I think Backblaze is only great if you are looking for something cheap. It is definitely that, and I am reluctant to complain about it when it backs up my 25TB home server Mac Mini for $60 per year. (Oh, it's $84 now. But whatever, still very cheap.)
But I also set up Backblaze for most of my family members, and when my dad's iMac SSD died, even though I physically visited, and even though I had 48 hours there, there was no way to recover the (meager 1TB) contents.
I had to use the pretty-trash web UI and could only select something like 25GB at a time, from a super-slow and janky web UI, and then download those files in like dinosaur-time.
It did save the day; I could get the most important files (there were like, specific ones on the desktop that my dad was mostly really concerned about).
But in my only experience of using Backblaze in actual crisis, it disappointed.
I think (though I have never verified) that their option to FedEx a hard disk would have worked, if I had had more time, and that's cool. But I was only there for a couple days, and was trying to set him up with a new Mac Mini to replace the failed iMac.
So in the end, we said fuck it, and my dad lost a bunch of his shit.
OTOH, 5 or 8 years ago (?), my laptop corrupted my iPhoto library. (Yeah, back in iPhoto time.) I happened to be on a Japanese bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo at the time (editing a Printed Book composition for a gift, and that seemed to be what irrevocably corrupted the iPhoto library). I restored the backed-up iPhoto library (maybe 250GB back then, a tenth of what it is today) to my home Mac and it was restored by the time I got home from the 2.5 hour train ride.
But it also cost me something like $180, because I had Arq configured to use AWS Glacier storage, which (at least back then — does it even still exist?) was cheap to put data into and very expensive to get data out of quickly. (IIRC Arq even paused automatically, to avoid this, but I pressed the Continue button.)
(Developer behind Arq here) Nowadays many folks have lots of free cloud space in Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive and use Arq to store their versioned encrypted backups there, which makes restoring/downloading free.
I think you're making unfair criticisms of Backblaze due to your specific situation. Backblaze offers two primary restore options; one through the GUI and the other by sending you a hard disk in the mail. The GUI isn't really meant for restoring a whole hard drive; it's designed more for file level restores. Your father has a slow internet connection (as you mentioned below), and that makes the GUI even more difficult to use. You should have had Backblaze ship you a drive with his data. It might not arrive as fast as you'd like, but at least you'd have the data.
For large amounts of data over a slow internet connection, the overnight shipping option is the best choice. Using the web ui to get individual files for individual recoveries works, but it doesn't really help if you want to do some giant recovery (as you found out).
That's an interesting anecdote about Backblaze, with restoring being such a pain. But could you not have continued downloading 25GB chunks remotely, until everything had been transferred? It seems like you'd only give up if you didn't really care about the rest of the files.
Yes, we almost certainly could have. But it would have been a process that stretched out over many days. So in the end we did give up — the files weren't worth the hassle. But the hassle was considerable.
Yeah, I agree, and even would have done so in this case (despite the files not being that "important") but it wouldn't have arrived in time.
While I wouldn't say my dad's "not smart" like the title of this thread, he is 70 or whatever, and not technical, and would probably not be able to convert a fedexed HDD from his old iMac to a working setup on his new Mac Mini.
I don't know how your relationship is, but when I was in your position, I set up a remote access solution. For me it was tinc+ssh, but I'm sure there are many equivalent solutions in GUI land that will let you login remotely.
It's easy to talk someone through physically plugging in a hard drive, and then you can do the copying yourself.
This of course relies on your dad not expecting his computer to be private from you, but I doubt there are many people who aren't technically engaged but expect the utmost in digital privacy.
No, he is fine with me having remote access, it's just that he lives in USA and the internet there is so bad (not everywhere, but where he lives there was only AT&T 2.5Mbps DSL and "12Mbps" (it wasn't) Comcast.
So the remote option technically did exist, and if my dad was gonna die or something if we didn't recover those files, I could have done it. But there was like 20-30 second menu latency with remote access (partly Apple's fault, the Windows machine is 5x better with the same connection, but it seems macOS can't forego its stupid animations no matter what).
I didn't mean to continue pushing you on why you didn't restore the backups, just making a general suggestion. As technical people we've got this tendency to think that we can set up systems for people to take care of themselves and then walk away. And that's great, but sometimes you just have to stay fully involved and take things over.
On the technical side, it's probably because RDP is well optimized. There has got to be something for Mac that works similarly well, but I can't give you any pointers. I was dealing with DSL as well (6M/384k), so ssh was an advantage.
Also, although I recently moved off of Mac to Linux for most desktop computing, I think I tried every single remote desktop solution for macOS over those years.
The best thing I ever found (in terms of being able to remote desktop into a 5K display and have usable latency and at least eventually show the screen at full resolution) was AnyDesk.
For my last year on the Mac, that is what I recommended for remote desktop. (It does work on Linux too, but on Linux I find xrdp works fine, just like on Windows.)
One tip: If you are connecting from macOS, using Microsoft Remote Desktop, that app crashes with 6K and 8K screen sizes. But there is an app called Royal TSX which can be an RDP client, and it handles those resolutions fine.
I almost went with Backblaze, but there does not appear to be a way to restore an encrypted backup without having the decryption take place on their servers [1]:
> When you request a data restore, we do what is known as a cloud restore. This simplifies the data restoration process. For example, let’s assume your hard drive crashes and you get a new hard drive or even a new computer. To restore your data you first log in to Backblaze using a web browser by providing your Backblaze account information (email address and password). Once you have logged in to the Backblaze secure web interface you can request a restore of your data. You do not have to install Backblaze to get your data back. To make this work, we decrypt your data on our secure restore servers and we then zip it and send it over an encrypted SSL connection to your computer. Once it arrives on your computer, you can unzip it and you have your data back.
That's if you are just using the default setup, which encrypts using a private key that Backblaze generates and manages.
You can optionally protect the private key with a passphrase. If you do that, restore changes:
> The data restoration process is a cloud restore, similar to the process previously described but with a few differences. To decrypt your data, you are required to enter your passphrase on our secure website. When you do so, it is passed over an encrypted connection to our datacenter where it is used to decrypt your private key, which in turn is used to decrypt your data. Your passphrase is never saved on disk and it is discarded once it is used. As before, once we decrypt your data on our secure restore servers we then zip it and send it over an encrypted SSL connection to your computer. Once it arrives on your computer, you can unzip it and you have your data back.
Instead, I decided to buy Arq and use a generic cloud storage service instead of a backup service. I was going to go with Backblaze's B2 for that but then realized that (1) I had 1 TB of OneDrive as part of my Office 365 subscription which had almost nothing on it, (2) OneDrive has an API allowing its use as a generic cloud storage service, and (3) Arq supports that API.
I've now got 3 years worth of backups of my 1 TB iMac on OneDrive, using about half of my 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
I almost went with Backblaze, but there does not appear to be a way to restore an encrypted backup without having the decryption take place on their servers [1]:
So encrypt it yourself before they encrypt it for storage.
I may have been unclear. I'm talking about Backblaze's personal backup product/service, not their generic cloud storage service (B2).
With the former you install some of their software on your computer. That software reads your files, encrypts them with the key Backblaze generated for you, and stores them on their servers.
The Backblaze software sees the same data that applications on your computer see. It is hard to see a reasonable way to impose your own encryption there in a way that would make Backblaze's software see the encrypted data.
If you are using a whole disk encryption system or whole partition encryption system, applications on your computer (including Backblaze's) see unencrypted data.
You could do file level encryption yourself with GPG or age or similar, but that would generally be in enormous pain in the ass because every time you wanted to use a file you'd need to decrypt it and if you modified it re-encrypt it. (And when you decrypt a file to use it you'd have to be careful that an incremental backup doesn't happen while you have the file decrypted).
I suppose you could get a drive specifically for local backup, use local backup software to maintain an encrypted backup on that drive, and use Backblaze's personal backup service to back up just your backup drive.
Personally I've never had an issue just using encrypted containers but I'd be interested in a solution that behaved like Windows EFS while letting you define a blacklist of programs that aren't allowed to see the decrypted file content.
