Anyone from Backblaze Here?
Your backup service is good. I have been a paying customer for years. During that time, I've never had to interact with your account management portal to manage licenses, backups, etc.
During the last few weeks, due to the fires in Los Angeles, I've had to make use of account management functions.
I have to tell you, I did not imagine it would be so bad. And, after interacting with customer service, I am now looking for alternatives.
I'll give you one example. I enabled group functions to manage and add others. I also happen to have an unused paid license (one that I have been paying for a few years without ever using it BTW).
After adding a person to the group, I discovered there is no way to assign this license to this person. In fact, support told me "you don't need a group, just have them reinstall the software and sign-in on their computer under your account and they can use that license". Really????
Only writing this because I was shocked. I've been using your service for years and have appreciated many things associated with your company. This, I did not expect. I can go to the DMV if I want to experience this kind of nonsense.
Yev from Backblaze here -> I'm sorry to hear that was the case and that you were affected by the fires in LA. It's true that Groups may not be required depending on what you were trying to do, but I'm saddened to hear that your experience with support was less than ideal. If you can send me your ticket number, I can have support management review the ticket.
Yev,
Ticket# 1115339. BTW, your support and your backups are good. The issue isn't support or backups. I think this aspect of your product is excellent.
However, if I may presume, from the user experience, I get the feeling that the user portal has not gotten as much attention as the rest of the offerings. I get how that can happen, yet, as a user, nobody wants to have what I call a "DMV experience".
I should be able to buy licenses and easily assign them to group members, take them back, reassign them, etc. As a practical matter, if I already paid for a license before forming a Group, why make a user delete it, then ask for a refund and buy the same license again.
Even worse, why ask the administrator of a group to let group members reinstall the application and login with the administrator's credentials to be able to grab an unused license? So, I have to give account admin credentials to a group member for they to have access to an unused license?
The reason I enabled "Business Groups" was what you say on your docs page:
https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/backblaze-gro...
"The Backblaze Groups feature lets you manage, pay for, and administrate several users. Groups allow several people to have individual accounts that all fall under one credit card and renew on the same date. If the Group is managed, the administrators also have access to manage user's accounts, create restores, and perform any action a user can typically perform on their account. Groups is a great feature for all sizes of business or families who want to be able to manage payment for multiple members."
I was also told during a chat session that all I had to do was enable Business Groups and I could then assign licenses as needed. I was told that enabling Groups was just a checkbox that enabled the administrative portion of things and I would be able to manage licenses just as well.
On this basis I formed a group and added people to it.
There are other issues.
For example, the login seems to have a 30 minute timeout (or whatever it is). If I want to monitor a backup I have to login again every single time I go to check on it.
On the Users & Computers page I cannot see the backup status of the computers in the group. I have to click on "Details" for each user one at a time. If I have 10 computers in that group, it would be painful.
Why does Preferences have a Delete Backup function? That's not a preference, that belongs in the Overview page within each backup information box. Or, better yet, a "Manage Backups" page with a simple table where you can clone, restore, rename, get details on, etc. for each backup, including perhaps seeing group assignments.
Etc.
This is why I say this probably did not get a lot of attention. I wonder how much usability testing was done on this? For example, I can't imagine a user who wants to delete a backup immediately thinking "Oh, yes, I need to go to Preferences".
Thanks.
Tangentially: Earlier this week, I spent a very disproportionate amount of time just trying to find a fresh download of the backup client, as the current installation has been crashing a bit.