsoft's or Apple's fault. It is 100% HIS fault for not understanding what's going on. Even if a file flush is correctly requested

Several times you seem to jump to the assumption that I don't understand fsync and disk flushing and that is the core issue. You aren't understanding what I'm criticizing. Here is an example of what bothers me:

You take a picture at your wedding, and you store it on your hard drive. You like the photo, it means a lot to you, and you use it as the background for your desktop FOR FIVE YEARS. You have rebooted hundreds of times, and it's always the background for your desktop. Then one day 5 years after your wedding, you reboot your laptop, and it seems to take a little longer to boot, and then after you sign into the laptop half the image you use for your desktop background is scrambled. The middle of it looks like dirty snow. You didn't get any reports of any issues from the OS manufacturer, but now one of your photos is corrupted.

This isn't because the software that wrote the photo 5 years earlier forgot to flush the picture to disk. It just isn't. Behind the scenes, as your laptop was booting from an aging drive, it probably encountered some issue, and it went about fixing the problem as best it could - which I have no problem with. My issue is the drive lost some data, and if the OS manufacturer would let you know this occurred you could take useful actions like order a new drive, prepare a restore from a few weeks ago before that issue occurred, etc.

> No, this is NOT Microsoft's or Apple's fault.

It isn't their fault that the drive is going bad, I agree. Drives go bad, that's why we have backups. My issue is the OS manufacturer try to cover up too much, keep too much hidden from the user, and didn't let the user know data loss has occurred (or might have occurred). And yes, I hold them accountable for not telling customers what is going on. It isn't anybody's "fault" that it occurred, but there is a responsibility to let customers know about it so the customer can take appropriate actions so they don't lose data (or more data).

I try to write incredibly paranoid software. Part of the reason is that is the "average" environment the Backblaze client runs in is more unstable than what most software developers are used to. The whole point of backups is to run when the computer is going sideways, it has bad RAM, it's losing disk sectors, or a customer's cat likes sleeping on the keyboard because it's warm, and the fans are clogged with cat fur. And because the family has teenage children that don't know about computer security problems, they download and install unstable junk from all over the internet because why not? That's the environment my software runs in, and I take my job of trying to protect my customer's data very seriously.