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Backblaze S-1 IPO
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- encryptluks2 5y agoAfter Cloudflare's announcement this is likely a last act as people move away. Good luck if you invest but I can see them filing for bankruptcy in 2-5 years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 0des 5y agoJust curious, are you currently or have you been a Backblaze customer?
- encryptluks2 5y agoYes, I was until I switched to restic and saved a bunch of money. I still get unlimited storage with G Suite. You can also get 6TB of annual storage with Office 365 family plan for $80 at Costco.
- dreadlordbone 5y agoHow can you save a bunch of money when Backblaze is dirt cheap?
- mkr-hn 5y agoPeople are confusing backup and sync. Backblaze will run an incremental backup of 20TB and 20GB for the same price, but you have to have 20TB or 20GB of storage attached to the backed up computer. It won't let you access files not on your computer without awkward workarounds, but it also doesn't charge the huge premium sync services charge for the storage.
- encryptluks2 5y agoBackblaze does actually have caps, even though they don't publish them and they throttle even though they say they don't.
- mkr-hn 5y agoIf they do, it's so high as to not matter for any reasonable use and quite a few unreasonable ones.
- prirun 5y agoIn 2018 they published a graph showing a user with a backup over 400TB. If they have space limits, they must be pretty high!
- 0des 5y agoIt sounds like there's no cap. Do you have a source to the contrary?
- helloworld11 5y agoIm sorry but how does that work? If the purpose of online backup is for your data to be stored online, why would you need 20TB or 20GB (or any amount) of storage attached to the backed up computer? Backblaze, or any other online backup service stores everything on their storage, elsewhere, and that's exactly the point: that if your entire house burns to the ground with all your computers and external drives etc, you have a cloud copy of all their content in a secure, password protected external location, and you can then download them elsewhere from online. As for sync, most online backup service seem to offer at least a basic version by which your local data syncs with your externally backed up data so that they incrementally stay identical. If I'm misreading your comment somehow, please correct me. Maybe I misunderstood something.
- michaelt 5y agoWhat they're trying to say is "Backblaze backs up an unlimited amount from one computer - but you can't back up more data than you have on one computer. So if you have 1234 GB in Backblaze, you must have 1234 GB of disk space" This is in contrast to other cloud storage services which might (for example) allow you to save space on your phone by uploading your old photos to the cloud and deleting the local copies.
- djbusby 5y agoBackblaze is $70/yr unlimited. Did you save $-10?
- xmprt 5y agoI'm assuming they're using the other features that Office 365 offers.
- encryptluks2 5y agoNo, not really.. I just got the family plan to have a 2nd restic backup in addition to my Google Drive, since it was the cheapest storage option.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoThat type of backup does not work on Linux or for network attached drives. I guess if you are willing to run Windows on your NAS then it technically works but it's a pretty ugly hack and the 'sync' will happily delete files that are accidentally deleted or corrupted.
- tedyoung 5y agoAre you referring to Cloudflare's R2 storage? If so, I'm not sure that's completely comparable as Backblaze has a huge focus on backup systems, not just cloud storage. [Edit: didn't realize Backblaze has cloud storage, I still think of them as the cloud backup company.]
- vineyardmike 5y agoBackblaze offers "B2" storage, which is also API compatible with S3 (and cheaper, no ingress/egress, etc). I think their focus is more long term storage (slow, infrequent access but cheap per unit).
- ac29 5y agoB2 definitely has egress charges, unless you are going to one of their partners.
- prirun 5y agoB2 also has a 1GB/day free egress allowance, which is what HashBackup uses to keep remote backup space optimized at no cost (I'm the author).
- gpm 5y agoBackblaze B2 charges egress (at 1 cent/gb) with the exception of egress to bandwidth alliance members, B2 storage served via cloudflare is interesting because it means no egress charges, but unless you're just using it to serve normal webpages you're probably breaking cloudflares TOS.
- jermaustin1 5y agoI had a chat with Cloudflare about this, and you can use it for hosting downloadable files or really anything you want for personal or commercial. I had used it as the backend for my photo app with 10s of gigs of downloads per month (not a lot, but enough to prove it was free and CF was fine with it).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- collegeburner 5y agoI dont think every time a competitor launches it instantly eats all marketshare from the others. Backblaze seems to target different niches like small projects, also personal backup (cloudflare does not do this). Also cloudflare new storage seems like more "hot storage" cache-type service but backblaze seems like more "cold storage" and infrequent access. Also since backblaze is a member of bandwidth alliance the two might work well together and compliment instead of compete so much.
- hfern 5y agoBackblaze makes 73% of their revenue from computer backups. I do not see how the Cloudflare announcement will eat into that. I would agree that B2 is their high growth area, but I do not think Cloudflare directly opposes B2.
- encryptluks2 5y agoIf the majority of their business is personal backups then the business is already in a decline. I've looked at them multiple times, and Google Drive and OneDrive are both much better deals.
- hfern 5y agoI was under the impression that their business was $70/year to backup your whole computer (all drives, completely managed). Their backup service grew 23% yoy, so I wouldn't call it in decline. Can you go into why Google Drive is a better alternative? I can see 2 TB for $100/yr, but I don't think the products are exactly the same.
- encryptluks2 5y agoFirst, the $70/year backup is for personal use and Mac and PC only.. they do have limits, they just don't tell you what they are and they throttle even though they say they don't. The clients suck and are closed source. Also, the restore functionality is terrible. At least with Google Drive, the 2TB plan you can store what you want and access it in the cloud like a regular file. It works with rclone and restic, so you can use it for regular backups as well and it is extremely fast. I can upload over 750GB per day in about 3 hours with Google Drive, but it would take over 3 days with Backblaze.
- mkr-hn 5y agoGoogle Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoTo be honest, I'm a Cloudflare fan. But I think the niche between them is totally different.
- vineyardmike 5y agoCongrats to the backblaze team! Long time customer of their backup product, and I'm considering B2 for an upcoming project as a result. They seem to be good at doing what they do, which is always great to see :) Especially great to see an IPO from a company that isn't exploiting privacy, or gig workers, and instead simply providing a great service.
- notyourwork 5y agoI've always enjoyed reading their blogs, they seem to be a company focused on doing one thing very well and customer's like this.
- mkr-hn 5y agoGood news for their pod suppliers. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/next-backblaze-storage-pod/
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoAre they still affiliated with 45drives? I was never clear on the history of the two companies.
- 0des 5y agoFor those looking at the risks, it might sound a little pessimistic, however when compared against other 'emergent growth' S-1's we've seen this year, it appears to be an otherwise normal filing with the normal amount of CYA. I hope they do well, and I hope they don't change too much in the pursuit of a profit. Not being profitable in the SaaS business is not necessarily the scarlet letter that it is in other fields, so I'm optimistic for their future. Also, congrats Backblaze! The next adventure begins :)
- tiffanyh 5y agoI love Backblaze. Kind of surprised they aren’t profitable. >” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”
- qeternity 5y agoThis caught me by surprise as well because I am pretty sure they have stated before that they were profitable.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThey apparently build 500+ of their pods at close to $9k each (as of the older version--can't find cost on the latest) every year in 2016. That could represent the cost of growth in free trials through 2020 with people getting their home offices set up. A few hundred thousand people added over 2020 not paying for 15 days, and possibly not paying at all if they cancel, would be expensive.
- qeternity 5y agoThey were unprofitable in 2019 as well… And the cost of the pods will be capitalized and depreciated so a large surge in buildings won’t necessarily lead to bad financials.
- mbesto 5y ago> And the cost of the pods will be capitalized and depreciated so a large surge in buildings won’t necessarily lead to bad financials. I was curious about this as well: Cost of revenue consists of expenses for providing our platform and cloud services to our customers. These expenses include operating in co-location facilities, network and bandwidth costs, and depreciation of our equipment and capital lease equipment in co-location facilities. Personnel-related costs associated with customer support and maintaining service availability, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation are also included. Cost of revenue also includes credit card processing fees, amortization of capitalized internal-use software development costs, and allocated overhead costs. We intend to continue to invest additional resources in our infrastructure and related personnel, and our customer support organization, to support the growth of our business. Some of these investments, including costs of infrastructure equipment (including related depreciation) and expansion, are incurred in advance of generating revenue, and either the failure to generate anticipated revenue or fluctuations in the timing of revenue could affect our gross margin from period to period. Sounds like this is captured in their cost of revenue. 50% gross profit is not great compared to a SaaS company, but still not terrible compared to <insert literally any other company that isn't enabled by tech>. They also generate ~$12M in net cash from operating activities. So "profitable" is a weird one here. They'll have to continually invest in data centers and hardware, but generally speaking they are turning cash pretty well.
- slownews45 5y agoI tried to get onto their business backup product without success. Something about how they do their accounts, sales, software stuff just was not smooth? I had to buy a separate product MSP360, and then even then configuring that to work with Backblaze wasn't easy (at all). I got stuck and gave up. Hope they smooth out the kinks.
- nprateem 5y ago> Something about how they do their accounts, sales, software stuff just was not smooth? I'm not sure, sorry
- antisthenes 5y agoI'm surprised how small Backblaze is. Am I reading this right that they only had 53 million USD in Revenue in 2020? That's a tiny fraction of, say, Dropbox's revenue. I would have expected them to be in the 30-50% range of Dropbox on size. And with 164 employees to boot, that's only $323,000 revenue per employee. I wonder what the compensation is like there.
- Spooky23 5y agoWhy? It’s a pure commodity business. They are competing against your iCloud subscription and little USB drives that cost $30. Not sure what the long term strategy is, but I hope going public doesn’t kill them — seems like a nice little business that could just coast for years.
- quickthrower2 5y agoYes - and the danger for them is as an iPhone user I feel almost forced to use iCloud, and if I do that I might drop backblaze as I can use iCloud for everything. Why am I forced, because if I don't back up my phone using iCloud, then I need to back it up using iTunes, or not at all. That they have made copying photos off the iPhone terrible and iTunes terrible, is a good tactic to make me use iCloud. For now I am holding out, sticking with backblaze (I love the do-nothing and it's backed up workflow) and probably will go the iTunes YUK route for backing up.
- marcellus23 5y agoI believe iOS has always supported a “camera view” when plugged into a computer, where all videos and photos are readable as files. Doesn’t help for backing up anything else but seems like a straightforward enough path for backups.
- quickthrower2 5y agoYeah copying files from there just crashes out on my pc.
- antidnan 5y agoSurprised at how small they are, given the scale of most IPOs these days. 90% gross retention is really good, even if 110% NRR is bottom quartile for public SaaS. Wouldn't be surprised if they become profitable soon.
- foobiekr 5y agoBackblaze is the best AAS I use by far. My only issue with them is that the UI on the site is a bit janky (the other day, for example, I couldn't get the end date for my backup to actually 'stick' - it would refresh and reset).
- hatware 5y agoI feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.
- adar 5y agoI'd feel deeply uncomfortable backing up 80tb of data to a $60/year plan, tbh.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nvr219 5y agoIt's probably not very important 80 tb.
- hatware 5y agoIt isn't, and the super important stuff is backed up a lot more times, a lot more ways.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoWhat you should be more uncomfortable with is the fact that there's basically no way to exfiltrate that data in any cost-effective, practical manner and there's zero recourse if a backup storage company goes "oops" and loses all your data or one day decides to just close up shop.
- hatware 5y agoI don't think backblaze has a chance at losing data, but I really use it as the last resort "oh shit" place. If I lose a drive I'll pay a bit of a premium for whatever multiple of 8TB needs to be sent my way, I'm going to be replacing a $2-300 drive anyways.
- vxNsr 5y ago
- actualwill 5y agoB2 is a fantastic service. I upload everything I want backed up to a private bucket via Cyberduck. 0 issues for many years.
- throwawaysea 5y agoQuestion for the HN crowd: what’s the best way to back up a NAS using client side encryption?
- olavgg 5y agossh with zfs send/receive. No problems having hourly backup of your most important petabyte scale data on the other side of this planet.< I even do this with Microsoft SQL Server using iSCSI.
- metalliqaz 5y agoI use rclone.
- divbzero 5y agoI use rclone as well and it has worked reliably for years. Keeping the password [1] separate allows me to restore files to a fresh computer as needed. Backblaze B2 is just one of many backend options [2]. [1]: https://rclone.org/crypt/ https://rclone.org/crypt/ [2]: https://rclone.org/overview/ https://rclone.org/overview/
- throwawaysea 5y agoHow does one use this with something like a Synology NAS? Or is that not really the intended workflow? I’m imagining something like a local backup plus a backup to cloud.
- dsego 5y agoYou can run it on synology via docker, there are guides online. But it's not really straightforward.
- divbzero 5y agoI’m not 100% on which workflow you are looking to set up. If you are trying to backup to Synology NAS, you could mount the NAS and use rclone’s “local filesystem” storage backend.
- ramesh31 5y ago>"We make it astonishingly easy to store, use, and protect data" What does this even mean? And how is their business even remotely competitive with the big 3? Bit pushing is a volume game, and it doesn't seem like they have much of it.
- haggy102 5y agoThey essentially market themselves as "S3 without the surprise costs" as well as "trust as more than amazon" which I think they hold up to. What they lack is the insane amount of reliability and scalability that S3 offers. I'm not saying this as a fanboy of S3. They (aws) have their share of issues and AWS has never been transparent about their pricing structure. If you don't believe me there just Google "surprise AWS costs". Just like everything in life B2 is a tradeoff. I love healthy competition and I hope backblaze continues to crush it!
- prirun 5y agoI'm the author of HashBackup. What I like about Backblaze B2 is that is has simple, no gimmick pricing, unlike almost every other cloud storage company. It doesn't have delete penalties, where they charge for storage you've deleted. It doesn't have minimum file sizes, where they charge for storage you aren't actually using. It doesn't have a minimum payment every month. For backups, their business is very competitive with the big 3, especially considering that they will mail a physical drive to you with your data.
- nemo44x 5y agoGood for these guys and for Expensify and some other very small revenue companies. For those that say there aren’t opportunities to get in, these may be them. For those that say the market is getting kind of crowded - getting harder to argue.
- DeathArrow 5y agoI liked how Backblaze storage is innovative and how they described in detail it's architecture and algorithms used.
- vadfa 5y agoFor a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.
- ubercow13 5y agorclone
- iyn 5y agoI use Borg: https://www.borgbackup.org/ https://www.borgbackup.org/ works well on client machines and servers.
- iFreilicht 5y agoEspecially easy with Vorta [1] and hosted on BorgBase [2]. It's definitely for the technically literate user, but if you are, then it's a dream, and the tutorials by borgbase are super nice. I was searching for something the could replace Backblaze on Linux for me, and Vorta+BorgBase was even better than that. Encrypted and compressed by default, deduplicated, life-long (if desired) and diffable history, every snapshot can be mounted locally, alerts on missing backups, just a breeze to use, and works for my personal machines just like my VPS. [1]: https://vorta.borgbase.com/ https://vorta.borgbase.com/ [2]: https://borgbase.com/ https://borgbase.com/
- petecooper 5y agohttps://arqbackup.com/ https://arqbackup.com/ I use the macOS version and it's excellent.
- p00dles 5y agodo you mind if I ask where you store the Arq backup? On a separate physical drive, in a cloud service, etc.?
- cupofjoakim 5y agoA friend in the music industry told me about a very cool backblaze moment. They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not insane for a company) backblaze actually flew a guy with a physical hard drive to their location. Saved ~5 gigs from being canceled, and my friend has been a die hard backblaze evangelist ever since.
- AnonHP 5y agoA counter fact: Backblaze is also the company that has scheduled maintenance every Thursday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m. Pacific Time, when there may be disruptions to the services. [1] [1]: https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html
- mtwittman 5y agoThis is important to be aware of, but there is some nuance. According to this BB blog post[0] certain functions are unavailable ("making a new purchase, installing new trials, signing in to your account, creating new accounts, enabling B2, and creating a master Key"), and two B2 API calls (b2_create_bucket, b2_delete_bucket). If these are the only disrupted features, then impact depends on the details of the use case (perhaps get object and friends have to be on demand but other changes can be async). Now, why these specifics are in their blog post and not in the Scheduled Maintenance page itself, that is a fair question, because it leaves room for doubt that only this exact set of functions are affected each and every window. [0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/227807447-Backblaze-Maintenance-Schedule https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/227807447-Backb...
- gchokov 5y agoSeriously impressive service. Thanks for sharing!
- wyclif 5y ago
- mrgill 5y agoI tried Backblaze's backup plan. Their software is just not good, I would say it's even bad. It just didn't work for me. Something poorly written that they just didn't bother to improve. I guess because most of their customers can't tell the difference anyway whether it's working or not.
- schleck8 5y agoThat's what I heard as well https://youtu.be/jJGwZolT9fI https://youtu.be/jJGwZolT9fI
- apple4ever 5y agoDon't invest in them. They have terrible customer service. I highly doubt its going to get better.