Backblaze cloud backup pays off for financial software firm
Talisys IT staff finds Backblaze backup can reliably protect the financial software firm's data at work, but is simple enough to pay for to use at home for personal data.
Talisys IT staff members Chadd Warwick and Simon Battersby like the Backblaze cloud backup their company uses so much, they also pay for the service at home.
Warwick, a systems architect at the financial software company, said he can't think of another product on his work desk that he pays to use personally.
"The fact that we run it at home says a lot," Warwick said.
Firing up Backblaze backup
Talisys, which is based in Colorado and serves brokerage firms, has been using Backblaze cloud backup for about six years.
Warwick said Talisys also looked at Carbonite, which was a popular choice at the time. But he didn't like Carbonite's per-usage cost. Backblaze offered unlimited use, charging per OS on a month-to-month basis.
"From a budgetary perspective, it was and still is the easiest product to deal with," Warwick said. "Backblaze, not only does it work, it's a set price."
Backup is useless if you can't restore it.
Chadd WarwickSystems architect, Talisys
Talisys uses Backblaze cloud backup for its user protection system. The company uses mainly Veeam Software with some Commvault to back up its data center, but Backblaze is for its end users' computers. Talisys uses Hitachi Vantara and Cisco for primary storage.
Battersby, an IT analyst, said Backblaze is easy to use and simple to manage. Users can fully function without the need for training, and IT doesn't have to deal with infrastructure, because the product is cloud-based.
Users have needed to recover files from their backups, and they can get into the program and function without IT support. They can also recover a file at home rather than having to go back to the office.
"Backup is useless if you can't restore it," Warwick said.
Talisys carries 130 licenses for the product and protects about 125 TB. The company generally carries five to 10 more licenses than it uses, so a new worker can immediately access it.
Warwick said he'd like to see enhanced reporting within the product, but, generally, Backblaze cloud backup does exactly what the vendor claims. And he's happy that his multiple terabytes of personal data are also under its protection. So is Battersby. He recalled a time when a melted hard drive resulted in lost baby pictures, but now he has Backblaze at home to protect personal files.
Backblaze builds a bridge for backup
Backblaze Cloud Backup 6.0 released in early 2019 features larger restore sizes and the ability to save backed up data to cloud storage snapshots.
Backblaze doubled the capacity of its restore hard drives. For the Restore by Mail feature, a $99 flash key now holds up to 256 GB, and a $189 hard drive now holds up to 8 TB.
Yev Pusin, Backblaze director of marketing, said Restore by Mail can help in the event of a complete system failure, because downloading a full restore over the internet could take too long and use up too much bandwidth.
Users can also now zip and archive backups to a snapshot in Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage. The files are available until the user deletes the snapshot. That's even if the user has deleted the original files from the computer and backup.
"It's essentially a bridge between the two," Pusin said of Backblaze cloud backup and B2.
Backblaze enables users to archive backups to a snapshot in B2 Cloud Storage.
B2 Cloud Storage costs half a penny per gigabyte, per month. It's 1 cent per gigabyte to download the data if the user needs it back.
Warwick said Talisys could use the B2 feature as an archive, for example, with data after an employee leaves.
Backblaze claims to have more than 750 petabytes of data under management and to have restored about 40 billion files.
