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🦉 WE READ 98 OWNER COMMENTS
Backblaze Personal Backup: what owners actually say
Owners appreciate the set-and-forget simplicity and pricing, but the 30-day external drive deletion rule and painfully slow restores are dealbreakers for many.
What owners complain about
- 30-day external drive deletion COMMON
If an external drive stays disconnected for 30 days, Backblaze deletes that backup. Multiple owners call this 'terrible' and a significant limitation for anyone who rotates or occasionally connects external storage.
- Restore process is painfully slow SOME
One owner reported their ~350 GB restore via zip took a week just to prepare. The USB hard drive shipping option took the same amount of time. Summed up as: 'Backing up works incredibly well. Restoring is a nightmare.'
- Unlimited storage is effectively capped SOME
An engineer confirmed they break even at around 2 TB. Users storing massive amounts (1 PB+) are considered abusers and get pushed out. The founder once encouraged heavy uploads, but policy has tightened as costs rose.
- Safety freeze confusion FEW
Owners report getting 'safety frozen' with unclear causes and no straightforward way to diagnose what triggered it or verify data integrity of large backups.
- No Linux support SOME
Backblaze explicitly avoids Linux clients because Linux users statistically store more data, which would increase losses on the flat-rate pricing model.
What owners love
- Set-and-forget reliability
Multiple owners praise it as a 'couple of years' solution that just works in the background without intervention.
- Straightforward pricing
Owners appreciate the clear, simple cost structure compared to piecemeal cloud storage options.
- Good Mac experience
Specifically praised for having a nice Mac app with fast upload speeds.
- USB hard drive restore option
Backblaze offers an 8 TB encrypted external drive shipped to you for faster restores, which owners appreciate as an option (even if preparation time was slow for some).
- Cheapest reliable option for typical use
Called 'cheap and the best' by multiple users who find it unbeatable for standard home-user backup needs.
Surprising patterns
- A Backblaze engineer publicly defended shipping 21 identical copies of the same executable on purpose, sparking a debate where other developers argued this showed a misunderstanding of fundamental filesystem and process management — revealing a controversial engineering culture.
- One user's backups appeared 'corrupt' during restore but the real cause was a password manager auto-filling a hidden field with the wrong encryption password — the error message was misleading, not the backup.
- Several users migrated to Backblaze specifically after CrashPlan shut down its consumer service and deleted decryption keys, showing this product captures refugees from failed competitors.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Linux users, anyone who needs to back up external drives that aren't always connected, and power users with multiple terabytes of data who might get caught in the 'unlimited' ceiling.
Synthesised from 98 real owner comments across 6 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →