Backblaze Raises Subscription Pricing of Personal Backup (backblaze.com) 73
Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman, writing on the company blog: Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We've invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down -- savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price.
However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.
The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices. The new monthly plan now costs $7, while the yearly plan will set you back by $70.
However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.
The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices. The new monthly plan now costs $7, while the yearly plan will set you back by $70.
Still cheap (Score:1)
Been using it for years. I will gladly pay the extra dollar.
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Why not both? Backup ZFS to B2 is not complicated.
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We do that at work, since offsite backup is nice.
I don't believe Backblaze backs up extended attributes though, which can be an issue for some files/OSes.
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It depends on how one backs things up. I use Borg Backup to Backblaze B2, which does back up extended attributes and ACLs, or if one wants to be 100% sure, one could use ZFS snapshots and zfs send to ensure everything related is backed up as an image.
The Backblaze client is only available for Mac and Windows, so one would have to either make a VM and mount shares or do something similar to get files backed up via that method.
Re: Still cheap (Score:2)
I forget why I decided against Borg backup (I ended going with rclone, but almost chose borg), and the limitation is related to rclone.
In the process though I saw a reddit thread where a backblaze employee was basically saying "people want real data, not meta data" and was pretty dismissive of the idea that anybody would care. Obviously we care (and even they do) about meta data (file name and location at the very least) and it was a pretty weird exchange.
Very dismissive of the concerns of OSX users where t
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Can I ask, what attracted you to Backblaze B2? It seems expensive compared to other options like Google cloud (e.g. Nearline) or Jottacloud.
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At the time, it was the ease of access and use. I use B2 for some things, and Wasabi for others. Both are excellent providers, and have worked well for my needs. In some cases, B2 may be more expensive because (IIRC) they have egress fees, but over a number of years, it hasn't been bad.
Re: Still cheap (Score:2)
And then your house burns down or a burglar runs off with your ZFS system. A pipe breaks and floods your server. Where is your God now?
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I guess I should call myself lucky for hosting my server in the annex :P
No pipes, fire suppression system and good security solution.
Re:Still cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
RAID is not a backup.
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Note that ZFS supports raid, but he was probably referencing the snapshot capability, which also affords some protection against things that RAID does not, like deleting a file. If the ZFS is running strictly as a remote file server without easy arbitrary remote shell access and without potentially vulnerable applications, it can even afford protection from things like ransomware. If the ZFS volume is your active root filesystem on your daily driver, then it would product against accidents for the most pa
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Re:Still cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Been using ZFS for years. I will gladly continue paying $0.
And I've been using pi-hole for years. So what?
Unless you skipped a few other pieces to your setup, I don't see how ZFS is in any way a replacement for a remote backup system like Backblaze. ZFS is fine, but nothing about it is inherently not geographically here in the way that a remote backup service is, so when a wildfire or flood or tornado destroys your home, ZFS can't help you restore your family photos unless it's part of a bigger system, whereas Backblaze can.
For my part, I've been using Backblaze for years. Sure, I have a RAID on my network that all of my local machines backup to automatically, so if there's a hardware failure or garden variety data loss, I'll look there first, but none of that is a replacement for a remote backup. I currently live in a place that occasionally gets tornados and floods. I grew up in a hurricane zone. An insurance policy can replace my house, but neither ZFS nor my homeowner's insurance can replace my data if my house no longer exists. That's why I just picked up a one-year extension with Backblaze at the current pricing.
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Why not both? ZFS is great for storage, but you need 3-2-1 protection, and Backblaze B2 is a decent offsite storage provider. Borg Backup, rclone, and Backblaze is a solid backup method. You can pop ZFS snapshots, mount them read-only and have Borg Backup copy on a file basis, or pop ZFS snapshots, use ZFS send and pipe it to Borg Backup for a block level backup.
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Where do you find an offsite location with connectivity that costs nothing?
Note that keeping disks a a friends or relative's home or at your workplace is an external cost, not zero cost.
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Been using it for years. I will gladly pay the extra dollar.
Been using ZFS for years. I will gladly continue paying $0.
Me too, with nary a glitch. But if my system is stolen???
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Transparent, Honest (Score:5, Insightful)
They're one of the most transparent and honest companies in tech, and this is that large of a price increase. Seems perfectly reasonable given current circumstances.
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Re:Transparent, Honest (crypto) (Score:1)
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Their statements are limited to Chia. Their statements are not a blanket statement against all other BUSINESS-driven crypto mining efforts.
Should any paying customer fork over hundreds of millions of USD to leverage their cloud storage services for storing Chia and they're against suc
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In that case just retain pornhub as a client. People will do without a lot of things. e.g. food, water, but not their porn collection.
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Yup. Although it's not just people's data usage that's inflating. The general inflation that people never thought would happen is now happening. Backblaze's basic hardware costs are rising. I imagine their bandwidth costs are going up too. Prices are rising across the board for everything from food to cars to technology. Given debt to GDP ratios, this has been a real concern for some time.
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It's got nothing to do with debt. It's pandemic fallout. Packing a lot of workers into a small space and paying them minimum wage isn't viable anymore.
You've got less workers due to health concerns, and workers are far less willing to take those jobs unless you pay them significantly more.
Re:Transparent, Honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Even announced the change a month in advance so people can lock-in a year or two at the current rate before the change.
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They're one of the most transparent and honest companies in tech, and this is that large of a price increase. Seems perfectly reasonable given current circumstances.
+1 (no mod points to give you)
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Their cloud storage seems very overpriced. I currently have about 4TB in Jottacloud (encrypted backups via Duplicati) and pay around 6.6 Euro/month for it. On Backblaze it would be around 16.6 Euro/month.
Their home backup offer seems to be unlimited which is good, but the caveat is that you have to use their software and it's very limited. Aside from trust issues the limited configurability is also an issue for me. I can store arbitrary files on Jottacloud as well, and share them.
That still seems pretty reasonable. (Score:2)
I'm still managing backups myself (including offsite drives) but it's a pain and really, at this point I am ready to give into just paying for a service to do it well.. the prices Backblaze offers seems pretty good, and so far I've heard mostly good things about them.
Having them raise prices because costs are rising makes me think better of them in terms of long term stability, for a backup service it seems like you'd want a company that knows how to keep the lights on for a very long time.
Re: That still seems pretty reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
I have almost 20TB backed up. They've never throttled me or pressures me in any way to reduce my backups. I'm both part of the reason prices are creeping up and have never had a bad experience on the home giant ass backup or their enterprise cloud solutions.
I now give my parents a backblaze subscription every Christmas as a stocking stuffer because it's so easy to use and let's me just say "did you check backblaze" when they call in a panic over a file going missing. (And probably average out my massive usage haha)
On the enterprise cloud storage front they've also recently added a lot of features to bring them into S3 parity that they held off on because they said it would be too expensive to offer but now offer for the same price as before. So that's definitely an area where they would have been forgiven for charging more (specifically computing hashes which does take compute resources) but managed to keep prices down. Really encourages you that they do try to eat the costs when possible.
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Maybe all those old mining cards were good for something.
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Thanks for the recent update, it still sounds really good so I think I'lll go for it! Especially some S3 like features, I didn't even know about that.
Blame Cryptocurrency (Score:4, Insightful)
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How does cryptocurrency eat up a lot of storage?
Re:Blame Cryptocurrency (Score:5, Insightful)
It is called "Chia Coin", and it is one of the stupidest idea ever, only exceeded in stupidity by other cryoto currencies.
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It is called "Chia Coin", and it is one of the stupidest idea ever, only exceeded in stupidity by other cryoto currencies.
Stupidiest idea ever you say?
Take this "Chia Coin" drive eating process, put it in a built-for-purpose burn-in station armed with a couple dozen hard drive bays, and sell it to every hard drive manufacturer.
They can use it for long-term burn-in testing on drives, as well as MTBF endurance testing.
One man's "stupidiest" idea is another mans money-making side gig. You need to learn to think better.
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It is stupid, along with the other cryoto currancies, because it does not actually generate anything with an intrinsic value. Yes, you can make money, but only because some sucker will lose that amount of money. And it does have societal costs. Perhaps there are societal benefits as well, especially if you consider all government actions as evil.
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It is stupid, along with the other cryoto currancies, because it does not actually generate anything with an intrinsic value. Yes, you can make money, but only because some sucker will lose that amount of money. And it does have societal costs. Perhaps there are societal benefits as well, especially if you consider all government actions as evil.
Your description can be applied to damn near every other fiat currency that we use warfare and spill blood to determine a valuation. Unlike gold or silver, a "dollar" doesn't have intrinsic value. It takes the bloodthirsty greed and power of an entire government to make otherwise worthless paper valuable. And let me know when society or governments start giving a shit about "societal costs" after Greed N. Corruption bankrupted a fucking planet in 2008 and society chose to not send a single banker to jail
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See: https://blocksandfiles.com/202... [blocksandfiles.com]
Instead of computation based proof, Chia uses storage based proof. Doesn't directly cause power lines to melt with mining but instead creates a heavy demand for storage space with predictable consequences.
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Can you use tape for Chia? It's way way cheaper than disk at scale. Access times are not as good but with a large multiframe library it's not like it requires human interaction to shuffle the tapes about.
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> Can you use tape for Chia?
When Chia asks you to prove you still have the "plot", you have to fetch data from a random location in your plot (each plot is 100 GBytes) and return the result within a small fixed amount of time. I do not believe tape will work.
> It's way way cheaper than disk at scale.
I might be biased because I work at Backblaze, but have you double checked that recently? Especially compared with
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I found a return calculator: https://chiacalculator.com/ [chiacalculator.com]
If you have just one drive, say 10TB, you are looking at years to break even and the coin will probably crash and burn by then. But if you have a few thousand to blow on a storage solution you could see a return in a couple of months.
Looking at Chia difficulty over time now may be a good time to invest if you can see yourself wanting say 100TB of storage in a few months time.
https://www.chiaexplorer.com/c... [chiaexplorer.com]
If you are lucky it might pay for itself. Jus
Seemed to good to be true (Score:2)
Copyright
Backblaze's Copyright Policy complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For more information, see our Copyright Policy.
Fuck that. Why would I use a service that will delete all my Swedish movies?
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Re: Seemed to good to be true (Score:2)
Isn't it end to end encrypted? And if so, how do they know it's copyrighted? Or know what it is period?
Re: Seemed to good to be true (Score:2)
Meant to say zero knowledge encrypted
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Re: Seemed to good to be true (Score:5, Informative)
> how do they know it's copyrighted? Or know what it is period?
Backblaze has two different product lines: 1) Computer Backup, and 2) Backblaze B2 which is "object storage" much like Amazon S3.
We have one Terms of Service that applies to everything, so it isn't complicated and you can find it in one location. INSIDE the Terms of Service there are little blurbs that apply to different products. And these two product lines are both stored on the same type of storage, but they are PROFOUNDLY different products. The Computer Backup product is encrypted on your client computer, we can't read it, we don't want to read it, and you cannot share files from one of our backups (because again, they are encrypted, and you need your username/password/2factor to download the files), and is a mirror of what is on your local computer, and we've never taken down a single file for copyright issues in our 15 years of operation from "Computer Backup".
On the other hand we have B2 (the other product line), and in some configurations of B2 the content is literally publicly served as a website, and you can get 10 GBytes free, and we WILL take down content that is not encrypted, being served to others, and is infringing on copyrights. Look, if you want to host illegal content to millions of people, go do it from some other hosting provider. You have to understand the US government will come and arrest every person at Backblaze if we try to fight your battle for you, and we'll lose anyway, which won't help you serve up your illegal content to millions of people. But if you encrypt the Swedish movies before you upload them to B2, and put them in a "private" bucket that does not serve it to millions of people, we don't know what is inside of it and we do not want to know.
We have one Terms of Service, and at very most inside of that you need to read little sections on each product line to gain more insight.
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Have you ever heard of encrypted backups?
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What are you expecting? They comply with the laws (or whatever regulations) from their jurisdiction. It means that if somebody catches you (most likely with a public link, which is possible with B2) and complains following DMCA they'll take it down and you can file a counter-notice.
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My comedic talents have gone over looked.
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There's no way I could use a service like this. My 40TB of data would take over 6 years of continuous uploading to even get it in to the cloud.
Not necessarily...
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/... [backblaze.com]
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That's for their B2 service (realistically the only way they'll let you store 40TB of data, unless you really do have 40TB of internal storage in your desktop computer), for which they would charge $204.80 per month or $2,457.60 per year.
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I have Backblaze B2, because I only back up essential data, which costs me under $5 a month.
My point was they offer a low bandwidth solution, which is cool.
Re:Cloud storage is too slow (Score:5, Informative)
> My 40TB of data would take over 6 years of continuous uploading to even get it in to the cloud.
I can hit about 500 Mbits/sec upload speeds from my home using Backblaze Computer Backup, which uploads about 5.4 TBytes per day. I think you could upload your 40 TBytes of data in 7.4 days, which is INSIDE of the 14 day free trial we provide for you to give this a shot without even putting a credit card on the product so there is literally no way Backblaze can POSSIBLY bill you or trick you. I think you should give it a shot. I'm also continuing to work on performance, and I think I can saturate a 1 Gbit network connection soon with some minor adjustments that I plan on making which might lower that to 3.6 days to get your 40 TBytes uploaded.
> But that wouldn't be possible anyway because I would hit my bandwidth cap.
There are a couple of different solutions to that particular problem. One of which is to pay for unlimited bandwidth for 1 month, and return your connection to the lower cost option you have after 1 month. Another solution some customers use is carry their computer to a work place with a faster internet connection (or a friend's home with a better internet connection than yours) and leave it there uploading at maximum rate until it is fully backed up, then bring it back to your house for the "incrementals" after that (whatever changes). Backblaze Backup doesn't make a full copy each time, it only uploads things that have changed.
I fully understand you might be in a location and situation where this may not be possible. But what is happening right now is in many locations across the United States they are offering full 1 Gbit connections and it really isn't outrageous prices. Again, maybe not in your area YET, but it is rolling out to more and more locations. When it comes to your home, keep Backblaze in mind.
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I'm surprised you don't offer the other method some backup providers use. Basically sending hard drives (or equivalent) back and forth till everything is transferred.
40 TB would be two 18 TB HDDs plus one 5 TB. Yeah that's over a thousand plus, but anyone having that much storage to begin with can afford the rental on two of them.
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I managed to get about 5TB into the cloud on just 10mbps upload. It took about 3 months, theoretical minimum would be under 2 months but I guess there was some overhead.
That was before I discovered that Spideroak breaks if you upload more than about 500GB. The client chokes and somehow your account gets corrupted and you have to start over. After doing that a few times I switched to Duplicati and never looked back.
Lower storage costs are the actual cause of this (Score:3)
The steady drop in the per-byte cost of external storage saves money for all users of disk space. Backup services are the one exception: though their disk costs are coming down also, each of their users is able to store more data, which means an exponentially increasing need for backup space.
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Improving consumer bandwidth also causes this. When I first started with Backblaze my main limiters were the Comcast transfer cap and slow upstream. Now my everything has been seeded and by bandwidth is higher.
Those prices have no reference in summary. (Score:2)
Still not competitive for me (Score:2)
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Not sure where you get that cost unless you are talking about their B2 storage platform, which is more expensive. Their personal plan is currently $6/mo per machine. What you can and should do is get a nice, big fat multi-TB USB drive (or build a large RAID drive) that's bigger than the total amount of data you will likely have to backup, slap it on the side of a cheap Windows machine that you aren't using, and push your data to that external drive. The Backblaze client only works with directly attached
iDrive offers linux command-line utilities (Score:1)
iDrive [idrive.com] offers linux command-line utilities.
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I used to have something a bit like this. External USB HDD with a custom made USB power control. The power control was just an MCU that presented an HID interface and controlled a single relay. They relay switched 240V mains power to the external HDD so it could be powered off when not in use. I used Task Scheduler to power it up at night, sync backups and power it off.
Gave up in the end because it probably wouldn't have helped much. Would have needed all three mains power lines (positive, neutral and earth
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My only complaint is that none of the major cloud backup services, including Backblaze, have command-line Linux clients. Setting up an isolated Windows machine though that can only talk to the Internet and deny UDP and TCP SYN packets to the internal network is easy enough to do. And for the truly paranoid and/or sneaky, there's VirtualBox.
There is gazillion of backup solutions available for linux. There is no need for provider specific tool. One step-by-step example here on how to make encrypted backups to the cloud. It uses ibm cloud as example because you get 25 gigs free. I rather use backblaze as they are checper. https://fedoramagazine.org/mak... [fedoramagazine.org]
If you are not happy with that one, you can for example use rclone to mount the cloud storage as a drive volume and use some other backup tool of your choice.