Ask HN: Alternative to Backblaze

It's difficult to make a recommendation when you're not sighting any problems that you're having or new features that you want or think would be valuable. The main criticism you have appears to be able to be summed up as it's not new and shiny. As if your backup provider is some bauble that you wear around your neck for others to see.

You do say that you feel that there's a lot that can be improved and you feel the experiences dated but there is not one example provided of what you believe an improvement would be. Not in workflows not in features not in anything. Products like backblaze rarely change unless there is obvious sellable features. I imagine they don't get a lot of feedback on actionable features and improvements that they could make.

This type of product is not sold based on feelings it's sold based on function. Is your backup provider functional, are the workflows intuitive and functional, does the UI work in the sense that it allows you to do things in a way that you're used to. Updating things to just be new and shiny without meaningful feature or workflow improvements absolutely destroy businesses. There is a reason places like Amazon still have a website that looks very dated compared to the modern browser lagging garbage that people think is so hot. When you have a UI/UX that's established and your users are used to it changing it is the best way to chase them away. Unless of course that change comes with very meaningful enhancements to how the work is done.

Is your backup provider supposed to be a trendy thing you can brag about to your friends? Honestly I don't know any backup provider that feels trendy and gives me the feels when I look at their apps or their websites. Mostly something like that would actually turn me off from them because generally places that invest heavily in front end spit and polish lack horribly in the back end. While I personally don't use backblaze I do believe that they are one of the more robust and better backend providers.

Last time I communicated with them it was very easy to get a hold of people in the executive team and they were open to suggestions and ideas. I imagine if you have actionable suggestions about improving the look and feel in a meaningful way to make the product easier to use they would consider it.

Personally I use SpiderOak for my backup. I think backblaze is a fine product it just didn't have the features that I wanted and SpiderOak did. It is also something that has not been updated in quite some time because it is functional as it is currently. I would actually take the opposite approach of you if my backup provider all of a sudden updated their app and changed it to look more trendy and modern it would be frustrating because my first thing would be now where do I go to select additional files for backup or do a restore or check on status and so forth. That would make me look to another provider because if I have to relearn a UI but not have any new functionality, I can just as easily relearn a UI on a different provider.