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Backblaze IPO

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Re: Backblaze IPO

#181

Post by LilBytes »

firecall wrote: post #63
rsync wrote: post #38

I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…

CrashPlan essentially bailed on the consumer market a few years back! I'd agree that customers can be fickle - especially technically inclined customers. It's actually very easy to switch backup systems.

I'm still salty CrashPlan pulled out.

I would have been very happy to keep paying.

- one of the salty people on Reddit who ended up building another NAS off site to make up for it.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#182

Post by Scott_Sanderson »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #127

Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…

Brian is the man.

Love his web page on dutch bikes in Amsterdam. Inspired me to get a real dutch bike and put 30k miles on it! https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

Re: Backblaze IPO

#183

Post by rasz »

jlmorton wrote: post #125

I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us somet…

So you store ~4 files per second? a Pi with USB HDD could serve your needs ;-)

Re: Backblaze IPO

#184

Post by teraflop »

argc wrote: post #176
brianwski wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Robbie- I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer. The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it. -- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com

This conversation makes me think you care about your users and inspired me to go look at pricing for personal laptop backup, and it appears that linux is not supported. Any plans to support it in the future? EDIT I might have not looked hard enough and there are potentially options out there, I just found https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d...

For many years, they were consistently and very diplomatically saying that they had no plans to offer Backblaze Personal Backup to Linux users, because Linux users would use a disproportionately large amount of storage and it wouldn't make sense to offer them a flat-rate alternative to the pay-per-GB B2 option.

e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_...

It seems that they may be changing their tune, at least as of a few months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m3xynu/backblaze...

Re: Backblaze IPO

#185

Post by rasz »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #178

I wrote Backblaze and said "I would pay to ship you a drive so I don't have to upload 500GB over my consumer internet. That is my biggest pain point." and then the customer service rep replied that it wouldn't be a good business model to do that. Why is the customer service rep making these decisions? Just forward the email to your biz dev team.

I think you are experiencing a culture shock after receiving a honest answer from a business.

- drive you send arrives damaged

- drive you send gets lost in transit

- your friend hears about this great new offer and sends 100TB of drives expecting $7/m offer to stand and someone at Backblaze to build pods out of his random drives.

- etc etc

Re: Backblaze IPO

#186

Post by crossroadsguy »

ehsankia wrote: post #131
robbiemitchell wrote: post #127

Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

This is a very Backblaze Personal Backup fan thingie. Some kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome? Just like Apple fans. I have rarely met Apple “users” and Backblaze Personal Backup “users”. I’ve mostly met their “fans” - they speak of these companies as if it was the second coming in their lives; as if it brought the light with it - which is very unhealthy imho.

I wonder whether it’s their marketing and PR spin/strategy. Apple’s I’d definitely think so.

And no I don’t hate the companies itself. I am a paying b2 customer and I am satisfied with that service and I’m an iPhone mini user I (kinda) like the phone at that size and price; but moving away from these will be just one or a half medium to major fuckup away.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#187

Post by bloqs »

max46 wrote: post #152
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

the answer is simple... either it's an employee for the marketing department who can turn anything into a positive or it's a fanboy. The page long responses that starts with textbook marketing BS ("No worries, the most important..") tells me it's from an employee because no one cares that much and actively wants people to lose data faster. The amount of buzzwords in his other response... ffs how can you guys seriousl…

Brian has now responded in the same thread

Re: Backblaze IPO

#188

Post by matheusmoreira »

caf wrote: post #112
matheusmoreira wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They said "yeah, we lose a ton of money on every user like you." Such an interesting statement. It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it. Like ISPs with their "unlimited" plans, they market that stuff and then they get mad if you actually saturate their link 24/7. I actually emailed backblaze about this years ago. I asked them if they…

It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it. Well, yes, it's like a all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that nonetheless isn't going to let you bring in a giant cooler and fill it up to take home.

No. All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. You go there, eat until you're satisfied, and then you pay. There is no lie to be found.

Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. They can't just lie to their consumers, cash in and then pull the rug from under them later because they violated their assumptions about likely usage patterns. They sold the consumers unlimited usage and assumed they would not use it. Some crazy person actually decided to use the service to the fullest possible extent? They must honor their promises.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#189

Post by davidandgoliath »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #114
55873445216111 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Duplicati (duplicati.com) with Backblaze B2 as a backend for my backups. I get billed by GB-month and I get to define exactly what files to backup and how many versions to keep.

I use restic -> b2. And also Vorta (which uses borg) -> rsync, borgbase; Tarsnap -> Tarsnap's S3 (I guess). Vorta so far has been really good and has lots of potential. (Badly need a restic GUI here. May drop restic anytime - I am not comfortable having a personal backup setup without a GUI)

rclone is fairly swell, and, comes with a spawnable browser ui.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#190

Post by jdgoesmarching »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #19
braum wrote: post #15

Fidelity is handling the IPO and if you have been a customer of BackBlaze for a while apparently you will get to buy before public, up to 1,000 shares between $15-17 per share. That is my understanding.

A family member and I are both Backblaze customers, they received a surveymonkey link to indicate interest in an IPO share allocation through Fidelity. If there’s a way to get on that list, I’m interested if anyone knows.

I just found it in my spam. It was sent on Oct 22nd, you had to reply by Oct 27th. Damn.
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