Hey Tedivm! Yev from Backblaze here -> It's true that the data was removed from your account. After your trial lapsed and was not paid for, we removed the data after 7 days as is our standard practice. Unfortunately in your case the overview page did not update to show that you had no data associated with your computer, so when you purchased the license, there was no data on the machine that it attached too, so when you erased data from the machine while performing maintenance, you assumed the data was on Backblaze, when it was in fact purged from our system a few weeks prior.
We've since fixed that visual glitch (if you have a trial that expires and is not paid for, once the data has been deleted, that will be reflected on the overview page) AND we're currently working on some other notification systems to help people avoid losing data. As always, I apologize that you had this problem, but I'm happy to inform you that we've since fixed that visual bug on our end.
So everyone else is clear, we did pay for the account after the trial ended. So we were paying customers, this wasn't an incident where a trial expired and we tried to get our data back.
Also, to be clear, the customer service experience was horrible. The support team repeatedly ignored what we were saying and send us form responses back which were just not relevant. The twitter team claimed we misread the retention policy. The whole thing was kind of ridiculous.
Even more to the point, and the main reason why I tell this story, is that people should know how this company operates. People should know that they don't have backups of backups, that there is no margin for error should your account lapse, and that their systems in general are not robustly programmed in the sense that there are ways that your data could be lost and you wouldn't know it.
From my perspective Backblaze only has one thing going for it over competing companies, and that's it's marketing department.
If I understand it right, you purchased a license after your trial expired and the backup was purged. And you didn't backup anything new upon getting the new license. So the GUI status bug was a real and unfortunate bug on Backblaze's side, but it was only a GUI bug and in fact they didn't lose your data in any unexpected way. This situation seems to be about 2/3rds BackBlaze's fault and 1/3rd your fault.
You also have bonus fault on your side for not testing the BackBlaze backup. Never ever trust a backup, even if it's right in front of you on your own disk, unless you can successfully restore it.
Yup, there were serious flaws in our backup plans here. In my defense, we hadn't been dating long enough at the time for me to really get things set and we were on our way to burning man ;-)
I am not claiming to be without fault, but I do think that Backblaze is on the lower end of the reliability spectrum when it comes companies that do this, which is why I bring up these issues. I've switched over to Crashplan and have external harddrives doing local backups.
I should also point out that this isn't the only issue that's come up with this company. Apparently their client side GUI is also not completely truthful about when it's backed things up, and will claim to have backed up files when it's really only backed up the indexes. It then spreads the real backups out in order to increase performance. Although this is a cool feature, it's one people should be aware of and not hidden. I have less knowledge of this though, as I only saw it in a few blog posts (google around instead of taking my word for it).
"Lower end of spectrum" - of precisely two companies that I know of, CrashPlan and BackBlaze, that do "Whole Disk Backups at a fixed rate".
I'm a big fan of using a combination of Arq (Love It), Dropbox, BackBlaze, and SuperDuper, but - crashplan/backblaze are both pretty similar, and both have their pros/cons, and, likewise, hundreds of anecdotes from the user community of each.
For what it's worth, I'm in my fifth year of Backblaze, and I've always been able to recover all my files - but I've also kept my subscription paid up.
And, I don't believe I've ever seen your "real backups happening spread over" claim - I am frequently in the field, so I am very aware of exactly when backblaze is sending data (frequently over my iPhone using Roaming Data) - and when backblaze says it's done backing up - that's pretty much exactly when data is no longer sent out.
Yev, the same dev who is commenting here, has admitted to the claims about back up times. You should read through this reddit thread, it shows that Backblaze does not do things as you'd think-
> If you boot up real quickly and want to do a scan one thing you can do is open up the control panel and hit "Alt" + "Restore Options", we'll do a small-file rescan immediately and schedule a large-file scan.
>Small is files under 30MB or so, it's a quick index, the larger files take a bit longer and we try to spread those out over the course of a few hours so as not to be too heavy on your system.
Yes, that's accurate. The program was designed to be light on systems so we are not constantly scanning and indexing your hard drives. In our best practices we tell people to leave their machines on for a few hours. We cannot run when the machine is off, so if the machine is constantly being turned on and off it'll disrupt our scans. The "Alt + Restore Options" method forces a scan, but you'll still need the machine to be turned on/connected to the internet in order for us to transmit the data. Just pressing "backup now" will start pushing the data that has already been queued for upload during a previous scan (if there was anything left over), but will not necessarily initiate a scan (unless there was nothing left over from the previous uploads).
So, to be perfectly clear, it is more than possible for you to sync the photos from your computer, hit the "backup now" button, have Backblaze respond back that a backup is complete, and then find out that all of those photos you thought you had backed up were not there.
All of this to make it look like your application is performing better than it actually is.
On top of that you keep doing that infuriating thing where you ignore what people are saying and respond as if they're idiots or by trying to deflect the issue. No one expects you to run when the computer is off, and pretending like that's what's being said is downright insulting. What they do expect is that hitting the "backup now" button, and having your application respond that their files have been backed up, should actually mean that the files are backed up.
The more you talk the more you try to twist this around into something it's not- a visual glitch, misreading your policies, or people turning their computers off when they shouldn't- rather than trying to understand why your customers are upset and actually deal with it. That's why this issue has grown, and why we keep having these conversations- you guys have zero concept of responsibility and would rather insult your customers than actually make a viable product.
No, we should display the last time you were fully backed up in the console. If you turn on your computer, move photos to it, and turn it off, even if you press "backup now" likely they won't be included in the scan. In our best practices and introductory email we say that if you want at least a "daily" backup, you have to let us run for at least 3 hours so that we can fully index your new/changed files and back them up. If you added a lot of files it'll take longer, if you only add a few, it can be pretty quick.
If your complaint is that the Backup Now button does not do a full-system scan, that is totally valid and after the reddit thread our engineering folks are looking in to changing the "backup now" button's behavior. One of the reasons it doesn't do that now is because a full-scan will hang your system, where uploading the remaining files is very light and unnoticeable. Like with any functionality decision it's tough to say what is the best answer, hanging someone's system each time they press a button, or kicking off a remaining files upload and gradually scanning the drive over the next hour.
I sincerely apologize if I am not communicating well though, I am not trying to talk down or assume you or anyone else is an idiot in any way. I've tried to address everything that you bring up on here and on reddit. As far as expecting Backblaze to run when the computer is turned off, you'd be surprised at how many of our support tickets ask, "If my computer is off, are you still working?" so we do see that quite a bit. I don't bring it up to try and dig at anybody. I also think we've taken responsibility for the bug that mislead you in to believing you had data on our system when it had already been removed. Once we realized what had happened in your case we offered a refund and have since fixed it so that it does not happen to anyone else.
We're in the business of backing up data. When customers lose data, whether it's something they did or something that occurred on our end, we feel badly about it and try to make it right. We do have a viable product. We've restored over 4 billion files for the customers that have accounts with us. We take it very seriously.
We do recommend having a 3-2-1 backup (3 total copies, 2 local (1 original, 1 local external), and 1 offsite (where Backblaze comes in). In Tedivm's defense though, he did find an actual glitch in our UI that occurred in edge cases, and we've since fixed it. The unfortunate part is that he lost data when we no longer had a copy, and we're actively working on additional ways to avoid that in the future.
well, at least you should be comforted by the fact that your problem (or at least, re-reporting it here on HN) will cause them to fix the bug that got you into this mess.
How did you compensate tedivm for his issues, and how do you plan on fixing the support-related issues tedivm brought up, like your CSRs lying about the problems?
Icelancer, typically when users have any issues we offer a refund if they wish to leave the service, I can say that one was offered in this case as well. I do take issue with our "CSRs lying" though. Reading through the tickets, it is absolutely accurate that our dashboard was misrepresenting the data. It was showing Tedivm's data as still being there (or available), when in reality it was deleted weeks before the license was purchased for the account (after a trial expires we maintain data for 7 days, then remove it, though we do send alert emails stating that the trial is ending and the data will be removed). In Tedivm's case the license was purchased over 20 days after the trial expired.
Our CSR didn't understand the issue that was occurring, because he had not experienced this particular problem before. The CSR was not deliberately trying to mislead anyone, and in truth once the issue was escalated and we realized was going on, we learned that Tedivm had a legitimate complaint, that we had a visual bug that was showing the data as still being there when it was not. Once we realized what was going on, we acknowledged the issue and we've since fixed that glitch as well, so now expired trials with their data deleted show that they have 0 files available online.
I can go in to further into detail, but we try to keep all customer information/support queries private. We did do a bit more training with the CSRs about identifying atypical issues like this one, so hopefully they can be found out earlier in the support process instead of after a bit of back and forth as was the case this time.
I think Yev put it well, but I just want to add that customer support has two distinct jobs (Tedivm's issue fell under #2):
1) Answering basic general questions like "how much does it cost"?
2) Debugging live customer issues. For example, if crappy anti-virus quarantines one of the Backblaze executables, what the heck is happening and why? Of if a customer's client cannot contact Backblaze's datacenter, which firewall is blocking it (maybe it is the software firewall on the computer, or maybe it is the router not allowing HTTPS through)? Etc....
In the process of debugging problems, the customer service reps are dealing with a truly insane array of possible issues and symptoms and they go back and forth with the customer asking for log files, ask if specific symptoms are happening, and in general COLLABORATE with the customer to get to the true bottom of the issue. Nobody lied. These are good, honest people that are really looking out for our customers and take their responsibilities seriously.
No no, I want to be clear, people lied. I never claimed the CSR lied, I just claimed he sent useless form letters and didn't understand the problem. There was no dishonesty there, just a frustrating customer experience. However, the Twitter team made numerous false statements trying to downplay the issue to other people and blame the issue on a policy misunderstanding, rather than a bug. This is what prompted me to post pictures of the dashboard online so they would have no choice but to acknowledge the issue publicly.
This is the kind of thing that happens when dealing with Backblaze. It's constant misrepresentation on the public side of things. Their twitter account people twist things around and misrepresent things and their employees come into discussions like this and defend the company by claiming I said things I didn't say.
Yea, we addressed our twitter folks about this as well. They aren't in support so typically have no context for tweets they are seeing. They just respond in the best way they are able to. In this case I believe that the social team saw that you were having issues with a restore and with data not being there, so they assumed that it had something to do with our 30 day retention window, which is most commonly the case when users are experiencing issues with the dashboard not showing what they think is accurate (typically this is with an unplugged hard drive or something similar).
Once we realized what was going on we told the social folks to try and defer to the support folks. It's hard to have a long conversation on twitter as well, it's not a great medium for full-on support, but it's great for sending links to FAQs and stuff like that.
I do honestly think that the conversations you had with our team on multiple fronts were misinterpreted on both sides which led to a lot of confusion. We've also gotten better at making sure that the social team asks our support folks for guidance if they see a tweet or post that they are not familiar with.
We've since fixed that visual glitch (if you have a trial that expires and is not paid for, once the data has been deleted, that will be reflected on the overview page) AND we're currently working on some other notification systems to help people avoid losing data. As always, I apologize that you had this problem, but I'm happy to inform you that we've since fixed that visual bug on our end.