I find it a bit misleading that there isn’t a single mention that the feature is currently in beta.
I’m not saying publishers can get away with anything with a simply “beta” label, but it’s an important fact to mention if you’re going to release a whole piece about this…
I'm not sure why you find it misleading, it says it's a beta repeatedly, both on the Settings page, on the logo, and during the opt in enablement process.
Honestly, if you're providing it (I believe by default in territories where it's enabled?) to everyone, then 'beta' is purely a marketing term and should carry no weight at all.
Hey, this is pretty insightful! Wonder if, in the course of researching to build this website you reached any conclusions as to what’s the AI assistant currently ahead.
I intended to make this submission about an alternative and not so much criticism about Backblaze. But you're right, I vaguely made some criticism and I definitely think it warrants a better explanation.
I also 100% agree with what you say about product updates, I want my backup provider to be relatively static and slow in changing their product as long as it is robust and it does the job.
On the more specific reasons I think Backblaze is a little far behind in UI/UX:
- It's very hard (or impossible) to know if you're 100% backed up after you add new files to your HD.
- When you go to the website to check if your new files are backedup, the web page is extremely slow and outdated (I'm talking windows xp style interface iframed into a modern page).
- When you get a new HD, because you're constantly filling this things up, the transition process is very sketchy, to say the least. Technically you go through the same process as when you loose an HD, which might make sense, but the process is very slow and the user doesn't get much feedback as to the progress and state of it. Which is particularly nerve-racking when you're dealing with a huge and priceless treasure trove of information.
That said I do have to make a caveat in favor of Backblaze. Not only it is reasonably priced (100$/year, new pricing), Backblaze seems to be design to run continuously on computers with lots of storage and with their HDs connected at all time. That's why they don't bother giving the information about the completeness of your backup, or even making a good web UI for it, because I guess their target user just turns on Backblaze and never really looks back at it. And forget about sharing files through Backblaze, it is 100% a backup tool, not a modern cloud file tool.
It should be said that I fall a bit off their target user, I want to backup my external drives that are connected only when I add new files, and not my whole computer, all the time. This is also the motivation to once in a while look for an alternative in hopes of finding a better solution.
Thanks for the tip on SpiderOak, I'll have a look into it.
I can see that being a very large gap if it is not easy to see if your files are actually backed up or not. That kind of surprises me a little bit that back blaze doesn't have that but again it's been many years since I've used them and I only did briefly.
That is one of the features that is very easy to see in spider oak. The UI opens to a dashboard that tells you the number of items and bytes that are outstanding and waiting to be uploaded. One other thing about spider oak is there's not an automatic retention like I believe you said 30 days you have to plug in the hard drives to keep them refreshed. In spider oak I've had systems that have been offline for years and the backup is still retained until I manually go delete that system to have its data purged. One of the other features I do like about them is their hive that allows you to synchronize between systems as well. So depending on your requirements you can back up things to their cloud for redundancy and maybe things that are of a lower priority you can simply have it synchronized between various systems.
The One singular feature that sold me on spider oak as opposed to every other provider I looked at was their Linux support. How they don't really treat Linux or even a Windows servers as different from any other thing you're backing up. You purchase your amount of cloud data and they don't care.
Just doing a little more looking at my spider oak and their UI I feel can be a little bit slow at times especially navigating large amounts of files but I did double check this and nothing gets automatically purged from their system based on time. Even files that are deleted from your local system simply go into their deleted items bucket and they are there in perpetuity until you manually go purge it to free up space.
You can set the recording format before the recording to better values. Sound takes little space compared to the video.
H265 and av1 should be the most optimal video formats available. Reducing the video resolution also helps reducing the filesize.
after the recording you can also reduce the filesize with ffmpeg, which can be better, since reducing the size after recording lets you get the best quality with the lowest filesize, since reducing the filesize is easier, but once it is reduced you can't revert it.
Select H265 (HEVC) encoding (with MKV container) in the settings and test what bitrate is the lowest you can work with. And obviously keep resolution to 1920x1080
This will save 50 to 60 % over just standard MP4 settings I'd say. Most players can handle mkv now
Indeed, merge policy management and enforcement is a pain point for a lot of companies out there, specially for the ones growing up and trying to keep a solid process with new people coming in.
