8 ms·

As a customer do I need to worry? It is my favourite cheapo backup.

klodolph 1y ago
I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I recommend worrying about Backblaze and I’ve recommended worrying about it for a while. Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other part of the business, but I think it’s just a matter of time before the business model changes. At the end of the day, there’s a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion. From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough). None of them offer unlimited data… or at least, not any more (most of them used to, but those parts of the business always get shut down).
- lud_lite 1y ago
  Thanks! I suspect that for my use case (actual backup no meed for cloud access) s3 glacier is statistically cheaper.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >actual backup no meed for cloud access How do you test your backups? You do test your backups, right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily run into a situation where you need to retrieve files beyond the 30 day window.
    - mingus88 1y ago
      If you regularly test your backups, glacier gets a lot more expensive due to egress fees And it’s such a good thing to remind people of. You don’t manage a backup service. Nobody cares about backups. People care about restores.
      - klodolph 1y ago
        Glacier egress is less than it used to be, and you can use a combination of glacier + other storage classes using lifecycle rules. I would personally be fine running tests on data that is recently backed up and only testing the data in glacier once or twice. Think about why you test backups in the first place—the main errors you’re trying to catch are problems like misconfiguration, backups not getting scheduled or not running, or not having access to your encryption keys. You can put your most recent backup in “infrequent access” and let older objects age out to glacier with lifecycle rules. Glacier used to have really expensive retrieval costs. That’s now called “glacier deep archive” and as far as I know, major use cases are things like corporate recordkeeping / compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). The costumers for deep archive should be sophisticated customers.
- leidenfrost 1y ago
  What do you recommend as an alternative? I use it as a cheaper replacement to S3
  - geerlingguy 1y ago
    I backup to Amazon Glacier S3 Deep Archive backed buckets. The price is only a little higher for a few TB than other providers, though egress fees in case of restore are a lot higher. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make as I'd have two have two separate local NAS replicas corrupt or die before I need to rely on the Deep Archive.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    For raw backup, I use GCP. Pricing is similar to AWS and the deep storage is easier to use. For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.
  - billfor 1y ago
    IDrive.
- jillyboel 1y ago
  Huh? b2 absolutely scales with usage. Here is their pricing page: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage
- gruez 1y ago
  >These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion. Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS? The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing money overall.
  - mingus88 1y ago
    According to the article they _are_ losing money overall, every quarter since the IPo
    - gruez 1y ago
      I meant the unit economics of their backup product, not the company as a whole. They made $69M in gross profit in 2024, with a gross margin of 55%. That turns into a lost only after subtracting R&D ($42M), sales and marketing ($44M), and G&A ($29M). Of course, those expenses can't be ignored in the context of a company that's set out to make money, but at least they're not selling $10 worth of storage for $5, like the OP implied.
  - klodolph 1y ago
    https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing $99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze. Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a product. These people are not turning around and signing contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many. So it could be that people are just using it below its limits, or it could be that it’s subsidized by other parts of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant—you want to be able to explain this product as a profitable product, as some viable sales channel, or as marketing. My recommendation is to buy storage products where the company is making money off you, or nearly.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is. The hyperscalers are able to get prices way cheaper with economies of scale and price models in a sustainable way. When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because of the IOPS needs of exchange. So “free”, (low iops) SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that “free” capacity.
  - rsync 1y ago
    "I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is." No - no exceptions. We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests. I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.
    - immibis 1y ago
      On the other hand why should you not extract value from someone who is giving you free value?
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        Unless you uuencode your photos and chisel them into stone tablets, stored in your personal salt mine, you’re not serious about backups.
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      You’re missing the point. Those companies are providing extremely profitable services, of which data storage is a part. Office and Workspace are lines of business with 50-60% margins. Non-nerds are going to screw up backups without good UI. If you want to pay by the drink, like I said, use the hyperscalers.
  - j45 1y ago
    The economies of scale go into profit for them while still incrementally increasing costs for clients. If it was aligned with economies of scale, customers would get more storage for the same price every year. We don't hear about cloud prices coming down that often.
- rsync 1y ago
  "I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage." This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop. Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests. The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives. On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume". Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time. The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
  - klodolph 1y ago
    > Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests. I also think about all those cafés with free WiFi, where you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in the background. I benefit, but the café doesn’t.
    - justinclift 1y ago
      Don't cafe's tell people to move on if they up space for large amounts of time when the place is busy?
  - mindslight 1y ago
    > The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :( Can you elaborate on this? They mount in a standard rack and it looks like they have a backplane connected to a commodity motherboard. I'd think if you wanted it to be a JBOD you could replace the motherboard with an external SAS connector. Based on your nick I'm sure you've thought this through so I'm curious. The only thing I see is that it looks like you have to slide the whole unit out to swap a drive, but that seems like an inconvenience rather than a show stopper.
- immibis 1y ago
  You should worry they'll increase the price and worry they'll delete your data if you don't pay the higher price. It's not necessary to worry they'll go out of business just because they are charging a fixed price. They'll raise the price long before going out of business.
  - j45 1y ago
    Having your own NAS in the mix more and more is unavoidable. On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will always charge more an more for it because customers have not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how profitable it is on the other end. On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to any cloud you wish.
- j45 1y ago
  Storage is a fixed fee (space on a hard drive). It make money every month when it sits there and is used. Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB can be calculated. Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can have the opposite problem. I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself, and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.
dist-epoch 1y ago
If it's your only backup, yes, you definitely should.
- lud_lite 1y ago
  It's one of two backups. The software is great. Dropbox level of just works. iDrive by comparison is cheaper but always errors and files it couldn't touch.
  - nikisweeting 1y ago
    Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter...
    - mingus88 1y ago
      I use restic with b2 as a backend It’s not the same service as backblaze’s client but it does everything I need, with dedupe
      - nikisweeting 1y ago
        Yeah I use duplicati, basically the same, it slow but works well and has saved my bacon a few times in real-world situations.
    - rsync 1y ago
      "Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter..." Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and such ? If only ...
      - cantrecallmypwd 1y ago
        tarsnap, mega ;)
everfrustrated 1y ago
They're not at risk of going bankrupt. This is more about confidence in the company to go anywhere that would help the share price. The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be buying shares expecting the price to rise.
stego-tech 1y ago
If the service isn’t making money consistently, I would worry about its long-term viability. This is basic commoditized storage they’re managing to screw up making a profit on, not some super-niche or brand-new product line. It’s bits in a barn, and they’re not making rent. That’s worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them, especially in light of this research.
PaywallBuster 1y ago
They already increased price from $5 to $6 sometime ago Financial statements indicate they selling services at 50% margin, but all the extra sales/admin/R&D add up to a loss They could cut all of that I guess, it's not like object storage need a lot of innovation and they've already stopped making their own storage servers and

I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I recommend worrying about Backblaze and I’ve recommended worrying about it for a while. Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other part of the business, but I think it’s just a matter of time before the business model changes. At the end of the day, there’s a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion. From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough). None of them offer unlimited data… or at least, not any more (most of them used to, but those parts of the business always get shut down).

lud_lite 1y ago
Thanks! I suspect that for my use case (actual backup no meed for cloud access) s3 glacier is statistically cheaper.
- gruez 1y ago
  >actual backup no meed for cloud access How do you test your backups? You do test your backups, right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily run into a situation where you need to retrieve files beyond the 30 day window.
  - mingus88 1y ago
    If you regularly test your backups, glacier gets a lot more expensive due to egress fees And it’s such a good thing to remind people of. You don’t manage a backup service. Nobody cares about backups. People care about restores.
    - klodolph 1y ago
      Glacier egress is less than it used to be, and you can use a combination of glacier + other storage classes using lifecycle rules. I would personally be fine running tests on data that is recently backed up and only testing the data in glacier once or twice. Think about why you test backups in the first place—the main errors you’re trying to catch are problems like misconfiguration, backups not getting scheduled or not running, or not having access to your encryption keys. You can put your most recent backup in “infrequent access” and let older objects age out to glacier with lifecycle rules. Glacier used to have really expensive retrieval costs. That’s now called “glacier deep archive” and as far as I know, major use cases are things like corporate recordkeeping / compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). The costumers for deep archive should be sophisticated customers.
leidenfrost 1y ago
What do you recommend as an alternative? I use it as a cheaper replacement to S3
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  I backup to Amazon Glacier S3 Deep Archive backed buckets. The price is only a little higher for a few TB than other providers, though egress fees in case of restore are a lot higher. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make as I'd have two have two separate local NAS replicas corrupt or die before I need to rely on the Deep Archive.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  For raw backup, I use GCP. Pricing is similar to AWS and the deep storage is easier to use. For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.
- billfor 1y ago
  IDrive.
jillyboel 1y ago
Huh? b2 absolutely scales with usage. Here is their pricing page: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage
gruez 1y ago
>These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion. Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS? The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing money overall.
- mingus88 1y ago
  According to the article they _are_ losing money overall, every quarter since the IPo
  - gruez 1y ago
    I meant the unit economics of their backup product, not the company as a whole. They made $69M in gross profit in 2024, with a gross margin of 55%. That turns into a lost only after subtracting R&D ($42M), sales and marketing ($44M), and G&A ($29M). Of course, those expenses can't be ignored in the context of a company that's set out to make money, but at least they're not selling $10 worth of storage for $5, like the OP implied.
- klodolph 1y ago
  https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing $99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze. Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a product. These people are not turning around and signing contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many. So it could be that people are just using it below its limits, or it could be that it’s subsidized by other parts of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant—you want to be able to explain this product as a profitable product, as some viable sales channel, or as marketing. My recommendation is to buy storage products where the company is making money off you, or nearly.
Spooky23 1y ago
I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is. The hyperscalers are able to get prices way cheaper with economies of scale and price models in a sustainable way. When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because of the IOPS needs of exchange. So “free”, (low iops) SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that “free” capacity.
- rsync 1y ago
  "I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is." No - no exceptions. We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests. I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.
  - immibis 1y ago
    On the other hand why should you not extract value from someone who is giving you free value?
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      Unless you uuencode your photos and chisel them into stone tablets, stored in your personal salt mine, you’re not serious about backups.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    You’re missing the point. Those companies are providing extremely profitable services, of which data storage is a part. Office and Workspace are lines of business with 50-60% margins. Non-nerds are going to screw up backups without good UI. If you want to pay by the drink, like I said, use the hyperscalers.
- j45 1y ago
  The economies of scale go into profit for them while still incrementally increasing costs for clients. If it was aligned with economies of scale, customers would get more storage for the same price every year. We don't hear about cloud prices coming down that often.
rsync 1y ago
"I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage." This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop. Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests. The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives. On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume". Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time. The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
- klodolph 1y ago
  > Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests. I also think about all those cafés with free WiFi, where you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in the background. I benefit, but the café doesn’t.
  - justinclift 1y ago
    Don't cafe's tell people to move on if they up space for large amounts of time when the place is busy?
- mindslight 1y ago
  > The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :( Can you elaborate on this? They mount in a standard rack and it looks like they have a backplane connected to a commodity motherboard. I'd think if you wanted it to be a JBOD you could replace the motherboard with an external SAS connector. Based on your nick I'm sure you've thought this through so I'm curious. The only thing I see is that it looks like you have to slide the whole unit out to swap a drive, but that seems like an inconvenience rather than a show stopper.
immibis 1y ago
You should worry they'll increase the price and worry they'll delete your data if you don't pay the higher price. It's not necessary to worry they'll go out of business just because they are charging a fixed price. They'll raise the price long before going out of business.
- j45 1y ago
  Having your own NAS in the mix more and more is unavoidable. On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will always charge more an more for it because customers have not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how profitable it is on the other end. On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to any cloud you wish.
j45 1y ago
Storage is a fixed fee (space on a hard drive). It make money every month when it sits there and is used. Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB can be calculated. Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can have the opposite problem. I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself, and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.

dist-epoch 1y ago

If it's your only backup, yes, you definitely should.

lud_lite 1y ago
It's one of two backups. The software is great. Dropbox level of just works. iDrive by comparison is cheaper but always errors and files it couldn't touch.
- nikisweeting 1y ago
  Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter...
  - mingus88 1y ago
    I use restic with b2 as a backend It’s not the same service as backblaze’s client but it does everything I need, with dedupe
    - nikisweeting 1y ago
      Yeah I use duplicati, basically the same, it slow but works well and has saved my bacon a few times in real-world situations.
  - rsync 1y ago
    "Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter..." Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and such ? If only ...
    - cantrecallmypwd 1y ago
      tarsnap, mega ;)

everfrustrated 1y ago

They're not at risk of going bankrupt. This is more about confidence in the company to go anywhere that would help the share price. The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be buying shares expecting the price to rise.

stego-tech 1y ago

If the service isn’t making money consistently, I would worry about its long-term viability. This is basic commoditized storage they’re managing to screw up making a profit on, not some super-niche or brand-new product line. It’s bits in a barn, and they’re not making rent. That’s worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them, especially in light of this research.

PaywallBuster 1y ago

They already increased price from $5 to $6 sometime ago Financial statements indicate they selling services at 50% margin, but all the extra sales/admin/R&D add up to a loss They could cut all of that I guess, it's not like object storage need a lot of innovation and they've already stopped making their own storage servers and