8 ms·

Backblaze cuts B2 download price in half

99 points by pbowyer 9y ago

BartBoch 9y ago
Can HN users share their experience with B2? I wanted to use them as a backup backup solution since their pricing is close to what getting your own leased server would be. Also, are there ready solutions for B2 and incremental backups of Ubuntu server?
- newsat13 9y ago
  rclone supports B2 (it's basically rsync for cloud storage) I really miss a node module for B2 API though.
  - artpar 9y ago
    daptin uses rclone to connect to cloud storages. I can add more actions to make a usable dashboard (for a file related utilities server). Please create an issue if someone would be interested in this https://github.com/daptin/daptin https://github.com/daptin/daptin
  - ratboy666 9y ago
    I use minio for this. I then use the minio node library to access minio, B2 and S3.
- briffle 9y ago
  duplicati [0] (at least beta 2) can backup to it, however, I use Google cloud storage with it, since B2 is a single datacenter. I like a bit of extra paranoia, even if it is backups. I hear they are spinning up a second one, but not sure how multi-Region storage will work. [0] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ShakataGaNai 9y ago
    According to their FAQ, they're still running primarily out of the single DC [1]. However they did post on the blog that the new DC was online as of June 2017 [2]. I run Backblaze (backup) for Desktop but also have a local NAS that stores copies of critical items. That NAS also serves bulk storage (like old Premier Pro projects) which is backed up to B2. So critical data follows 3-2-1 backups [3]. Desktop, NAS, Backblaze. Less critical bulk data is only 2 copies, NAS & Backblaze B2. That's a really long way of saying that 1 remote datacenter is enough for me. My data is important to me, I'm a digital packrat, but the likelyhood of something taking out my home (SF Bay Area) and Sacramento (Backblaze DC) ... likely means TEOTWAWKI [4] - and my data will be of very little concern then. Caveat. I'm just a person. Not a business. If you're a business using B2 for backup... you probably want to worry more about multiple AZ/Region storage. [1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Security-and-Redundancy https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Se... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/data-center-design/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/data-center-design/ [3] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivalism#Survivalist_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivalism#Survivalist_termin...
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Yev from Backblaze here -> very good points! We find that some folks even use us along WITH S3 or Azure as not only a different "region" but specifically because we're a different "vendor" - for greater diversification. It's easy enough to fork data over to B2 and with the low costs, it make it an easy sell for IT folks.
  - brianwski 9y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > since B2 is a single datacenter Backblaze now has three datacenters spread about (two in Sacramento area 50 miles apart, and one datacenter in Phoenix). However, if you store exactly one file in B2, it will land in one of those three datacenters. Very soon we will allow you to choose which of the three datacenters your one file lands in. > I like a bit of extra paranoia So do I, and I would NEVER keep a valuable piece of data in only one datacenter with only one vendor. My advice to my closest friends is you value a piece of data highly, you should have three copies with three separate vendors and technologies. For example, one copy on your local laptop, one copy in Amazon S3, and one copy in Backblaze B2. You might also make sure the Amazon S3 is not hosted in the same building as the Backblaze B2. Since Backblaze B2 does not share a single line of code with Amazon S3 and no employees and a different billing system, this means a bug or network outage or malicious employee inside Amazon S3 won't affect your copy in Backblaze B2. For bonus points, use two different credit cards to pay for it that expire at different times. If you forget to pay your Amazon S3 bill, they will delete your data for sure.
    - loxias 9y ago
      > > I like a bit of extra paranoia > ... three separate vendors and technologies ... > ... does not share a single line of code with ... > ... use two different credit cards ... This person legit thinks about failure modes.
      - atYevP 9y ago
        Yev from Backblaze -> we think about failures ALL the time...
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  I'm using B2 with duplicity under Linux. I ran into an issue where the tool couldn't upload its own index files to the backend, but there was a fork that fixed the problem and I expect it will be resolved in the official fork soon. Haven't done any file restores yet.
- loxias 9y ago
  B2 is great, I've used it roughly since they came out with it. I rolled my own solution for backups with linux, involving NBD and libcurl, but it sounds like there's other available things now. I'm stoked, they're already the cheapest, now they're even cheaper. I think the only thing left on my "wish list" would be some sort of lower pricing for using it from regions of the internet with lower transfer costs. Like, if there was some VPS provider Backblaze would partner with, then offer B2 at a discounted access rate when used from that provider, akin to how S3 access is cheap when used from EC2.
- gregmac 9y ago
  I switched to B2 after Crashplan Home was discontinued. I backup a couple hundred GB of personal photos/videos mainly, stored on a Ubuntu server. The drives are already protected by SnapRAID, and backups to an external drive, so B2 is my fire/theft/everything-else-failed-at-once protection. I just use b2 sync, and don't synchronize deletes. It took a few minutes to get set up, and I haven't thought much about it since, other than seeing the bill for a few dollars a month. The cron job should e-mail me if something goes wrong. I've also checked a couple times to ensure the latest files are visible in B2 storage, just to be certain. Haven't tried a restore yet.
- sp332 9y ago
  I've been using it with the first-party b2sync cli tool. My use case is very simple - refresh the backup, then download the whole thing when the hard drive dies. I was afraid the restore operation would be expensive, but it was cheap enough that I decided to be more liberal with what I upload in the future.
- fpoling 9y ago
  Recently we evaluated to use them to backup 25TB of data. Unfortunately their client sustained bandwidth was about 3 MB/s and even less for app that came with DiskStation. This is on 100 Mbit/line that normally gives that speed sustainably. Eventually we decided to use tapes. With our data usage just after 2 years the tapes will be cheaper...
- bproven 9y ago
  I use duplicity + B2 on my Fedora laptop. It works very well. I even proved out the restore when I accidentally borked my .profile file the other day ;)
- Harkins 9y ago
  I tried to evaluate it last month. Their login page does some kind of cross-site cookieing or referering that my privacy settings don't permit. Any time I log in, I get a warning that someone's been trying to brute force my account and it's been locked for 24 hours. Support was useless. I was repeatedly asked if the IP address I gave them was public or private, when they should've had training or tooling to know at a glance. The help system closes tickets aggressively, ignores replies, and the link to keep a ticket open just leads to a knowledge base. Eventually support agreed to take a curl that reliably reproduces their bug, but I got no tracking number or even a vague promise they'd get back to me when it's fixed. I concluded that if the product was broken and support was broken, there's probably something upstream in the business that's broken and I am not confident I'd be able to restore data.
  - brianwski 9y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Any time I log in, I get a warning that someone's been trying to brute force my account and it's been locked for 24 hours. We had a bug where anybody who "cleared their cookies" would get exactly that behavior. It is fixed. I apologize for the inconvenience. I'm assuming you run some sort of cookie blocking software? If you used stock Chrome browser or stock Safari or stock Microsoft Edge and didn't clear cookies, it always worked.
piracykills 9y ago
Great service - combine with restic for secure and cheap backups with automatic deletion. I went from only affording to backup the most important files with Tarsnap to just backing up / with B2. It's the difference between $1/mo and $50/mo.
tyingq 9y ago
I would guess this is a reaction to Digital Ocean's object storage, which is also $0.01 per gb downloaded.
- newsat13 9y ago
  The great thing about DO storage is that it is S3 API compatible. The not-so-great thing is that DO has serious stability issues. Try deleting 1000 files and the backend just gets stuck for like 5 minutes :/ Make more than 100 calls and you get rate limited. DO does not acknowledge how serious the issues are. Not sure how B2 API performs.
bluedino 9y ago
Is this as simple as, "we did market research and we found people wanted to use the service, but didn't want to pay very much?" Or, was it, "the performance (or some other factor) isn't worth using the service at the current price" I mean, charging 1/9th of the amount that Amazon does sounds incredible. I'm guessing Amazon has lower costs but it also seems like they're just giving it away now.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze -> There are of course trade-offs to every service, but we realized that we didn't need to be charging that much for downloads (we already lowered it from $0.05/GB to $0.02/GB in April 2017 - but after almost a year of gathering data realized we could have gone further down).
  - brianwski 9y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze with Yev. > we realized that we didn't need to be charging that much for downloads To be totally clear, Backblaze can keep going lower. Backblaze buys bandwidth at about 2/10ths of 1 cent per GByte right now, and it drops by maybe 10% per year. The only reason we don't go lower faster is that we are trying to "ease into" this. Internally we are afraid of hitting a tipping point and attracting too many customers using the outbound bandwidth too quickly. The Backblaze network capacity is currently built out for an extra 500 Gbits/sec or so of outbound bandwidth that we aren't using (ready to sell to customers), and it takes time (a few months) to provision more bandwidth. Sometimes the bandwidth providers have to trench to our datacenter which takes like four months. So if we drop the price too low too fast and enough customers show up that would require a total of let's say 600 Gbits/sec capacity in less than 30 days, we might not be able to keep them all super happy and we might get a black eye. So we want to "ease into" this to continue to provide top notch service while we figure out how much of a market exists for inexpensive outbound bandwidth. The ALTERNATIVE strategy would be to massively over provision, but if not many customers show up then we have wasted money. Since Backblaze is profitable and not funded by Venture Capital, we do not like wasting money. :-)
gregf 9y ago
I use backblaze for my backups with restic and enjoy it, but their service is just so slow I'm now looking at giving digitalocean a try instead. Transfers both up and down are painfully slow even on a 1Gbit connection.
- votepaunchy 9y ago
  Where do you connect from? Backblaze only has one datacenter, in Sacramento, CA [1]. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> We have 3 data centers located in Sacramento and Phoenix, hoping to increase that soon!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- znelis 9y ago
  Have you tried enabling more threads (add -o b2.connections=$number)? It improved enough to make it ok for my (admittedly tiny) backup needs. The process of creating a new snapshot is still really slow though, but I'm not sure that is B2's fault.
  - gregf 9y ago
    I'll give this a go thanks
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
I debated switching to Backblaze after CrashPlan's home plan was removed, but they don't appear to have an option to let me send them an external HDD to "seed" the backup, and that's a deal-breaker for me. I have 4TB of media to backup. My ISP will throttle/penalize me if I download/upload more than 1 TB per month, assuming I do absolutely nothing else with my internet connection. Even assuming I devote 80% of bandwidth to just the backup, it will take me 4-6 months of metered transfers, while paying for their service, before I actually have a "complete" backup with them.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Maybe Yev can comment, as they have a service like this for their B2 Cloud product. EDIT: @admiralasshat: If you want to send me a drive, I'll put it on a GB connection for you until it's backed up. EDIT: @Yev: Fair point :) Was trying to be helpful.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev here after seeing Bat-signal, I'll respond in-line. EDIT -> I can't recommend the above for security reasons :P EDIT -> Hey, if they're up for it...have at it :P
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze -> We don't currently have a seeding open for Backblaze Online Backup (we do for B2, it's called Fireball, but is quite expensive for just that little bit of data). If you think you can actually upload all 4TBs in one month (might be able to w/ Maximum Throttle + some threading), we've had some of our users contact their ISP and received a "pardon" for a month. Not saying that's the norm, but some folks did manage to get their data caps lifted for a short time!
  - gmemstr 9y ago
    I'm assuming the reason for not having seeding open is because you never know what's on the drive? Or is there some other technical reason?
johnflan 9y ago
Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans?
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans? About 15% of our business comes from Europe today, and we collect VAT tax accurately for all Europeans as required by European law. So if you are willing to encrypt your data in Europe and send it encrypted WITHOUT the encryption keys to store it encrypted in B2 (zero knowledge) in the USA, then Backblaze would love to have your European encrypted data. If you are asking when Backblaze is going to open a European datacenter where you can guarantee your encrypted data sits on disks inside of Europe, we are hoping to open that datacenter in 2018 (this year).
  - johnflan 9y ago
    Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that announcement.
post_break 9y ago
Backblaze still won't let you label a snapshot. It's so frustrating when I've got say folder A, B, C, and I take a snapshot of each, I have no way to tell which snapshot is which. And god forbid those folders are 100GB in size. This is my only gripe with them.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> very interesting! We'll look in to this.
  - post_break 9y ago
    Yeah please fix it. We won't use snapshots since they are only labeled with the time you create them. It's a joke.
chx 9y ago
Plain and simple: you won me. I am hosting (covering the cost out of my own pocket) a very interesting motley collection of pictures of Hungarian history, our first sister site is http://fortepan.us/about/ http://fortepan.us/about/ you can get a feel what it's like and I have been carefully watching for affordable professional backup solutions. Yeah, the unlimited google drive is nice but it's also a hack and they don't really support this at all. I had my eyes on B2 because the storage costs were within budget but didn't switch our backup to it because if we ever needed to download it, well, what then, it was too expensive. I will upload our 100k / 2TB or so photos the weekend. Awesome. Now I am reviewing this... you are now on BunnyCDN level of download pricing. Are you like a CDN or does every European download need to cross the Atlantic?
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> All data currently has to cross the Atlantic as we have data centers in California and Arizona, but we do hope to add European data centers in the near future!
  - calcifer 9y ago
    When you do, any plans to offer migrations? I'd love to move my B2 buckets (~5TB) to a much closer EU server for a reasonable one time fee.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Not sure about that yet, but as always, we'll try to be fair if we can be.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Have you considered uploading your corpus to the Internet Archive? If not, would you like help doing so?
  - chx 9y ago
    OMG that would be fantastic! Yes please! chx1975 gmail com finds me. Thanks!
benchess 9y ago
Not all bandwidth is created equal. Different providers can have widely different levels of performance. Higher-priced bandwidth _can_ also be better bandwidth. Cloud providers haven't done a great job of explaining this so far, but Google Cloud's Network Service Tiers product is a good attempt at why they charge more for bandwidth, and how you can get it for cheaper: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/ https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/ That said, cheap (and presumably slower) bandwidth may be the right target for B2, given that it's customers are probably using it for backups and private storage rather than, say, serving a website serving photos to millions of visitors from around the globe. So comparing AWS or Google transfer costs directly to B2 isn't necessarily a fair comparison, depending on your needs.
fokinsean 9y ago
I'm about to set up a NAS device at home for personal storage am looking at cloud providers for an offsite backup. I was originally going to send stuff to AWS glacier since my offsite backup is pretty much only going to be for disaster recovery (fire/theft etc). This is my first time seeing Backblaze and it looks appealing, does any one have any opinions on using it vs glacier/s3? For context I currently have less than 1TB of data I need to store and I don't expect to upload more than a few GB per month. Also would I use B2 or the unlimited personal storage?
rconti 9y ago
Cool! I'm using them to store my Time Machine backups from my Synology. The first month I burned through about 3TB of my 1TB with comcast, but that's the only month I went over my 'cap' (they have 2 months' grace period). The only problem I have is that my Time Machine backups change too much -- for, say, 400MB of data being backed up in time machine, it seems like the deltas (and what is synced to backblaze) is something like 4GB. I'm using the CloudSync functionality from Synology -- I think the issue is with Time Machine, not with CloudSync, though. What this means is I'd regularly exceed my data cap if I let me CloudSync run all the time. As a workaround, I've scheduled it to only run between midnight and noon on Mondays, which results in syncing less data (apparently the deltas must contain a lot of duplicate data that doesn't have to be synced up to BackBlaze when I only do it a few times a week). Of course, now my problem is I'm afraid that I'm risking the integrity of my backups because the schedule might cut off my sync in the middle of a run. Since I leave my home computers off during the day, though, there shouldn't be new deltas occuring as I'm syncing to backblaze, so once it catches up (and 12 hours is enough to catch up), there is no more activity.
- chrisper 9y ago
  I'd recommend you to look into borg backup for your important data. It has deduplication and such making the deltas rather small.
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99 points by pbowyer 9y ago

Can HN users share their experience with B2? I wanted to use them as a backup backup solution since their pricing is close to what getting your own leased server would be. Also, are there ready solutions for B2 and incremental backups of Ubuntu server?

newsat13 9y ago
rclone supports B2 (it's basically rsync for cloud storage) I really miss a node module for B2 API though.
- artpar 9y ago
  daptin uses rclone to connect to cloud storages. I can add more actions to make a usable dashboard (for a file related utilities server). Please create an issue if someone would be interested in this https://github.com/daptin/daptin https://github.com/daptin/daptin
- ratboy666 9y ago
  I use minio for this. I then use the minio node library to access minio, B2 and S3.
briffle 9y ago
duplicati [0] (at least beta 2) can backup to it, however, I use Google cloud storage with it, since B2 is a single datacenter. I like a bit of extra paranoia, even if it is backups. I hear they are spinning up a second one, but not sure how multi-Region storage will work. [0] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ShakataGaNai 9y ago
  According to their FAQ, they're still running primarily out of the single DC [1]. However they did post on the blog that the new DC was online as of June 2017 [2]. I run Backblaze (backup) for Desktop but also have a local NAS that stores copies of critical items. That NAS also serves bulk storage (like old Premier Pro projects) which is backed up to B2. So critical data follows 3-2-1 backups [3]. Desktop, NAS, Backblaze. Less critical bulk data is only 2 copies, NAS & Backblaze B2. That's a really long way of saying that 1 remote datacenter is enough for me. My data is important to me, I'm a digital packrat, but the likelyhood of something taking out my home (SF Bay Area) and Sacramento (Backblaze DC) ... likely means TEOTWAWKI [4] - and my data will be of very little concern then. Caveat. I'm just a person. Not a business. If you're a business using B2 for backup... you probably want to worry more about multiple AZ/Region storage. [1] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Security-and-Redundancy https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217667468-B2-Se... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/data-center-design/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/data-center-design/ [3] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivalism#Survivalist_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivalism#Survivalist_termin...
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> very good points! We find that some folks even use us along WITH S3 or Azure as not only a different "region" but specifically because we're a different "vendor" - for greater diversification. It's easy enough to fork data over to B2 and with the low costs, it make it an easy sell for IT folks.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > since B2 is a single datacenter Backblaze now has three datacenters spread about (two in Sacramento area 50 miles apart, and one datacenter in Phoenix). However, if you store exactly one file in B2, it will land in one of those three datacenters. Very soon we will allow you to choose which of the three datacenters your one file lands in. > I like a bit of extra paranoia So do I, and I would NEVER keep a valuable piece of data in only one datacenter with only one vendor. My advice to my closest friends is you value a piece of data highly, you should have three copies with three separate vendors and technologies. For example, one copy on your local laptop, one copy in Amazon S3, and one copy in Backblaze B2. You might also make sure the Amazon S3 is not hosted in the same building as the Backblaze B2. Since Backblaze B2 does not share a single line of code with Amazon S3 and no employees and a different billing system, this means a bug or network outage or malicious employee inside Amazon S3 won't affect your copy in Backblaze B2. For bonus points, use two different credit cards to pay for it that expire at different times. If you forget to pay your Amazon S3 bill, they will delete your data for sure.
  - loxias 9y ago
    > > I like a bit of extra paranoia > ... three separate vendors and technologies ... > ... does not share a single line of code with ... > ... use two different credit cards ... This person legit thinks about failure modes.
    - atYevP 9y ago
      Yev from Backblaze -> we think about failures ALL the time...
pc2g4d 9y ago
I'm using B2 with duplicity under Linux. I ran into an issue where the tool couldn't upload its own index files to the backend, but there was a fork that fixed the problem and I expect it will be resolved in the official fork soon. Haven't done any file restores yet.
loxias 9y ago
B2 is great, I've used it roughly since they came out with it. I rolled my own solution for backups with linux, involving NBD and libcurl, but it sounds like there's other available things now. I'm stoked, they're already the cheapest, now they're even cheaper. I think the only thing left on my "wish list" would be some sort of lower pricing for using it from regions of the internet with lower transfer costs. Like, if there was some VPS provider Backblaze would partner with, then offer B2 at a discounted access rate when used from that provider, akin to how S3 access is cheap when used from EC2.
gregmac 9y ago
I switched to B2 after Crashplan Home was discontinued. I backup a couple hundred GB of personal photos/videos mainly, stored on a Ubuntu server. The drives are already protected by SnapRAID, and backups to an external drive, so B2 is my fire/theft/everything-else-failed-at-once protection. I just use b2 sync, and don't synchronize deletes. It took a few minutes to get set up, and I haven't thought much about it since, other than seeing the bill for a few dollars a month. The cron job should e-mail me if something goes wrong. I've also checked a couple times to ensure the latest files are visible in B2 storage, just to be certain. Haven't tried a restore yet.
sp332 9y ago
I've been using it with the first-party b2sync cli tool. My use case is very simple - refresh the backup, then download the whole thing when the hard drive dies. I was afraid the restore operation would be expensive, but it was cheap enough that I decided to be more liberal with what I upload in the future.
fpoling 9y ago
Recently we evaluated to use them to backup 25TB of data. Unfortunately their client sustained bandwidth was about 3 MB/s and even less for app that came with DiskStation. This is on 100 Mbit/line that normally gives that speed sustainably. Eventually we decided to use tapes. With our data usage just after 2 years the tapes will be cheaper...
bproven 9y ago
I use duplicity + B2 on my Fedora laptop. It works very well. I even proved out the restore when I accidentally borked my .profile file the other day ;)
Harkins 9y ago
I tried to evaluate it last month. Their login page does some kind of cross-site cookieing or referering that my privacy settings don't permit. Any time I log in, I get a warning that someone's been trying to brute force my account and it's been locked for 24 hours. Support was useless. I was repeatedly asked if the IP address I gave them was public or private, when they should've had training or tooling to know at a glance. The help system closes tickets aggressively, ignores replies, and the link to keep a ticket open just leads to a knowledge base. Eventually support agreed to take a curl that reliably reproduces their bug, but I got no tracking number or even a vague promise they'd get back to me when it's fixed. I concluded that if the product was broken and support was broken, there's probably something upstream in the business that's broken and I am not confident I'd be able to restore data.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Any time I log in, I get a warning that someone's been trying to brute force my account and it's been locked for 24 hours. We had a bug where anybody who "cleared their cookies" would get exactly that behavior. It is fixed. I apologize for the inconvenience. I'm assuming you run some sort of cookie blocking software? If you used stock Chrome browser or stock Safari or stock Microsoft Edge and didn't clear cookies, it always worked.

piracykills 9y ago

Great service - combine with restic for secure and cheap backups with automatic deletion. I went from only affording to backup the most important files with Tarsnap to just backing up / with B2. It's the difference between $1/mo and $50/mo.

tyingq 9y ago

I would guess this is a reaction to Digital Ocean's object storage, which is also $0.01 per gb downloaded.

newsat13 9y ago
The great thing about DO storage is that it is S3 API compatible. The not-so-great thing is that DO has serious stability issues. Try deleting 1000 files and the backend just gets stuck for like 5 minutes :/ Make more than 100 calls and you get rate limited. DO does not acknowledge how serious the issues are. Not sure how B2 API performs.

bluedino 9y ago

Is this as simple as, "we did market research and we found people wanted to use the service, but didn't want to pay very much?" Or, was it, "the performance (or some other factor) isn't worth using the service at the current price" I mean, charging 1/9th of the amount that Amazon does sounds incredible. I'm guessing Amazon has lower costs but it also seems like they're just giving it away now.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze -> There are of course trade-offs to every service, but we realized that we didn't need to be charging that much for downloads (we already lowered it from $0.05/GB to $0.02/GB in April 2017 - but after almost a year of gathering data realized we could have gone further down).
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze with Yev. > we realized that we didn't need to be charging that much for downloads To be totally clear, Backblaze can keep going lower. Backblaze buys bandwidth at about 2/10ths of 1 cent per GByte right now, and it drops by maybe 10% per year. The only reason we don't go lower faster is that we are trying to "ease into" this. Internally we are afraid of hitting a tipping point and attracting too many customers using the outbound bandwidth too quickly. The Backblaze network capacity is currently built out for an extra 500 Gbits/sec or so of outbound bandwidth that we aren't using (ready to sell to customers), and it takes time (a few months) to provision more bandwidth. Sometimes the bandwidth providers have to trench to our datacenter which takes like four months. So if we drop the price too low too fast and enough customers show up that would require a total of let's say 600 Gbits/sec capacity in less than 30 days, we might not be able to keep them all super happy and we might get a black eye. So we want to "ease into" this to continue to provide top notch service while we figure out how much of a market exists for inexpensive outbound bandwidth. The ALTERNATIVE strategy would be to massively over provision, but if not many customers show up then we have wasted money. Since Backblaze is profitable and not funded by Venture Capital, we do not like wasting money. :-)

gregf 9y ago

I use backblaze for my backups with restic and enjoy it, but their service is just so slow I'm now looking at giving digitalocean a try instead. Transfers both up and down are painfully slow even on a 1Gbit connection.

votepaunchy 9y ago
Where do you connect from? Backblaze only has one datacenter, in Sacramento, CA [1]. [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> We have 3 data centers located in Sacramento and Phoenix, hoping to increase that soon!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
znelis 9y ago
Have you tried enabling more threads (add -o b2.connections=$number)? It improved enough to make it ok for my (admittedly tiny) backup needs. The process of creating a new snapshot is still really slow though, but I'm not sure that is B2's fault.
- gregf 9y ago
  I'll give this a go thanks

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

I debated switching to Backblaze after CrashPlan's home plan was removed, but they don't appear to have an option to let me send them an external HDD to "seed" the backup, and that's a deal-breaker for me. I have 4TB of media to backup. My ISP will throttle/penalize me if I download/upload more than 1 TB per month, assuming I do absolutely nothing else with my internet connection. Even assuming I devote 80% of bandwidth to just the backup, it will take me 4-6 months of metered transfers, while paying for their service, before I actually have a "complete" backup with them.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Maybe Yev can comment, as they have a service like this for their B2 Cloud product. EDIT: @admiralasshat: If you want to send me a drive, I'll put it on a GB connection for you until it's backed up. EDIT: @Yev: Fair point :) Was trying to be helpful.
- atYevP 9y ago
  Yev here after seeing Bat-signal, I'll respond in-line. EDIT -> I can't recommend the above for security reasons :P EDIT -> Hey, if they're up for it...have at it :P
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze -> We don't currently have a seeding open for Backblaze Online Backup (we do for B2, it's called Fireball, but is quite expensive for just that little bit of data). If you think you can actually upload all 4TBs in one month (might be able to w/ Maximum Throttle + some threading), we've had some of our users contact their ISP and received a "pardon" for a month. Not saying that's the norm, but some folks did manage to get their data caps lifted for a short time!
- gmemstr 9y ago
  I'm assuming the reason for not having seeding open is because you never know what's on the drive? Or is there some other technical reason?

johnflan 9y ago

Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans?

brianwski 9y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans? About 15% of our business comes from Europe today, and we collect VAT tax accurately for all Europeans as required by European law. So if you are willing to encrypt your data in Europe and send it encrypted WITHOUT the encryption keys to store it encrypted in B2 (zero knowledge) in the USA, then Backblaze would love to have your European encrypted data. If you are asking when Backblaze is going to open a European datacenter where you can guarantee your encrypted data sits on disks inside of Europe, we are hoping to open that datacenter in 2018 (this year).
- johnflan 9y ago
  Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that announcement.

post_break 9y ago

Backblaze still won't let you label a snapshot. It's so frustrating when I've got say folder A, B, C, and I take a snapshot of each, I have no way to tell which snapshot is which. And god forbid those folders are 100GB in size. This is my only gripe with them.

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> very interesting! We'll look in to this.
- post_break 9y ago
  Yeah please fix it. We won't use snapshots since they are only labeled with the time you create them. It's a joke.

chx 9y ago

Plain and simple: you won me. I am hosting (covering the cost out of my own pocket) a very interesting motley collection of pictures of Hungarian history, our first sister site is http://fortepan.us/about/ http://fortepan.us/about/ you can get a feel what it's like and I have been carefully watching for affordable professional backup solutions. Yeah, the unlimited google drive is nice but it's also a hack and they don't really support this at all. I had my eyes on B2 because the storage costs were within budget but didn't switch our backup to it because if we ever needed to download it, well, what then, it was too expensive. I will upload our 100k / 2TB or so photos the weekend. Awesome. Now I am reviewing this... you are now on BunnyCDN level of download pricing. Are you like a CDN or does every European download need to cross the Atlantic?

atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> All data currently has to cross the Atlantic as we have data centers in California and Arizona, but we do hope to add European data centers in the near future!
- calcifer 9y ago
  When you do, any plans to offer migrations? I'd love to move my B2 buckets (~5TB) to a much closer EU server for a reasonable one time fee.
  - atYevP 9y ago
    Not sure about that yet, but as always, we'll try to be fair if we can be.
toomuchtodo 9y ago
Have you considered uploading your corpus to the Internet Archive? If not, would you like help doing so?
- chx 9y ago
  OMG that would be fantastic! Yes please! chx1975 gmail com finds me. Thanks!

benchess 9y ago

Not all bandwidth is created equal. Different providers can have widely different levels of performance. Higher-priced bandwidth _can_ also be better bandwidth. Cloud providers haven't done a great job of explaining this so far, but Google Cloud's Network Service Tiers product is a good attempt at why they charge more for bandwidth, and how you can get it for cheaper: https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/ https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/ That said, cheap (and presumably slower) bandwidth may be the right target for B2, given that it's customers are probably using it for backups and private storage rather than, say, serving a website serving photos to millions of visitors from around the globe. So comparing AWS or Google transfer costs directly to B2 isn't necessarily a fair comparison, depending on your needs.

fokinsean 9y ago

I'm about to set up a NAS device at home for personal storage am looking at cloud providers for an offsite backup. I was originally going to send stuff to AWS glacier since my offsite backup is pretty much only going to be for disaster recovery (fire/theft etc). This is my first time seeing Backblaze and it looks appealing, does any one have any opinions on using it vs glacier/s3? For context I currently have less than 1TB of data I need to store and I don't expect to upload more than a few GB per month. Also would I use B2 or the unlimited personal storage?

rconti 9y ago

Cool! I'm using them to store my Time Machine backups from my Synology. The first month I burned through about 3TB of my 1TB with comcast, but that's the only month I went over my 'cap' (they have 2 months' grace period). The only problem I have is that my Time Machine backups change too much -- for, say, 400MB of data being backed up in time machine, it seems like the deltas (and what is synced to backblaze) is something like 4GB. I'm using the CloudSync functionality from Synology -- I think the issue is with Time Machine, not with CloudSync, though. What this means is I'd regularly exceed my data cap if I let me CloudSync run all the time. As a workaround, I've scheduled it to only run between midnight and noon on Mondays, which results in syncing less data (apparently the deltas must contain a lot of duplicate data that doesn't have to be synced up to BackBlaze when I only do it a few times a week). Of course, now my problem is I'm afraid that I'm risking the integrity of my backups because the schedule might cut off my sync in the middle of a run. Since I leave my home computers off during the day, though, there shouldn't be new deltas occuring as I'm syncing to backblaze, so once it catches up (and 12 hours is enough to catch up), there is no more activity.

chrisper 9y ago
I'd recommend you to look into borg backup for your important data. It has deduplication and such making the deltas rather small.

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