Easy. They were keeping you as back up. They were not sure if their most preferred candidate would accept the offer, so they kept you in a loop until the other person joined. Looks like he did.
I understand the company fucked up but why does the article only talk about the company and not the intelligence agency hacking into companies to get information?
The CTO just said the truth. How else would he say that the customer's data will be deleted? Sure it was straight up blunt, but I think he was just speaking casually.
I am very confused by the email, especially the second point. I've never used Backblaze so maybe I'm missing some critical information. To me, it sounds like Backblaze was happily keeping a backup for a paying customer until said customer booted their laptop. They then threaten to delete the backup if customer doesn't update their software. I understand about warning that the software no longer works but why threaten to delete the backup?
I'm with you , that email does not in any way make me feel like Backblaze has my best interest in mind , sounds like they were knowingly charging you for a defunct account then threatened to delete all your data in 7 days ?!
I want to like Backblaze I love their harddrive report but this is not helping.
Since the software version no longer works, they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway. Keeping their old data on the live servers longer could be a liability.
(just a guess, but i imagine it's something along these lines)
There's might be some ancillary issue on the backend. Something like that they changed backup formats, but can't reformat the customer's existing backups because of E2EE, so they need the customer to power up their laptop so the client can reformat the backups. That would explain why the client doesn't work, and why they're so keen to have them do a new backup.
It wouldn't have been unreasonable to move away from SHA1 in that time period, for example. They may have needed the original files to get a SHA256 hash.
I think it must have been blocking some organizational objective. I can't think of any reason why they would bother to send that email, much less to go all the way to the CTO to send that email.
I don't mind the bluntness, but you should either delete the data cancel the sub, or keep the sub and the data. I don't understand why you'd do one and not the other if you cared about the customer. And again 7 day is a bit short, though in a follow up email they extended it to 2 weeks.
Really, the issue is that routine exercise of the most basic kind is totally absent in most Americans' lives. In most of the world you can reasonably walk to school, to work, to do some quick shopping, to meet with friends, and if you're not walking directly there you can walk to a bus or a train that will get you in that general direction. In most American suburbia, these types of walking journeys are at best indirect and at worst downright dangerous with a lack of safe sidewalks or crosswalks.
I moved from a major, transit oriented US city to a suburb, and my daily steps walked declined by like 75%. The suburbs are designed around doing as little physical movement as possible.
