Do you have any more details? This is a pretty big deal. The differentiators between Backblaze and Hetzner mostly boil down to this kind of thing supposedly not being possible.

I’m on my phone so forgive the formatting, but here’s my entire support exchange:

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Hey, I tried restoring a file from my backup — downloading it directly didn't work, and creating a restore with it also failed – I got an email telling me contract y'all about it.

Can you explain to me what happened here, and what can I do to get my file(s?) back?

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Hi Jan,

Thanks for writing in!

I've reached out to our engineers regarding your restore, and I will get back to you as soon as I have an update. For now, I will keep the ticket open.

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Hi Jan,

Regarding the file itself - it was deleted back in 2022, but unfortunately, the deletion never got recorded properly, which made it seem like the file still existed.

Thus, when you tried to restore it, the restoration failed, as the file doesn't actually exist anymore. In this case, it shouldn't have been shown in the first place.

For that, I do apologize. As compensation, we've granted you 3 monthly backup credits which will apply on your next renewal. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

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That makes me even more confused to be honest - I’ve been paying for forever history since January 2022 according to my invoices?

Do you know how/when exactly it got deleted?

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Hi Jan,

Unfortunately, we don't have that information available to us. Again, I do apologize.

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I really don’t want to be rude, but that seems like a very serious issue to me and I’m not satisfied with that response.

If I’m paying for a forever backup, I expect it to be forever - and if some file got deleted even despite me paying for the “keep my file history forever” option, “oh whoops sorry our bad but we don’t have any more info” is really not a satisfactory answer.

I don’t hold it against _you_ personally, but I really need to know more about what happened here - if this file got randomly disappeared, how am I supposed to trust the reliability of anything else that’s supposed to be safely backed up?

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Hi Jan,

I'll inquire with our engineers tomorrow when they're back in, and I'll update you as soon as I can. For now, I will keep the ticket open.

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Appreciate that, thank you! It’s fine if the investigation takes longer, but I just want to get to the bottom of what happened here :)

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Hi Jan,

Thanks for your patience.

According to our engineers and my management team:

With the way our program logs information, we don't have the specific information that explains exactly why the file was removed from the backup. Our more recent versions of the client, however, have vastly improved our consistency checks and introduced additional protections and audits to ensure complete reliability from an active backup.

Looking at your account, I do see that your backup is currently not active, so I recommend running the Backblaze installer over your current installation to repair it, and inherit your original backup state so that our updates can check your backup.

I do apologize, and I know it's not an ideal answer, but unfortunately, that is the extent of what we can tell you about what has happened.

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I gave up escalating at this point and just decided these aren’t trusted anymore.

The files in question are four year old at this point so it’s hard for me conclusively state, so I guess there might be a perfect storm of that specific file being deleted because it was due to expire before upgraded to “keep history forever”, but I don’t think it’s super likely, and I absolutely would expect them to have telemetry about that in any case.

If anyone from Backblaze stumbles upon it and wants to escalate/reinvestigate, the support ID is #1181161.