I’ve finally started to consider an off-site backup location. I don’t have enough data to justify building a server to put in my parents' house (yet), so cloud it is.
So far, I’m leaning towards #Backblaze B2. Do you have anything good (or bad) to say about it, or can recommend other services to check out?
I want: one (EU-based) location, no (or small) egress fees, pricing per GB (or less), no minimum charge. I use #restic, so backend doesn’t matter (S3, FTP, DAV, you name it).
Weekend is here so, now the 'No tomes Available' Sidekiq errors are starting to appear like clockwork as businesses that use their services do backups over the weekend put strain on Backblaze B2B and #Backblaze throttles available connections dynamically across their system.
Joy Joy for low-cost media storage of a #MastoAdmin. We get what we pay for. Luckily, for me, most of that media is from the Fediverse firehouse.
Really wish we could turn off Preview images, esp self-hosts
Backblaze was down for me for around the last 10 minutes as of this post
Edit: It's still down. Status.backblaze.com has no issues
Sidekiq errorL Aws::S3::Errors::ServiceUnavailable: Service temporarily unavailable, please try again
Images were blank but seem back now
#Backblaze#MastoAdmin
I'm having issues they can't resolve lately. B2B doesn't play nice with Mastodon. Any good, reasonably priced alternatives? Refer-a-friend links won't insult me
🤓🚨 16-hours after I reported the #BackBlaze US East outage/disruptions after thousands of S3 errors in SideKiq, Backblaze confirms there are ongoing issues. #MastoAdmin#BackblazeB2
I'm trying out Backblaze for backups, and setup an encryption key. Turns out if you ever use the “View/Restore Files" feature on their website, they send the full encryption key to their remote server.
Which completely and absolutely defeats the point of the encryption key, because now they have a copy of the encryption key.
This form here transmits your encryption key to Backblaze's servers, but they pinky promise never to use it or store it. #SecurityFail#Security#Backblaze
#MastoAdmin question: what are admins doing about media storage and bandwidth? The shop is on S3 + Cloudfront, and it's easily our highest cost on a monthly basis. What other options are there? How do people contain those costs?
I'm shopping around again for options to host masto.nyc outside my home. Right now, I'm considering:
Colocation Datacenters
Pros: We can host locally! And support NYC businesses. Much more affordable long term.
Cons: Still have to manage our own hardware.
Cloud
Pros: Easy to scale. Easy to maintain.
Cons: Difficult to find a local provider. Expensive.
In the meantime I'm looking for more concrete evidence of how much it would actually cost to migrate to cloud resources.
I use NameCheap VPS Quasar ($15.88 per month without a discount https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/vps/ ) and hold around 160gb of storage for my 2000 + / - follows and followers on #BackBlaze B2b S3. Cost under $2.00 per month.
Plus, I have the popular @hashtaggames account that swallows storage.
I'm also connected to several relays, including some fedi buzz.
I've not had an issue
I can understand @seano wanting to keep it local. Kudos.
So I'm running out of disk space on this very basic Mastodon Instance.
So I need to either buy more disk space or implement an S3 Object Bucket. Is the S3 object going to help with disk space issue though?
And is there any easy way to clear temp files on the server (in one(ish) step instead of going around through the various things to clear them in the OS)
I use a couple relays. Have 3 million statuses in my database. 70gb is headers and profile images of 1 million fediverse users. Another 100gb is status media files. For over a year, it's held steady at this with retention settings in admin> server settings set to 7 days
I don't remove the headers/profile media since Mastodon will just redownload when it comes across the account again
@thisismissem Have you seen the drive failure stats that #Backblaze put out regularly?
They use a TON of drives and they pass that knowledge along to the community.
Obviously this is for THEIR environment which is 24/7/365 but good info.
And of course the second I hit “send” I realize you specified “external” which admittedly I prefer to buy cases and put drives in them, but that may not be what you prefer, so apologies if inapplicable.
Just came back from a client who had a 24TB RAID not start up (individual artist/pro); after calling me about it, found offsite backups had been turned off 2y ago and they hadn’t noticed “we couldn’t charge your card” email from #Crashplan so…no #backup
Success! I replaced the unit, moved the drives over and it fired up! 😅😅
That could have been VERY bad.
I got them set up on #Backblaze, we discussed local backup options and monitoring and all is well.
Does #backblaze have some kind of restore limit? I ran a few restores recently because I boggled one of my drives, but I was only doing small subsets since I don't have all the space available and had other constraints. Now whenever I try to run further restores it gets a few files in and then just stops, and stays unmoving for up to 12 hours. Pausing it causes the restore app to hang. I can't use other methods because we're talking about moving near a terabyte at a time.
A quiet Sunday morning. Stayed up late last night to figure out my #Vorta to #Borgbase backup.
After a phase of "why am I not getting this?", the light-bulb finally went off, and I got my #QGIS projects to backup successfully to the cloud. Works really well. I used to backup to #Backblaze on my mac, so nice to find a BETTER open source option.
My historical data collection is growing to the level that I really want more redundancy.
Today I make better instruction notes in #Joplin for myself.
I just had a short outage of the media storage on my Mastodon instance. Connections to Backblaze were timing out for a few minutes but it seems like everything is up and running again. Anyone else using Backblaze B2 as storage backend with similar issues?
If you're running a #Synology#NAS and you back files up to #Backblaze#B2 check your polling settings because the majority of my bill (admittedly not a large bill) was in "Class C Transactions" which were caused by my NAS polling B2 every 60 seconds
There's even a section on it on the Backblaze docs, but I didn't read #RTFM as initially setting up Cloud Sync seemed straightforward
My impressions with the #Backblaze restore app released as part of 9.0.0 for Windows and its #accessibility with a #ScreenReader. The window hierarchy is a bit strange, there's nested dialogs inside windows that you occasionally have to object navigate if tab won't get you there, especially on the sign-in process. The actual computer backup portion appears to be relatively straightforward, you have a date and a time picker which work like I think some Windows controls do. It's like a list, and you use left/right to change the column you're modifying and up/down to increment and decrement it. The file list is in the form of a tree control with checkboxes for you to check items. The only real issue I have with it is that it seems to auto-expand on hover, which means if you arrow to a node and wait even half a second it automatically expands, which can sometimes take a while depending on the backup. You have to left arrow to collapse it and then it will stay collapsed until you go away from it and then back to it. I can't find a setting to turn this off so I would explicitly have to expand my nodes, and would much prefer if there was one. Automatic expansion is not ideal for keyboard users. And given such expansion can cause server queries which in my case actually appeared to block the application, this would be bad even for a mouse user I'd suspect if they're scrolling through a long view to try to get to a particular folder. First letter navigation, at least, appears to work, unsure about multi-letter. Overall not a bad start, and is definitely nicer than the web version with a screen reader, to say nothing of zip size requirements or paying for B2 or hard drive shipping. I think their servers are just being particularly hammered right now so I'm getting messages about slow response times, imagine when that eases up the restore app will be snappier. It does seem to retrieve file listings each time you select a different date/time and hit the go button, which can take a while. I assume waiting for the entire list to be sent and held in memory would be much worse, so this is a good compromise, and at least you have to click a button to make it do so rather than trying to be dynamic about it and die in the process.
Do #SSD failures follow the bathtub curve? Ask #Backblaze
SSD Edition: 2023 Drive Stats Mid-Year Review: While the actual curve produced by the SSD failures over each quarter is a bit “lumpy”, the trend line (second order polynomial) does have a definite bathtub curve look to it.
But Lifetime AFR: The lifetime data is cumulative from Q4 2018 through Q2 2023. For this period, lifetime AFR for all of our SSDs was just 0.90%, but removing a few bad models drops it to 0.72% https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2023-mid-year-drive-stats-review/
So far, I am really liking #BackBlaze for my s3 hosting for my Mastodon instance.
FLEXIFY.IO made moving from AWS to BackBlaze a breeze, and although I could have moved everything manually with rclone, etc, it only costed $1.18 to have it moved. (FLEXIFY.IO gave me a $20 credit.) It was fast, too.
How confident are you about your self-hosting, that it won't just blow up some day and all your data would be gone?
I'd like to try to self-host as much as it would make sense (but without overdoing it) but I'm afraid I'd mess something up, and I'd lose everything I have.
What are your backup strategies?
I know Google/Dropbox/OneDrive/whatever can also lose users data, but I also know, that I have much bigger chance to blow my data up by myself than that they would lose it.
@djvdq my file server has a RAID1 setup and gets backed up weekly to #Backblaze B2 storage. I also occasionally back up to an external USB hard drive; I should do that more often than I do, though.