Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-)

> I am genuinely considering using CloudBerry Backup and backing up to an S3 bucket

CloudBerry's standard client can backup to an Amazon S3 bucket, or just as easily to a Backblaze B2 bucket. The advantage of Backblaze B2 is that it is less than 1/4th the cost of Amazon.

We have many happy customers using CloudBerry.

Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.

> They will necessarily cost more than doing it yourself.

This may or may not be true. Backblaze purchases up to 10,000 hard drives at a time DIRECTLY from the manufacturer at a discount of list price. You pay list price. You also have to pay for unused hard drive space, while Backblaze sells the unused hard drive space to other customers. Then Backblaze locates our datacenter in an area with cost effective electricity. If you live in Hawaii you are paying 50 cents/kWh, at Backblaze we get electricity for about 10 cents/kWh. On the other hand you might be beating our price on electricity if you live in Oregon (3 cents/kWh). Backblaze does charge an (extremely small) profit. Anyway, the point is this calculation is a little subtle. My goal would be to actually save our customers money over doing it themselves even while pocketing a small profit for ourselves. That's nothing but good business for all of us.

> It's not like they have magic disks.

We use the same hard drives as the you do but with two important twists:

1) We Reed Solomon encode your data replicated across 20 *separate* hard drives in 20 *separate* computers in 20 *separate* locations in our datacenter. We can lose 3 entire computers and your data is FINE.

2) We monitor every hard drive, and when one hard drive goes bad we send a datacenter technician over to replace it 7 days a week. We care DEEPLY about the health of your files. If two computers fail in the same logical Reed Solomon group of 20 computers we have pager systems that wake people up in the middle of the night and they start driving towards the datacenter (maybe 15 minutes away) to get it fixed NOW. And it is a "dead man's switch" in that if our datacenter techs do not "silence the page" (acknowledging they are going to fix the problem) we keep paging more and more and more people at Backblaze up to and including the CEO. When you backup to a single local hard drive, how many employees get paged when some of the sectors go bad?

Anyway, at Backblaze we have been doing storage for over 10 years and we really care deeply. It is all we care about. My goal is to get the price down below where you can be free to solve other problems.

Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.

> I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days

If you are using Backblaze, make sure you "Check for Updates" (menu option) and make sure you are running the 5.0 client we just released last week. Then if you want to make faster progress, turn off all power savings modes on your computer so it won't sleep, and then go into Backblaze "Settings..." menu and turn off "Automatic Threads/Throttle" and manually set the number of threads high enough to saturate your network. Let it run all night long for several nights in a row then check the time estimates again.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I'd love to see some hard data on the chance of data loss on those cloud services vs. typical home set-ups.

Backblaze uses a Reed Solomon encoding where every file is replicated across 20 different hard drives in 20 different locations in our datacenter. We can lose up to three full computers out of the 20 and your data is still both safe AND available. And a really good feature is we monitor EVERY SINGLE DRIVE and have datacenter employees replacing drives that have gone bad 7 days a week.

However, a counter point is that if you forget to pay Backblaze your monthly bill for as little as 60 days we delete your data to make room for paying customers. I really think people underestimate how easily this can occur purely by accident. For example, the credit card on file expires, and the employee who was signed up to get alerts retired the year before and the emails are not being read anymore.

For all of the reasons above, to my closest friends I recommend BOTH for data you would be really bummed out to lose. Keep the live copy, plus a backup at home on a hard drive, and a copy in Backblaze for when your house burns down. This is what I do, and it lets me sleep at night.

Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.

> if your out of touch with the server for 30 days it's deleted

Some clarification: For any computer that does not "phone home" we allow up to 6 months before even threatening to delete your backup, and we warn you first quite a bit (after that).

However, if the computer is backing up every day but you have an external hard drive (like a Drobo) and you leave the Drobo unplugged for more than 30 days, we warn you profusely by BOTH email and by popup dialogs and then we delete the data. If at some later date you plug the Drobo back in you need to repush the contents from scratch.

We are actively researching whether we (Backblaze) can extend this to be longer (like 60 days or 90 days) without losing too much money, but if you install today you have to live with "external drives must be plugged into the laptop host at least once every 30 days".

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> it doesn't sound like they have a Linux client

For Linux, Backblaze offers "B2 Object Storage" with a large list of established Linux clients supporting it. You can see the list on this web page: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i... (for Linux, look for the little pictures of a penguin).

Solutions that backup to Backblaze B2 include: Duplicity, HashBackup, Transmit (by Panic), and rclone

> I can't wait for a grocery chain (local, national, Amazon, I don't care) to carry a full store's worth of food and let me decide when I want it.

In some areas (I'm in the San Francisco area) Safeway will deliver. http://shop.safeway.com/

However, I looked into it for my aging parents in Oregon and Safeway did not "officially" do deliveries there, but the checkout clerk I was talked with said she shopped and delivered for several older people in town. If Safeway won't deliver in your area you might setup something informal with a Safeway checkout clerk?

> If it were really that cheap and easy to do I would expect that some company would have already done so and charged everyone a few Euro...

They have, it's called cellular data services (LTE). In Europe it would be Vodafone, Telekom, Orange, etc. Sure, the frequency and protocol is slightly different than 802.11 WiFi, but it is wireless, it is already everywhere, it already works, you can surf web pages on your phone or tablet wirelessly TODAY, and the data rates are a usable 50 Mbits/sec now and they are rolling out upgrades to 100 Mbits/sec and higher. LTE has some European deployments at 450 Mbits/sec today: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/ind...

I wonder what the tradeoff of 802.11 WiFi vs LTE is. While cell phone data plans are a little bit expensive the cellular providers seem to be making steady progress with faster and faster services.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> If the hard drive can survive in the environment provided by Backblaze, then they will certainly do better in a home computer properly built

I suppose it matters. The pods are in a professional datacenter with air filters and sticky paper that we step on before entering the clean datacenter. When we open pods in the datacenter they are NEVER filled with dust bunnies. But when I open up my "properly built" gaming computer at home there are ALWAYS dust bunnies, air in homes with pets and carpets is simply going to have some dust.

Backblaze also monitors everything and fixes every problem, a home computer usually monitors nothing. Recently I was editing video on my laptop and it just shut off (I lost 10 minutes of edits). Turns out it was overheating due to a bad fan, but nothing WARNED me about this so I was subjecting all the components in the laptop to dangerously high levels of heat before the CPU shut down to protect itself. That won't happen in the Backblaze datacenter where we monitor everything, including the temperature of every last one of the 68,813 drives and go fix it when they deviate from normal for any reason.

One of the main things Backblaze does which may or may not occur in a home office is that we do leave the drives powered up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you leave your computer shut down half the time, there may be situations where that extends it's life in your home. For example, if the drives bearings inherently are built for 2 years of continuous run time and you only have the computer turned on 1/2 the time then your drive will last 4 years at home and only 2 years in the Backblaze datacenter.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> most reliability studies on electronics overall curiously do not equate temperature with average failure rates.

Backblaze looked into it in 2014 and we found no correlation: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they had seen increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celsius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and in all but a few unusual conditions (such as some fans have failed) most drives are really running cool at around 25 degrees Celsius.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> What's the typical drive temperature in Backblaze's cases in their environment?

Short answer: the coolest drives are 21.92 Celcius and the hottest drive was 30.54 degrees.

I wrote this up above in response to a temperature question, copy and pasted here. The raw data dump from Backblaze includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a complete set of historical data of all drive temperatures in the Backblaze datacenter here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...

We analyzed the failures correlated with temperature in this blog post in 2014: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celcius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> I think their pods only have GigE interfaces

Originally (up until 3 years ago) that was true, but all new pods have 10 GbE interfaces, and 100% of the pods in our "Backblaze 20 pod Vaults" have 10 GbE interfaces. And there are some really strange (and wonderful) performance twists on using 20 pods to store each file: when you fetch a 1 MByte file from a vault, we need 17 pods to respond each supplying only 60k bytes to reassemble the complete file from the Reed Solomon. So the actual bandwidth when fetching just one medium size file can reach more like 170 Gbit/sec theoretical bandwidth. However, if you tried to fetch ALL the files from a pod all at once, the raw 7200 RPM drive performance is our current limiting factor.

Here is a link to a blog post on the 20 pod Backblaze Vault architecture: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

Here is a link to the Reed Solomon encoding we open sourced that we use on the 20 pod Vaults: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

Brian from Backblaze here.

> I also wonder if we'll ever get numbers from Backblaze on things like the actual temperature ... power these drives lived through.

The raw data dump includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a dump here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...

We analyzed the failures correlated with temperature in this blog post in 2014: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to cause failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.

Brian from Backblaze here.

> Perhaps they don't keep the temperature as cool as they should in order to save a few bucks?

The colocation datacenter is SunGard in Rancho Cordova California and there are other tenants. I assume the temperature of the datacenter is industry standard? But even better, in the raw data dump it includes all the temperatures of all the hard drives, so you (or anybody) could check the correlation. We looked into it in 2014 and didn't find much correlation between temperature and hard drive failure as long as we kept the temperature of any one hard drive well below a tipping point (which we do). Here is the blog article and stats behind our analysis: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...

Brian from Backblaze here.

> back blaze ... only reports numbers that they determine are significant.

That's not true. We provide a COMPLETE dump of the raw data for anybody who wants to download it. Here is a link for the lazy: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...