Need Help with a Backup Solution

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Backblaze omissions and exclusions

Post by grahamperrin » Tue Apr 16, 2013 5:48 pm

I received much the same initial response. I'm more than happy with Adam's responses (in the few tickets that I have raised, always prompt etc..), but a little disappointed in the Backblaze omissions and exclusions:

  • extended attributes
  • /Applications
  • /opt

– and so on.

I wouldn't describe it as useless – it's extraordinarily low cost (thanks in part to server-side de-duplication) and for what it can do, it is good. For me the disappointment stems from surprise. Most of what I read from Backblaze (a few months ago) demonstrated great attention to detail from 'power user' perspectives.

Simply: I'm very surprised that extended attributes – integral to the OS X experience (more than a minor detail) – are not backed up, equally surprised that this limitation is missing from their knowledge base.
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Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by ilovezfs » Tue Apr 16, 2013 6:35 pm

Yes, I was being hyperbolic! The squeaky wheel gets the grease, especially when it comes to dealing with developers' tendency to see all enhancement requests as featuritis.

It's not useless, of course, especially if you use encrypted sparsebundles to deal with the security and metadata issues. Frankly, given their security model, I'm not sure I'd even be comfortable doing a file based backup with them anyway. Encrypted Sparsebundles or encrypted vmdks (split into 2GB stripes) seem to solve both problems if you want to use Backblaze.

I don't see much for a "power user" to get excited about with Backblaze, other than the cachet of using the product of a "hot startup." I found this kind of telling: "We didn't take a short-cut and create a Java app that can run on many platforms. Instead we wanted to create a product that felt integrated well with the Mac. So we built Backblaze using Apple's Xcode and put the controls in the System Preferences using a native interface. It doesn't matter if you are running Mac OS X Lion or Leopard, Backblaze's online backup service will work for both." http://www.backblaze.com/mac-online-backup.html

They are referring, without mentioning the name, to CrashPlan which uses Java and the Java Cryptography Extensions, and is available for Mac, Solaris, Linux, and Windows, with basically the same interface on all platforms because it's Java. The irony is that while Backblaze is bragging about not taking shortcuts by having a native Cocoa app, CrashPlan actually gets the Mac data backed up correctly! As to security, the notion that Backblaze is "encrypting" your data is true but rather silly, because the only way you get your data back from them is by allowing them to decrypt it on their servers.

And specifically with respect to ZEVO, the fact that CrashPlan explicitly supports Solaris is definitely comforting. The app is virtually identical across all of the platforms, so I am less afraid it will somehow bork a ZEVO pool.

Also, CrashPlan is much more configurable and geeky in its user interface, which is excellent for power users, but is its biggest competitive disadvantage relative to Backblaze.

Have you checked out CrashPlan yet? Basically the same pricing. $5.99/month. Less if you commit for a longer period.

I'm "looking forward" to finding out its deficiencies, which will inevitably crop up. I'm actually considering signing up for Backblaze as well, on the theory that these unlimited plans may end up getting grand-fathered in at some point if (ahem, when) they stop offering them, as happened with the wireless carriers with respect to unlimited data plans.

Arq still seems like a viable alternative. And it is fantastic to see that the developer of Arq provided an open source command line interface to get at your data. That should be de rigueur for all of these solutions, but unfortunately is not.

http://sreitshamer.github.io/arq_restore/

I was a bit concerned about the command line utility's not having been updated for a while despite a significant outstanding bug, but the developer just did a fresh commit March 9 and fixed it, among other things.
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The CrashPlan range

Post by grahamperrin » Tue Apr 16, 2013 11:59 pm

I liked CrashPlan enough to recommend a group purchase of CrashPlan PRO, which I installed and configured with ease a few years ago but – for reasons that are off-topic from ZEVO – I never got around to actually using the service for our clients.

For my then use case (IT support to a group that's predominantly Mac-based), the greatest deficiency was the CrashPlan client's inability to work beyond a single home directory, where multiple users are protected with FileVault 1 – as far as I recall, no backup of /Applications and so on.

From a group perspective, I have not tested any recent version of CrashPlan with FileVault 2. My guess: unless the design of the client is significantly improved, CrashPlan may be severely limited now, as it was before, where there's an emphasis on security. Hint: with Apple's defaults, For multiple administrators: FileVault 2 alone is less secure than FileVault 1.

I'll take a closer look at CrashPlan for myself alone before deciding whether to resurrect interest in the PRO server.
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Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by ilovezfs » Wed Apr 17, 2013 12:44 am

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