Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/10/08/backblaze-7-0-extends-version-history-supports-catalina/
Perturbed that the online backup service Backblaze retains old versions of files and deleted files for only 30 days? You can now pay extra to maintain such files in your online backup for either 1 year or forever.
Actually, this is critical to my using BackBlaze. I cancelled the backup account on one of my computers earlier this year because they deleted my entire backup of my primary disk!
Why? Because it is a MacBook Pro that is my wifeāa main computer at home, and also our main computer when traveling. We traveled for 6 months this year, visiting 9 countries. While in Sri Lanka, we were told that the main disk (with 5TB of backed up data) was being deleted, because it had not been attached for more than 30 days.
WTHeck??? Tech support said 'tough luck. Nothing we can do" and my data was goneā¦ 
I deleted the BB account on that computer, since it is clearly not useful to me with that limitation.
My own home computer is an iMac Pro with 35TB of data, that is left on 24/7 and never leaves the house. That one is backed up, and the 30 day limit is not a problem. But the traveling laptop with 30 day limit? That was simply a non-starter.
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I have some external drives that are not connected most of the time. I have to connect them at least once a month, make a small change on the drive and then wait a few hours to be sure the backup has happened. I will be moving to Arqās service once my BB contract is over. It is a good service and I understand why they have this policy but this is an annoyance.
I have an external drive like this that I donāt use often, but whenever Backblaze warns me about it, I just turn it on for a while and when I remember later in the day, turn it off. Thatās enough to convince Backblaze that the data is still live. Perhaps @yevp can tell us if thereās a better way to deal with such infrequently accessed drives.
Yev from Backblaze here -> Paul, thatās exactly what this update can address. If you change your Version History to 1 Year or Forever, that 30 Day limit lifts for external hard drives - so you can keep it disconnected for longer stretches. Weāll still send reminders because we think itās a good idea to sync them from time to time, but youād not need to plug them in for the version history period of your choosing.
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Yev here -> Burt - sorry about that situation, itās one of the reasons why we built this feature, to give people more flexibility when theyāre not near their computers, are away, or have disconnected externals.
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Thank you, this is wonderful. This was my only complaint. I depend on BackBlaze for disaster recovery and I use Time Machine for recovering older versions and for disaster recovery (I rotate TM drives and always have one off-site).
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I signed up immediately for the 1 year situation. I cannot think of a time Iāve needed an older version of something beyond then (or a deleted file), but I love have that much headroom.
I only have two items on my Backblaze wishlist left now.
(Native restore app for browsing; retrieval of encrypted elements to local machine for local restore.)
Re " Iāve never noticed Backblaze slowing down my Mac or Internet connection." I believe I have and I select the BB pause backup option and it seems to help.
A limited retention period for deleted files always was, and is, a red flag for me.
If a backup does not retain everything thatās in it until the user intentionally deletes something, then I wonāt use it. Itās just too much of a risk to lose something just because you realize too late that it was corrupted or delete unintentionally.
Backups should truly be āset it and forget it.ā Thereās no room in there for āā¦ but always remember the following limitations: ā¦ā Their we-save-everything-forever approach is the key reason why Iāve always been a loyal CrashPlan user, even through their user interface ārefreshā a while ago.
Alas, CrashPlanās current client sadly has a stunningly awful user interface. I usually try not to be this critical of other designersā work, but the CrashPlan application doesnāt even support the standard Escape/Return keys to trigger Cancel/Confirm buttons. Thatās Interaction Design 101. 
Now that Backblaze has added unlimited retention I might just give 'em a try to see what their product looks and feels like.
Since this is TidBITS, though, I do have to ask: does anyone here see a reason why not to check out Backblaze? Just wonderingā¦ 
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Some more info:
- The extra charge is $24/year for 1-year saving of external disks (instead of 30-days), on top of the yearly $60. Fair, but not mentioned.
- The way to set this up is also not obvious: see https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036946513-Setting-Up-Extended-Version-History . There is a separate procedure for new- and for existing accounts.
Iāll go ahead and do it, to me itās certainly worth it.
Itās possible that slowdowns may be related to particular Macs, other processes running, or Internet connection speeds or latency. So yeah, your mileage may vary, but Backblazeās scheduling lets you keep it from being a pain if so.
If you do the math, it now costs almost the same to get what CrashPlan has offered all along ($9/month plus storage fee vs. $10/month for CrashPlan for Small Business). If you have enough stored files or pay BackBlaze by the month, it costs more for BackBlaze.
So now it really comes down to which service has the best features, performance and customer support. Iām a long time CrashPlan customer and I have been demoing BackBlaze as a possible replacement. So far, CrashPlan is ahead. The main difference that matters to me is while CrashPlan backups my data as often as every 15 minutes, it can take a couple of hours (or longer) before BackBlaze uploads to its servers. (I queried BB about this and I was assured that this is the normal timeframe.)
But I agree with the other comment about CrashPlanās user interface: The UI for the discontinued CrashPlan for Home was much easier to use. I also miss that CrashPlan for Home had the option to save deleted data forever for the same price as BackBlaze without the added fees.
As a longtime user of CrashPlan I am much happier with Backblaze, since CrashPlan ended to plan for home users. Backblaze is much more skilled at large file sets than CrashPlan was. I has to constantly fiddle with the memory allotment for the Java engine and it used way more system resources than the native Mac client of Backblaze. I also spent way too much time with CrashPlan support, often over days, to keep it working. Their advice was always āyou should back up fewer filesā (!) I am backing up c. 6TB across several disks and Iāve never had a single hiccup with Backblaze. CrashPlan - good riddance!
So now it really comes down to which service has the best features, performance and customer support.
Iām in the process of testing Backblaze for my computer that was using Crashplan. Crashplan used to be great (I used it for years after discovering it here on TidBITS Talk), but then they degraded the software and doubled the price.
Last spring I added a 1TB external drive and Crashplan still hasnāt backed it up (600MB+ to go). I have had nothing but problems for months ā every few days I get a message that itās not backing up and I have to restart Crashplan. Then it works for a day or so before stopping.
I am on satellite internet, which has terrible upload speed, but so far BB is uploading just fine. Once I confirm its success, Iām canceling Crashplan.
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I suspect that one of the idiosyncrasies inherent to satellite Internet use is wreaking havoc with how CrashPlan works. 1TB should have finished uploading by now unless your upload speed is glacial, your data cap is being invoked or some other factor(s).
Have you communicated with CrashPlan tech support regarding the problems you are having? If so, how did they respond (or not. . .) ? Others in your situation must have tried using CrashPlan, so tech support should be able to tell you how to fix it or tell you that CP does not work well with satellite uploads. Since CrashPlan worked great in the past, I would want to know why it isnāt working now.
The information in your reply could be helpful to others with satellite Internet who are considering their Cloud backup options.
I suspect that one of the idiosyncrasies inherent to satellite Internet use is wreaking havoc with how CrashPlan works. 1TB should have finished uploading by now unless your upload speed is glacial, your data cap is being invoked or some other factor(s).
My upload is glacial (under 1 megabit per second up compared to 70 down), but I donāt think thatās the problem. The app itself seems to quit and I donāt notice it for a day or two, when I get an email that my Mac hasnāt been backed up. I relaunch Crashplan and it acts like itās working, but the same thing keeps happening. Iām also not sure if it backs up when the Mac is sleeping (itās hard to tell since it makes so little progress and the app quits).
So far Backblaze is doing about 10GB a day in uploads with about 700GB to go, so itās going to take a while, but it seems to be working. I tested some restores and they worked fine. In the five days Iāve been testing it, itās already uploaded more than Crashplan has in the past six months!
Have you communicated with CrashPlan tech support regarding the problems you are having?
I have not. I considered it, but just felt like it wasnāt worth the effort. I suspect theyād just blame it on the idiosyncrasies of my machine or internet service.
I had already been contemplating leaving because of their abandonment of the consumer plan, unwelcome price increase, and downgrades in software quality (the Crashplan app often gobbles up gigabytes of RAM now). The tone of the company is very much āour way or the highway,ā which does not make me want to stay with them.
I hadnāt left yet because of inertia and the time to research a better alternative, but the recent non-functional aspect of the service motivated me to check out BackBlaze and so far itās a winner.
(I should note that in the past BackBlaze would not install on this particular laptop [it works on another machine I have]. Iāve no idea why and their tech support, after months of trying, gave up. I decided to try their new 7.0 software and lo and behold, it installed just fine and works, so they fixed something.)
When I was researching satellite Internet service the latency inherent in sending a signal to an orbiting satellite made things like VOIP impossible. Could be something like that is affecting CP.
I donāt think that CP uploads if your computer is sleeping. When I am uploading to the Cloud 24/7 I configure my Macs to stay awake with display sleep activated. In my case the upload speed increases when Iām not actively using my computer.
For many setups, I donāt think this is as unlikely as you state in the article. I use the TidBITS/Joe Kissell recommended strategy, but my only computer is a laptop, so I use TimeMachine on a network drive. Fairly frequently (anything from 4-12 weeks), Time Machine tells me that itās scanned my backup and found problems and needs to start over. I know of others with this problem, too, so itās not just my setup. So I canāt rely on Time Machine for long-term version history of a file that might be corrupted and I didnāt realise. For that, I rely on my cloud backup.
The reason Iāve never been able to seriously consider Backblaze is that it doesnāt back up all Mac metadata ā including old resource forks if my memory serves me correctly. For the vast majority of files, this wonāt matter, but I have some files where full metadata backup is vital, and I donāt want to worry about whatās backing up properly or not.
Iāve been using CrashPlan for many years, but as others have said its interface is awful, it uses huge amount of system and network resources, and lately it doesnāt seem to even back up consistently. It spends most of its time āsynchronisingā. 
This, combined with new restrictions on what file types are backed up (disk images are now excluded) means that Iām moving away. I want set-it-and-forget-it situation where I know everything in the selected folders is being backed up fully.
After evaluating the various options, Iām in the process of moving to Arq (probably Arq Cloud). Arq backs up all metadata, has a native Mac client for backing up and restoring, and the support is responsive, personal, and helpful.
This came up at MacTech Conference last week in several discussions, and Dave Hamilton of MacObserver was saying that the real issue with this approach is that Time Machine doesnāt work on a client/server model, so if anything interrupts the transmission of data to the network drive, it can corrupt the backup.
Personally, Iāve always felt that the Time Capsule was an extremely sketchy way of doing backup, and Daveās explanation bears out that feeling. Thatās why Iāve always used Time Machine with a local disk that has plenty of space. Along with a bootable duplicate, of course. Thatās easy on my iMac, and for my MacBook Air, I just connect the drive every so often when I plug in. (I use the MacBook Air infrequently, and create almost no data on it, so its backups are somewhat irrelevant anyway.)
However, Dave did suggest a stunningly cool workaround discovered by (I believe) John Braun. He suggested running the Time Machine backup to a Synology or other NAS that supports the btrfs filesystem. It has snapshots, just like APFS, so if Time Machine on your Mac reports corruption, you just go to the NAS and revert to the previous snapshot. Voila, corruption eliminated! I donāt have the hardware to test this, but Iād certainly give it a try if you do.
Another solution to the laptop backup problem would be to use a backup app that employs a proper client/server model for network backups, like Retrospect. Thatās not an area Iāve looked into in a big way.
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