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.htmlThey 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.