Backblaze Reviews 218

Still working on backup after 5 DAYS! CUSTOMER SERVICE THE WORST. They explain they have NO PHONE NUMBER TO CAL. Can ONLY submit a ticket. Then they do NOT respond for up to 48 hours! Then they go dark. I have asked to be connected to a supervisor.... lol, right. Unimpressed.

I signed up for a £8 unlimited data plan and I end up switching over to another plan paying £20 a month? After 2 more payments were taken I canceled the plan and asked for a refund on the latest payment - they said no they couldn't as it was against their T&C's.

Lack of transparency, lack of clear plans and pricing makes for a very very dodgy company. Think twice about going with these guys please.

Restoring files kept giving wrong versions. Downloaded a recent backup, and some data was not up to date but from a long time ago.

I lost a hard drive and went into my Backblaze backups. While all the directories were present, about two thirds of the data was missing. This was after about a year connected to the drive. So I decided to cancel my subscription. What a mission! During the process they actually took another $111.32 even though I had four months paid up in my subscription.

I just had to put in my 2 cents worth here for Backblaze. I see some horrendous reviews, but I have not had that experience at all. Maybe I'm just lucky but I've been with Backblaze for over a year. I have multiple very large hard drives as I use my computer for video and audio tasks that consume a great deal of hard drive space. This is the one service I found, and I looked around a lot, that is affordable enough to backup all my hard drives and do it with ease. Basically set it and forget it. And I use 2FA and security with my files so that it is very hacker proof. I know it's not going to make an image and backup everything, but the main point is that the backups are always updating every day of my main important data. If I had to reinstall windows I can do that and then restore the data drives. I like that if there was ever a fire, flood or tornado etc, my data is backed up safe. The speed seems to be very good now that I have fiber optic from my IP.

Last year Backblaze charge my account after I had closed it, I had to do a dispute with my credit card company and change credit card numbers. And this year backblaze charged a family members credit card that I’m not even associated with that the card number or line of credit was never provided to Backblaze. So, after talking to the credit card companies, that means they would’ve taken my information and looked up family members information, and this is not legal.
If the company’s gonna go that far to steal credit card information, what are they doing with your private information that you back up?
These people are hackers, and the company was sold to someone else that used to be a good service but they shut off their customer service phone number and as far as customer service there isn’t any. If you need technical support they just email you articles they don’t actually answer your questions. So you’re much better off backing up your data yourself and locking it in a fire safe container. And safe yourself getting your finances hacked.

Don’t trust your data with this company!

A bug in their software meant they corrupted my whole backup and had to start again. At no point did they apologize for this - they just pointed me to a guide on how to delete my backup and start again - like it was perfectly normal for them to corrupt backups.

Obviously I decided to end my business with them - but they do not offer a way to cancel an automatic renewal - and you cannot delete your credit card info! So how do you cancel? You have to delete your whole backup before the end of your period - so you cannot get the full period you paid for.

It would be so easy for them to add a cancel renewal button and a delete credit card info button. The fact they don't is underhand tactics to make people accidentally continue paying.

Also it is against GDPR to not delete credit card info upon request - you cannot withhold a service from someone who does not wish to store their credit card details.

We've had Back Blaze for our company for 3 months. As of now we still do not have a back-up. We have three machines that have critical data on them, one being our server. We purchased their three computer option. All BackBlaze has done is try to get us to sign up for the free trial or purchase their service. As we have purchased their service, we are just trying to get the systems to back-up.
What complicated the process is that they have NO tech support.
We will be going back to Crash Plan.

Their support team only send pre-generated responses to your concerns. They failed to review our account utilization when their system fails to properly remove outdated files based on the set policy.

Also, their download costs are through the roof. We were charged several thousand when some 3rd-party unrelated to our company downloaded several 100TB of our data. They have no accountability for failures in their automated platform. Avoid like the PLAGUE!

Rude, avoidant know-it-all support staff. As you’d expect from any cliche “better-than-thou” IT support pastiche. Acting superior, offering minimal kindness or authenticity in their responses. Quoting BackBlaze “scripture” in robotic and blaise manner, and acting superior to the people that pay them and give them a business.

They do not backup applications, or SD cards. And there is no setting to enable these. And no desire to explain why, or push to make it happen. Useless app, that doesn’t back up your entire system. Run by stuck up and rude gatekeepers that seem to treat you like an inferior instead of the person paying to use their service, and paying their salary. Some mutual respect wouldn’t be difficult, would it?

I've been a Backblaze subscriber for years - but much like insurance, you can't ever truly know how good it is until you have a problem. Last week I had that problem - I lost 212GB of data, critical photos for a long term documentary project I'd been working on for four years. A stupid error by me - I overwrote a folder on top of another by mistake and didn't realise at the time. That night, my SuperDuper backup to my physical backup drive meant my mistake was replicated on my backup drive. Backblaze would also have copied the error - BUT - because they offer time machine backups, I was able to go back a week, find the original folder and download it all. It took a few hours - 212GB is a lot of data - but it all came through seamlessly and completely saved my bacon. I cannot recommend it highly enough!

I have asked for a Backblaze restore drive. It took a month to arrive due to postal issues on their end. Now I cannot even access my backup data due to a documented Western Digital issue. They ignore the fact and keep on saying to unlock it, which is exactly what is impossible to do, due to this error. Their customer care proposed me to do an action that would entirely remove my backup history from their storage data center, exactly now that I need the backup to be intact due to all the issues that I have been receiving. So, no backup on the drive, and delete the backup on their end as well, why not, in a way that they can blame me for. Also, they do not know that Backblaze does not backup a list of things hidden in their configuration files (on top of the ones that are configurable through their software) and you wouldn't know that until you need those files. Their customer care doesn't even know that (only their managers do) and you won't be told anywhere (if you are worried as you should, here they are, already configured extra exclusions without you knowing: search google for "backblaze advanced topic setting custom exclusions via XML"). I've been without my data for two months now, paid 130€ for the subscription and 200€ to receive my restore drive, and here we are. Your choice what you do with my information!

I LOVE this backup company. I set up my backup several years ago and almost canceled it several times because I wasn't sure I needed it since I have Time Machine running. Then my computer crashed. Having Time Machine that wasn't enough. Having Backblaze allowed me to get to files from my laptop while my computer was being fixed, which took over a week. During that time, I couldn't access any of my files. If I hadn't had Backblaze, I would not have been able to get to what I needed. I've since used it when I need to work from home because I can easily get to files on my desktop when I need to. It's a great backup, and I will be keeping my backup with Backblaze for the foreseeable future.

As others have mentioned, there are numerous issues restoring, and the aging software has not received any meaningful updates in the 4 years I've been using it. I finally lost a drive last night, and the restore process has been horrendous.

You can download one file at a time through a dated web UI (useless), or create a zip file (really?) up to 500GB at a time, which takes forever. And now you need significantly more space to extract that zip file. There are no point in time snapshots. No ability to mount your data as a drive. Not sure who thought of this ridiculous restore process.

TLDR: Shut THEM DOWN! They are scammers. Your software will never work and the bill will keep coming.

In Janurary of this year I decided to start backing up my only laptop. Backblaze had what I thought was a good price and offer to backup the pc while I sleep. Win-win. Nope the first full backup stopped. I recivecd error messages and started trouble shooting. Weeks later after many emails to tech support, failed TS, installing and uninstalling the software I gave up and cancelled my plan.

Well Backblaze decided to continue charging me. I emailed them, nothing, I finally had to reach out to my bank cancel my card and request a full refund from the fraud team.

Wow, the reviews here are pretty bad. I have been using Backblaze for over 5 years now and I have been 98% satisifed with them. But there are some things that one needs to understand because a restore is not as simple as you think it should be.

1) I pay for 1 year of backup. That is, anytime up to 364 days after I delete (or modify) a file, I can get it back. This is an extra charge and not the default option. To me this was worth it because it may be months before I realize something is missing.

2) It's sort of like a time machine on the restore side...you have to tell it when the file was last uploaded. The default is from date of installation on your computer today. But if you modified a file today, and want the file as it was 3 days ago, then you need to set the date on the restore to be 3 days ago---otherwise you just get the already overwritten file. This is not intuitive for people. If you think you deleted content a month ago, if you look at the default listing of your compute contents on the restore page, you won't see the missing data you will liekly panic that it is gone.. Just change the last date on the restore window selection to be 1 month ago (or whenever you think the files existed) and they will show up in the restore list and allow you to download them.

3) You can order a hard drive will your content (up to 8TB) for $189 BUT you can return it and get your $189 back. So yes, you have to pay for return shipping but for $16 bucks or so you get up to 8TB of your lost data sent to you on a USB drive. Super easy. Did you lose 100TB of data? Ugh. You can get 40TB on hard drives free (5 x 8TB drives) that you pay up front and return. The rest you have pay for the hard drives and keep them (and resell them on eBay after wiping them) or download files manually.

4) You can download all your content if 1) you have patience and 2) fast enough internet connection. I was able to select up 500MB of data that Backblaze zipped up in about 1 hour of time. It then took me 2 hours to download it over my 1 gigabit network connnection. You can do thise as much as you want. You can have up 5 zip files being created at one time, but as they are created and waiting for you to download them you can create more. Unlimited amount more. You could have 16 500MB zip files of your data waiting for you download, for example, which would be the same as a single 8TB HDD being sent to you and wouldn't have to pay the deposit. (But you can have unlimited zip files created to download for free.)

5) This is where their technology breaks down in my opinion. Selecting 500MB of data, if it is a lot of small files like 5 years of iphone photographs shoved into 1 folder. You can select folders but if the folder greater than 500MB in data, and no subfolders, then you have to select the first 500MB of files one-at-a-painful-irritating-time. There is no way to select the first file and scroll down a few hundred photos and shift-click some where and see if you are close to 500Gb limit yet. I would prefer their software to let me select as much data as I want and automatically break it into seperate zip files of 500MB each.

6) Lastly, the backblaze downloader software is critical for huge zip files. But it sucks that you can only do one at a time. I tried running the software twice and downloading files in parallel (after all I have a gigabit internet connection) it they both failed. I even copied the source files of the downloader and DLL files into seperate folders and they both failed to download. They must be using a shared log or support file somewhere on the local windows machine (or remotely?) and it breaks. So you have to do one at a time. And the other stinky part is you can't queue all the files to download.. So I started to download my first 500MB file of photos and saw it would take 2 hours... but it wasn't 8 hours later when I got back from work that I could start the next file to start downloading. Why can't I select all the files to be downloaded and have the download manager download them, on at time if needed, serially, until they all are done without making me babysit the process?

So, consider storing files in your computer in sub-folders of 500MB or less if possible. That will ease restore process if ever needed.

Last thing to be aware of is that the zip files that are created in their cloud restore server expire after one-week in which the zip file is deleted. If you didn't download it soon enough you have to start over and reseelct the files and wait for the zip file to be recreated.

Those complaining of slow backup--change the upload speed in the setting to FASTER BACKUP. Default is faster local performance and minimal internet bandwidth impact to the user.

I also use, and suggest you all use, your own private key to encrypt your data. Encrypts on your local system and uploaded encrypted data to backblaze. They can never read your content. That's good practice.

Generally seems to be working. But their claim of providing free migration service was false. They also do not answer emails regarding this. I would have to say to avoid this company.

The support people with Backblaze are totally disinterested in helping. The most they will do is send you links to their website. I went through all of the hoops multiple times and all I get is error messages. They just don't care! I've tried to deal with the for weeks.

I have been using Backblaze for around a month, and so far the experience is excellent. I have contacted technical support a couple of times (by email) and both times their response was within 24 hours and answered my question accurately.
The only drawback I've noticed so far is that in order for backups to work in 'continuous' mode, you must leave your computer switched on for several hours after the latest file modifications in order for backblaze to backup the changes. As I tend to use the computer for a couple of hours at a time and hiberate it between uses, continuous backup wasn't working. However, if you select 'Backup only when I click on "Backup now"', the backup is done within 2 or 3 minutes and does backup all recent files. My current backup size is around 140GB, so an incremental backup taking 2 or 3 minutes is fine with me.
I cannot comment on the numerous negative reviews, as my own experience is entirely positive so far.

Just as others on this site, I have had very unfortunate situations with their brain-dead support team - who obviously has not been trained in customer service.

I have actually been using their service for quite some while, and have helped upwards of 10-13 clients setup and use Backblaze across their fleet as I find their software good and reliable. Such a shame that their developers are backed up by such incompetent staff.

I'll be moving all of my clients away from this service out of pure principle, and I'll incur the cost for that. I normally do not leave reviews and see myself as a calm person, but the injustices of this company is beyond my belief, and I could not help it.