Can i download files from backblaze

Note that cleanup will remove partially uploaded files from the bucket if they are more than a day old. When you purge a bucket, the current and the old versions will be deleted then the bucket will be deleted. However delete will cause the current versions of the files to become hidden old versions.

Here is a session showing the listing and retrieval of an old version followed by a cleanup of the old versions. As of version 1. When a copy operation does not require any files to be uploaded, no more requests will be sent.

Uploading files requiring chunking, will send 2 requests one each to start and finish the upload and another 2 requests for each chunk:. Versions can be viewed with the --b2-versions flag. When it is set rclone will show and act on older versions of files. For example. Showing that the current version is unchanged but older versions can be seen. These have the UTC date that they were uploaded to the server to the nearest millisecond appended to them.

Note that when using --b2-versions no file write operations are permitted, so you can't upload files or delete them. Rclone supports generating file share links for private B2 buckets.

They can either be for a file for example:. For example:. This is for debugging purposes only. Setting it to one of the strings below will cause b2 to return specific errors:. These will be set in the "X-Bz-Test-Mode" header which is documented in the b2 integrations checklist. Note that when using this no file write operations are permitted, so you can't upload files or delete them. Slack isn't so much of an online file store as much as an online communications platform.

However, if you're looking to share a select few documents rather than a huge archive then Slack might just work for you. This is especially the case if you're managing a project, or working as part of a team on a project, and need to keep all your documentation in one place.

This is easy to set up in Slack, and better still, ensure control over which team members have access over which documents. This provides an advantage over general file-sharing services, because it allows for much more user control - and especially respect hierarchies - without having to worry about overcomplicated permissions.

Even better is that Slack has a free tier with a generous 5GB of storage available per team member, so you can try it out with minimal investment other than a little time spent setting up your team s. Paid-for plans allow for phone and video conferencing on top of messaging, with increases to member storage.

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. On TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. North America. The best files transfer software makes it simple and easy to manage and transfer files online, both individually as well as part of a team. View Deal. Reasons to avoid - Limited free allowance. Feb 11, Nov 4, Version v1. Nov 1, Start v1.

Nov 15, Oct 28, Sep 29, View code. Website Documentation Download Contributing Changelog Installation Forum Rclone Rclone "rsync for cloud storage" is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. Releases 81 rclone v1. Now, why these specifics are in their blog post and not in the Scheduled Maintenance page itself, that is a fair question, because it leaves room for doubt that only this exact set of functions are affected each and every window.

It's amazing how many musicians today are dependent on data storage for live performances. Yeah, I get ya. Much music is made directly on laptops, and if you figure the surrounding stuff as well sound samples, animated backdrops, VST's etc the assets required for a gig can be several GiBs big. Bayart 34 days ago root parent prev next [—]. VSTs are lighter than pedals. If I were on a 5 stop tour and my choice was between "hand-delivered by a Backblaze employee" and "left to fate with multiple countries' postal and customs services," I would choose the hand delivery every time.

The nearest data center to Kazakhstan is in Amsterdam. We're talking unreleased songs on that drive and high value assets surrounding the act.

Both the sensitive nature of the data as well as the speed of delivery are better handled by having a person fly them in personally. If it wasn't for the content and that they needed it ASAP I think regular air cargo would've sufficed. Seriously impressive service. Thanks for sharing! I get that backblaze is a cool business, but why would anyone invest in these companies that just lose massive amounts of money?

Mostly because they believe other investors will invest in these companies and hence their investment will pay off. Most don't even blink at a mention of a billion lost in a year as far as I can see. I love Backblaze. I think if you consider the increase in assets total value of the of servers, racks, network gear etc from the purchase of hardware to accommodate that growth, in order to satisfy those revenues and future revenues, it makes sense.

Once you purchase a hard drive and place it in a network-connected server, it will cost a few pennies each month to keep it spinning while it will generate revenue for 5 years or more after. The increase in annual revenue over time from previous cohorts is very attractive and shows that customers do appreciate the cost effectiveness and quality of service compared to other offerings. Deciding to use your gross profit to fuel further growth especially considering they're compounding it at a healthy rate and doing so without giving up equity or interest is a wise move.

If anything, it probably would have made sense to take some debt or finance more of the hardware purchases early on as I see they are doing now at some scale as of in order to put those proceeds towards customer growth. It is very possible and likely that those marketing dollars went towards new enterprise customers on b2 storage vs backup and the revenue-per-customer number increasing during that timeframe seems to support that.

Seems lots of the customers came from the organic content play. Osiris 34 days ago root parent next [—]. Thank you for the very insightful accounting perspective. I have a hard time understanding all the complexities of modern account and how a "loss" isn't always a loss.

Backblaze pricing is very customer friendly. I tried Backblaze but couldn't get over its insistence on first backing up my entire primary hard drive instead of allowing me to simply choose directly my most important files in my external drives, or from wherever I prefer. Seems arbitrarily forceful to me, though the pricing and security options are good.

Also, the interface of deselecting things to not back up via exclusions, instead of simply being able to specifically select what you WANT to back up is absurd, it complicates things unnecessarily if out of dozens of folders, you only want to select a few essentials for cloud storage.

Overall, zero knowledge backup is the best route, Backblaze plays at that, on the other hand I wouldn't touch any backup offering by Google with a 10 meter cattle prod. Grotesque that they reserve the right to snoop right through your files unless you first encrypt them externally via third party apps. This is not accurate. You are not forced to backup your entire hard-drive. I'm not aware of any other platforms that it works on.

I think the parent post is about the PC Backblaze backup service, not B2. The PC backup service does backup everything, and part of the reason for that is to make it extremely easy to setup. If they allowed selection of what to backup, it would be another user interface, more documentation, and then if the user deselected something important, they'd be mad if they had a problem and something wasn't backed up.

Since it doesn't affect the flat-rate price, it's easier just to back up everything. Noted, but Backblaze's insistence on "simplicity" by obligating a full main drive backup so that users can't later complain that something was missed is silly.

Why not just offer this as a default but also offer the choice of creating your own completely custom backup selections, you know, on the assumption that some users of the service might actually know what they want and how to select it. If you want to get hired by them, propose it, get it approved, implement and test this 2nd code path, and maintain it for foreseeable futures, go right ahead.

Idk about on first run, but I'm pretty sure you can pick and choose which drives it scans, including boot drive, and set up excludes as needed handy to avoid backing up. You can exclude folders. I use it for a few things where there's no point in backing it up.

As far as I know, Backblaze lets you exclude folders from accessory drives and so forth, but not from the main PC drive itself. Also, the selection by exclusion itself is deeply annoying, because, as I said above, if out of many folders you only want to back up a few, selecting just those would be much easier and more intuitive than deselecting a whole pile of them to only leave a few.

This was a deal breaker for me. I definitely have folders excluded on the main drive. Ahh thanks, I hadn't thought about that. I can't edit my post. I was thinking about B2. Furthermore, in response to the comment above, my reference was to using Backblaze alone and with Windows, as many people without any technical knowledge of computers at all might use it.

Having to add in the use of Linux or rclone would mean a very different use case from the usual. This is the exact reason why I didn't use backblaze, that and their linux support. I didn't want my entire PC backed up, and wanted to hand select a few hefty folders.

You can specify what gets backed up by using rclone. This is core part of their business model. They can provide unlimited backup capacity, because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer.

So this effectively limits your storage space. Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.

This is not accurate, please see my response to helloworld Has Backblaze ever published their EOL costs? At some point, I'd imagine it's an optimization problem between cost of failure vs liquidation value vs revenue per GB , where running them all the way into the dirt doesn't make sense.

Or maybe it does? PaywallBuster 34 days ago root parent prev next [—]. It's still a loss for the current year. But this is a SaaS, working with recurring revenue. As long as you keep track of these metrics you know you're in a good direction or digging yourself a hole. They don't work hard to keep current customers. That is pretty rare to see on HN, and helpful to understand their financial situation. Its probably because they don't have great customer service.

So they keep losing customers. And as we know, its much more expensive to get a new customer than keep a current customer - even more so with Backblaze where the initial startup charge is large due to them uploading everything. They don't even need to keep the hard drive spinning since there are no guarantees of immediate access. They can keep them off and spin them up when you need to download a backup.

Regardless, there is a cost associated with having that harddrive on or not sitting in a server in a datacenter with air conditioning and resilient power. My point was not accurate to the exact operating cost per drive, but if you want that, here it is: 1 2.

Amazon was notorious for having a profit of about 0 for years and years due to investment in capital to produce future earnings. Your spending today includes both the operational costs of creating what you have today, plus the investment you're making to generate additional revenue in the future. Obviously this excludes other important expenses like depreciation, but you get the idea. This caught me by surprise as well because I am pretty sure they have stated before that they were profitable.

Yeah, what gives? I remember they prided themselves on being profitable, self-funded and not beholden to VCs. Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.

When we started the company it was bootstrapped, so "making enough money to survive" has always been a part of the equation! That last comment was from , yet according to the S-1, they were actually unprofitable. What's going on here? Were they profitable before, then suddenly taking on a massive loss? Their loss in was huge compared to the one in They didn't say they were profitable - they said they were cash-flow positive.

And if you look at the cash flow statement in the S-1, they were indeed cash-flow positive in It looks like much of the difference comes down to stock-based compensation. This doesn't cost the company any cash, but under GAAP, it has to be recorded as an expense. Can the service itself be profitable but the company not be? I mean how do we define profitable? Presumably the employees are working below-market in exchange for equity, so the company is not really profitable yet - it's sort of "ramen profitable" in that it's profitable if you don't count the full rate of the workers' time.

CameronNemo 34 days ago root parent prev next [—]. If the service is provided by employees who are compensated with equity, why would you not count that in profitability numbers?

Because that's literally one of the reasons to use equity based compensation. The figures above are with GAAP standards but as a private company do they actually have to use that? It certainly helps if you plan on going public at any point in the future. Taxation, I guess? There's a lot of ways to measure "profitable". Judging from their current numbers the service is profitable on a per user basis, less marketing expenses.

This is a pretty reasonable way to look at it. Being cashflow positive means you can turn up marketing to grow and turn it down if needed. Being cash-flow positive does not necessarily imply being profitable. The one is a day-to-day indication on whether or not you are able to make ends meet without outside funding, the other one is the basis on which you will pay - or not - taxes. It is absolutely possible to be cash-flow positive but not yet profitable, especially while growing.

There are many reasons why cash-flow and profitability can be out of step with each other, for instance, you might have capital expenditures that are going to influence future years' books, you might have an interest carrying bank loan, you may have invested money into acquiring users whose lifetime value is larger than the cost to acquire them but you haven't broken even on that yet, it's possible to have the reverse and so on.

Accounting for all this - and doing so properly - is not as easy as it may seem to be for an outsider or someone who is used to just sell their own hours, where you can immediately see the difference between income and costs and label that profits. And even there the situation can get more complex, for instance, if work is done in one year but the invoice is sent in the next.

Profit wise you are booking that money in the year the work was done, even if the actual cash only lands in the next. Pre-paid services are even more complicated here you typically partition a chunk of the income month-by-month until the total amount is accounted for.

Mxs 34 days ago root parent prev next [—]. If you examine the financial statements you will see that they were Cash Flow positive in but not in KennyBlanken 34 days ago root parent prev next [—]. Ahhh yes, Crashplan, the company that purposefully locked everyone out of their backups when they shut down their personal backup service. I had a drive fail and I thought I was OK I couldn't even install the client, either - they silently updated the client to have a logic time bomb and refuse to install.

It's also not a really bad profit margin. It's not hard to see how they can right the ship -- perhaps they have scaled up enough to stop needing to spend so much, or they'll just continue to gain economies of scale.

That could represent the cost of growth in free trials through with people getting their home offices set up. A few hundred thousand people added over not paying for 15 days, and possibly not paying at all if they cancel, would be expensive.

I was curious about this as well: Cost of revenue consists of expenses for providing our platform and cloud services to our customers. These expenses include operating in co-location facilities, network and bandwidth costs, and depreciation of our equipment and capital lease equipment in co-location facilities.

Personnel-related costs associated with customer support and maintaining service availability, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation are also included. Cost of revenue also includes credit card processing fees, amortization of capitalized internal-use software development costs, and allocated overhead costs. We intend to continue to invest additional resources in our infrastructure and related personnel, and our customer support organization, to support the growth of our business.

Some of these investments, including costs of infrastructure equipment including related depreciation and expansion, are incurred in advance of generating revenue, and either the failure to generate anticipated revenue or fluctuations in the timing of revenue could affect our gross margin from period to period. Sounds like this is captured in their cost of revenue. So "profitable" is a weird one here.

They'll have to continually invest in data centers and hardware, but generally speaking they are turning cash pretty well. Sounds to me like prices will pretty much inevitably go up after they're public, and I'll finally have the motivation to set up my own remote backup by exchanging hard drives with a friend of mine on the other end of the country.

KennyBlanken 34 days ago root parent next [—]. Just like every other cloud company: hook people cheap, get them super dependent, and then go public telling investors they'll make a goldmine when you jack prices.