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Backblaze IPO

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Re: Backblaze IPO

#211

Post by Aeolun »

ksec wrote: post #204
crossroadsguy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/strateg…

>I wonder whether it’s their marketing and PR spin/strategy. I have rarely read any fandom about Backblaze. There may be just a few mentions whenever there is a topic of backup or S3 alternative. But I remember vividly there were at least a few hundred if not thousands of hateful comments on HN when they swear to god they will never use them again because of a mistake they made with Facebook analytics. Anyone who def…

I think it’s reasonable to love Backblaze of their backup service but still hate they added Facebook tracking to their webinterface (even if it was a mistake).

Re: Backblaze IPO

#212

Post by dannyw »

femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Note: the 13 EiB pledged are real storage capacity: miners must provide a cryptographic proof every day, that they are storing this much space; or it doesn't count. I still think crypto valuations are excessively, tulip-y high, but valuation/byte is pretty similar.

The cryptographic system that enables people to prove storage is called 'Proof of spacetime'; which sounds cringey, but it's pretty clever (begins at page 10): https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

Note that if you went to Backblaze and wanted to store 2 EB, it's unlikely they'll be able to serve you immediately (they probably can't get enough HDDs from their channels that quickly). However, you CAN store 2 EB on Filecoin the same way you can auto-scale on AWS.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#213

Post by distances »

LilBytes wrote: post #181
firecall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm still with CrashPlan. They pulled out of the consumer market but there was no problem rolling over as a business customer. Their admin web consoles are definitely not suited for a basic end user but they work, so I'm happy to keep using the no-hassle Linux client.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#214

Post by distances »

delusional wrote: post #47
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…

I don't think there's really any "unlimited backup" solutions left outside of backblaze. Back when storage was cheap I could see users switching if you upped the price, the datahoarders that actually use the storage don't really have anywhere to go anymore.

CrashPlan is still alive with flat pricing, they just don't advertise the service for private customers.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#215

Post by cehrlich »

deanCommie wrote: post #45
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…

I think the hope is that 420,000 of those users are Grandmas who installed backblaze because their son told them it's a good idea to make sure she doesn't lose all her important documents, and she's backing up a couple PDFs. And then the other 10,000 are data hoarders like me with Terabytes of data. I used to be a Crashplan customer - tried them and Backblaze, and liked Crashplan more. They eventually pivoted to Busi…

I would consider myself to be pretty far from a "Grandma"-type user. Nonetheless my Backblaze account only uses about 300GB. I pay for my mom's Backblaze as well. No idea how much she uses, but almost certainly way less than that.

Most people's precious data isn't actually that large. Unless you're backing up large amounts of media (photographer, movie collector, whatever) it's not easy to fill even 1TB.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#216

Post by dannyw »

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.

Have you tried writing to Google about requesting they digitize a few old photo albums and upload it to your Google Photos account?

Re: Backblaze IPO

#217

Post by dannyw »

KZeillmann wrote: post #102

It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc. I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?

I use rclone on a grandfathered unlimited Google Apps account. Too many Googlers on HN, so I'm not going to share how much I store, but... it's great.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#218

Post by Chilinot »

teraflop wrote: post #184
argc wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

As a linux user, i have just setup my own backup solution to backblaze using Rclone and their S3 compatible storage.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#219

Post by de_bioinf »

DominoTree wrote: post #86

Their periodic drive failure reports and whatnot tell me that they probably have a lot of their other shit together as well - always a gamble but I’d rather invest in a company with their product together and the biggest worry of them being acquired versus something flashy

I'm afraid I am not as confident as you in their HDD statistics. They used to make every mistake in the (statistics) book regarding their hazard ratio calculations. For example, once they came to the conclusion that a particular model of higher capacity had a higher reliability than the same model of lower capacity. My Cox hazard calculations showed that their hazard profiles were equal, but the higher capacity HDD were younger.

The raw data is worth gold, though.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#220

Post by chinathrow »

femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Happy Backblaze customer here (for a Windows Laptop I admin, for the rest I happily use rsync.net).

I couldn't care less about any company doing ICOs or anything else crypto related when it comes to backup services.

I want a backup company doing one thing: backups, safe, reliable, paid by me.

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