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I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because,

I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1] This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no restrictions on file type or size" [2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_backup_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal

embedding-shape 6mo ago
Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
        mcmcmc 6mo ago
        What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
        organsnyder 6mo ago
        Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
        bombcar 6mo ago
        The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
        mcmcmc 6mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
  - willis936 6mo ago
    And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
    - littlecranky67 6mo ago
      > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
    - deno 6mo ago
      Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
      - cestith 6mo ago
        Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
      - salawat 6mo ago
        Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
  - hypercube33 6mo ago
    If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
    - dboreham 6mo ago
      In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
    - BobaFloutist 6mo ago
      They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
  - mikepurvis 6mo ago
    Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
      - lelandfe 6mo ago
        Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
        embedding-shape 6mo ago
        > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
        lelandfe 6mo ago
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo ago
    Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
  - LaGrange 6mo ago
    It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
- ethbr1 6mo ago
  > It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
  - michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
    Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
    - Aerroon 6mo ago
      Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
      - Chaosvex 6mo ago
        YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
        UltraSane 6mo ago
        YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
        bombcar 6mo ago
        We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
        computably 6mo ago
        YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
- kccqzy 6mo ago
  I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play. I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry. It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible. But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall. It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.
  - Majromax 6mo ago
    You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
    - deaux 6mo ago
      > but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive. In general this is a myth promoted by platforms with millions of users. The vast majority of such large platforms could easily afford that level of human support, they just actively choose mot to give it. Blackblaxe - if they even have millions of users - belongs to the minority of such companies.
  - redsocksfan45 6mo ago
    [dead]
- dreamcompiler 6mo ago
  Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- fuckinpuppers 6mo ago
  They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.
- globular-toast 6mo ago
  Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.
monooso 6mo ago
Unlimited means without limits or restrictions. If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are affecting service reliability for other customers)
- conductr 6mo ago
  Sorry but unlimited has never meant unrestricted. TOCs always have restrictions. If it were unrestricted it would be used for all kinds of illegal stuff they don’t want on their servers, child pr0n and whatnot. They can’t legally offer a service like this without restrictions as they operate within an existing set of laws. Unlimited however, they can offer. I don’t see how people get into mental block of thinking something is nefarious when a company offers you unlimited hosting or data. Yes, they know it’s impossible if everyone took full advantage of that. They also know most people won’t and so they don’t have to spend time worrying about it. It’s a simple actuarial exercise to work out the pricing that covers the use of your users. Back in the early 2000s I ran a web hosting service that was predominantly a LAMP stack shared hosting environment. It had several unlimited plans and they were easy to estimate/price. The only times I had an issue of supporting a heavy user, it would turn out they were doing something unrestricted. Back then, it was usually something pron or mp3 related. So the user would get kicked off for that. I didn’t have any issues with supporting the usage load if it was within TOS. The margins were so high it was almost impossible to find a user that could give me any trouble from an economic standpoint.
ricardobeat 6mo ago
It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.
- SomeHacker44 6mo ago
  What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup please?
  - Zetaphor 6mo ago
    rclone on a cron job
  - its-summertime 6mo ago
    Restic + rclone personally, with a wrapper script to glue things together nicely
    - dicytea 6mo ago
      What's the advantage of additionally using rclone vs. just restic?
      - its-summertime 6mo ago
        Mostly because it allows decoupling authentication to a given remote, away from restic. easier to use `rclone:remote:folder` than needing to provide a remote + a separate set of env vars to authenticate with that remote. Not an issue in most languages, but I'm using bash, so its more of a bother.
  - smj-edison 6mo ago
    Not OP, but this is my script: https://gist.github.com/smj-edison/33229537007a73520a26a14a03bdb979 https://gist.github.com/smj-edison/33229537007a73520a26a14a0... It's been cobbled together over the years to add things I want, like not backing up on battery, or sending a desktop message on success. When I set it up I couldn't figure out how to set up a timer, so it runs when I wake from suspend. I'd probably use a systemd timer in the future though. I also should probably snapshot my file system before backing up since I'm running btrfs, but I never figured out how to do that either, and this works, lol.
ape4 6mo ago
Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte
- danpalmer 6mo ago
  Because approximately no one wants that. Anyone who does already uses S3 etc.
- ahofmann 6mo ago
  They do, it's called B2 and is another product of them.
- cowboylowrez 6mo ago
  I use them for the b2 bucket style storage where this happens. Its expensive per gig compared to the cost of a working personal unlimited desktop account. I like to visit their reddit page occasionally and its a constant stream of desktop client woes and stories of restoring problems and any time b2 is mentioned its like "but muh 50 terabytes" lol
  - renata 6mo ago
    It's cheaper if you have multiple computers with normal amounts of data though. My whole family is on my B2 account (Duplicati backing up eight computers each to a separate bucket), and it's $10/month.
lousken 6mo ago
Yea, that's pretty shady. Either don't call your service unlimited or bump up the prices so you can survive occasional datahoarder, called them out on it many years ago.
matheusmoreira 6mo ago
I actually emailed them years ago about it. Asked them point blank what'd happen if I dumped 20+ TB of encrypted, undeduplicable backups onto their storage servers. They actually replied that there'd be no problem, but I didn't buy it. Not at all surprised to see this now.
rsync 6mo ago
"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"." The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months. Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.
- tombert 6mo ago
  Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now. Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.
  - 00deadbeef 6mo ago
    I bought a 24TB for £365 last June. It's £905 now.
- Dylan16807 6mo ago
  Is it that bad? When I look at the prices of new drives on amazon I mostly see increases just under 50%. I think used went up more but that's not affecting backblaze as much.
  - gck1 6mo ago
    It's pretty bad. The enterprise drives I bought a year ago for under $300 are now either out of stock, or priced above $600 with limited stock.
bitfilped 6mo ago
When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually given consideration to the cost of doing business and have priced that in already.
- rafabulsing 6mo ago
  I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite" and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the very least their use should be heavenly regulated. _Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits. "But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users" Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.

embedding-shape 6mo ago

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.

littlecranky67 6mo ago
Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests. Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
      - mcmcmc 6mo ago
        What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
        organsnyder 6mo ago
        Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function of rate and time).
        bombcar 6mo ago
        The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access. Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc). Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
        mcmcmc 6mo ago
        I’ll be honest I think “unlimited” should just be banned from advertising. The literal definition a layman would understand is never what’s in the fine print. Every good or service has some kind of limit, whether it’s artificially put in place by the seller or a law of physics. Any way you can interpret “unlimited” to where it means “unlimited, except those limits” is false advertising.
- willis936 6mo ago
  And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
  - littlecranky67 6mo ago
    > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7 I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that. Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
  - deno 6mo ago
    Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
    - cestith 6mo ago
      Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time. Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
    - salawat 6mo ago
      Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
- hypercube33 6mo ago
  If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
  - dboreham 6mo ago
    In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
  - BobaFloutist 6mo ago
    They mean that they're not going to limit the total amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural limit implied by the maximum rate. When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
- mikepurvis 6mo ago
  Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works. Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
    - lelandfe 6mo ago
      Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
        lelandfe 6mo ago
- ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo ago
  Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
- LaGrange 6mo ago
  It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
ethbr1 6mo ago
> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
- michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
  Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
  - Aerroon 6mo ago
    Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
    - Chaosvex 6mo ago
      YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
      - UltraSane 6mo ago
        YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
        computably 6mo ago
        YT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
kccqzy 6mo ago
I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play. I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 6mo ago
  The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry. It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".
colechristensen 6mo ago
In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible. But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall. It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.
- Majromax 6mo ago
  You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
  - deaux 6mo ago
    > but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive. In general this is a myth promoted by platforms with millions of users. The vast majority of such large platforms could easily afford that level of human support, they just actively choose mot to give it. Blackblaxe - if they even have millions of users - belongs to the minority of such companies.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]
dreamcompiler 6mo ago
Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
fuckinpuppers 6mo ago
They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.
globular-toast 6mo ago
Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.

monooso 6mo ago

Unlimited means without limits or restrictions. If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.

swiftcoder 6mo ago
From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are affecting service reliability for other customers)
conductr 6mo ago
Sorry but unlimited has never meant unrestricted. TOCs always have restrictions. If it were unrestricted it would be used for all kinds of illegal stuff they don’t want on their servers, child pr0n and whatnot. They can’t legally offer a service like this without restrictions as they operate within an existing set of laws. Unlimited however, they can offer. I don’t see how people get into mental block of thinking something is nefarious when a company offers you unlimited hosting or data. Yes, they know it’s impossible if everyone took full advantage of that. They also know most people won’t and so they don’t have to spend time worrying about it. It’s a simple actuarial exercise to work out the pricing that covers the use of your users. Back in the early 2000s I ran a web hosting service that was predominantly a LAMP stack shared hosting environment. It had several unlimited plans and they were easy to estimate/price. The only times I had an issue of supporting a heavy user, it would turn out they were doing something unrestricted. Back then, it was usually something pron or mp3 related. So the user would get kicked off for that. I didn’t have any issues with supporting the usage load if it was within TOS. The margins were so high it was almost impossible to find a user that could give me any trouble from an economic standpoint.

ricardobeat 6mo ago

It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.

SomeHacker44 6mo ago
What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup please?
- Zetaphor 6mo ago
  rclone on a cron job
- its-summertime 6mo ago
  Restic + rclone personally, with a wrapper script to glue things together nicely
  - dicytea 6mo ago
    What's the advantage of additionally using rclone vs. just restic?
    - its-summertime 6mo ago
      Mostly because it allows decoupling authentication to a given remote, away from restic. easier to use `rclone:remote:folder` than needing to provide a remote + a separate set of env vars to authenticate with that remote. Not an issue in most languages, but I'm using bash, so its more of a bother.
- smj-edison 6mo ago
  Not OP, but this is my script: https://gist.github.com/smj-edison/33229537007a73520a26a14a03bdb979 https://gist.github.com/smj-edison/33229537007a73520a26a14a0... It's been cobbled together over the years to add things I want, like not backing up on battery, or sending a desktop message on success. When I set it up I couldn't figure out how to set up a timer, so it runs when I wake from suspend. I'd probably use a systemd timer in the future though. I also should probably snapshot my file system before backing up since I'm running btrfs, but I never figured out how to do that either, and this works, lol.

ape4 6mo ago

Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte

danpalmer 6mo ago
Because approximately no one wants that. Anyone who does already uses S3 etc.
ahofmann 6mo ago
They do, it's called B2 and is another product of them.
cowboylowrez 6mo ago
I use them for the b2 bucket style storage where this happens. Its expensive per gig compared to the cost of a working personal unlimited desktop account. I like to visit their reddit page occasionally and its a constant stream of desktop client woes and stories of restoring problems and any time b2 is mentioned its like "but muh 50 terabytes" lol
- renata 6mo ago
  It's cheaper if you have multiple computers with normal amounts of data though. My whole family is on my B2 account (Duplicati backing up eight computers each to a separate bucket), and it's $10/month.

lousken 6mo ago

Yea, that's pretty shady. Either don't call your service unlimited or bump up the prices so you can survive occasional datahoarder, called them out on it many years ago.

matheusmoreira 6mo ago

I actually emailed them years ago about it. Asked them point blank what'd happen if I dumped 20+ TB of encrypted, undeduplicable backups onto their storage servers. They actually replied that there'd be no problem, but I didn't buy it. Not at all surprised to see this now.

rsync 6mo ago

"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"." The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months. Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.

tombert 6mo ago
Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now. Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.
- 00deadbeef 6mo ago
  I bought a 24TB for £365 last June. It's £905 now.
Dylan16807 6mo ago
Is it that bad? When I look at the prices of new drives on amazon I mostly see increases just under 50%. I think used went up more but that's not affecting backblaze as much.
- gck1 6mo ago
  It's pretty bad. The enterprise drives I bought a year ago for under $300 are now either out of stock, or priced above $600 with limited stock.

bitfilped 6mo ago

When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually given consideration to the cost of doing business and have priced that in already.

rafabulsing 6mo ago
I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite" and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the very least their use should be heavenly regulated. _Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits. "But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users" Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.