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Backblaze responds to claims of "sham accounting", "customer backups at risk"
- gnabgib 1y agoRelated Backblaze: Mounting Losses, Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, Insider Selling (262 points, 3 day ago, 158 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43802675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43802675
- throwaway519 1y agoEdit: See following comment.
- gruez 1y agoPeople have mentioned in the other thread (see sibling comment) that they have ex-Hindenburg Research people working there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_Research
- VTimofeenko 1y agoTFA title seems odd. Article sez Backblaze has responded to the claims of "sham accounting" and (indirectly) to the claims that "customers backsups [are] at risk", yet the title wording implies that the backups are at risk as a consequence of BB responding.
- abrookewood 1y agoNot really - if they continue to lose the money that they are losing, then they could go bankrupt. If they never reach profitability, then the only other option is to keep borrowing/raising cash.
- zeckalpha 1y agoAmbiguous but different semantic commas. In one interpretation, it is a connective between two "claims" in a list. In the other, it is a consequence of the response (as you interpreted). This is worsened by the convention of putting punctuation inside quotation marks.
- dang 1y agoMaybe if we quote them symnmetrically the problem will go away?
- VTimofeenko 1y agoYeah, the extra quotes do help
- xupybd 1y agoThis might all be true but coming from a short seller seems off.
- gruez 1y agoWhere do you want the accusation to come from? Backblaze isn't exactly the type of company that new york times or propublica are going to go after. Hardly anyone heard of them outside of techies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xupybd 1y agoI don't think that question is relevant. I see potential bias is all. Is there a perfect source for this information? No idea.
- sokoloff 1y agoHindenburg Research nailed the Nikola story a few years ago. I think it’s a valid set of actions to keep a market healthier than if it didn’t exist. By all means be aware of the possible bias, but if you believe your short thesis enough to put money behind it, I’m more rather than less inclined to believe that you believe.
- rainsford 1y agoI don't totally disagree with the idea that putting your money where your mouth is lends some degree of credibility. But when you're taking a short position on a company and then publicly sharing opinions and information that might drive down the stock price of that very same company, it's reasonable to ask if they're simply taking a financial position in a theory they believe in or trying to create a set of circumstances that benefit their financial position. To put it another way, the incentives for an organization that benefits from a stock price going down mean you should take anything negative they say about the financial health of that stock with an enormous grain of salt. Making a bet that a stock will go down makes me think you believe the stock will go down, but only to the extent that making that bet won't actually drive the stock price down absent any other factor. A short selling firm (or people connected to a short selling firm) putting out press releases designed to drive down a particular stock price 100% don't meet that bar, unless they can demonstrate they have no financial stake in the outcome.
- DecentShoes 1y agoWhat makes a company like this lose so much money? I'm paying 15$ a month for years for a tiny tiny bit of hard drive space. Where does all the money go? What's the big money sink with something like this? I'm not doubting it, just would like to understand.
- buckle8017 1y agoYou're paying for the hard drive, the server it goes into, the rack is in, the building it's in, and ask the power and maintenance for you to be able to access the data.
- abrookewood 1y agoAnd the staff to manage it.
- c0brac0bra 1y agoAnd the salaries, benefits, office space, supplies, etc for their employees.
- motorest 1y ago> You're paying for the hard drive, the server it goes into, the rack is in, the building it's in, and ask the power and maintenance for you to be able to access the data. It's not even just the one drive. Data is stored across multiple drives, in multiple servers, hosted in multiple locations. People pay the likes of Backblaze for it's reliability and them fool themselves into believing it's a dude with a HD stashed in a shelf somewhere.
- rbanffy 1y ago> It's not even just the one drive Your data is scattered across multiple drives, but that doesn’t make it take up much more space. A terabyte stored in a RAID-5 array is 1.2 terabytes. Maybe the fixed price for unlimited storage part was a mistake, but the footprint overhead is relatively small. Also, keeping a year of history isn’t that much either unless you change every bit of the files multiple times. Using my BtrFS snapshots and Time Machine backups as a reference, normal data changes very little.
- dboreham 1y agoOh. That sounds quite bad. Presumably in practice they would be acquired by Amazon rather than simply shut down service overnight.
- scarface_74 1y agoI always held BackBlaze up as one of the very few companies that went from initial value proposition, to taking investor funding to going public without enshittification. I don’t have an opinion on the current controversy. My issue with BackBlaze is that they haven’t been aggressive enough about raising prices to be profitable. I gladly give companies money to give me a service. I no longer use their service. But only because I took my plex server down years ago and copied my media to my AWS Account (S3 Glacier Deep Archive).
- juancn 1y agoThis is anecdotical, so take it with a pinch of salt, but I had a really bad experience with Backblaze, they lost ~80% of my files with no recourse for recovery. They trust their pods too much and they fail in ways they cannot detect until you attempt to extract the data back. If you use it, periodically download everything just to check it's still there.
- yladiz 1y agoWhich backup services would folks here recommend to replace and/or supplement Backblaze? I have a lot of important files backed up there (photos, documents), some only there, so for the sake of redundancy I think it would make sense to find a second provider.