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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#101

Post by nvr219 »

adar wrote: post #49
hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

I'd feel deeply uncomfortable backing up 80tb of data to a $60/year plan, tbh.

It's probably not very important 80 tb.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#102

Post by mkr-hn »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #100
mkr-hn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are confusing backup and sync. Backblaze will run an incremental backup of 20TB and 20GB for the same price, but you have to have 20TB or 20GB of storage attached to the backed up computer. It won't let you access files not on your computer without awkward workarounds, but it also doesn't charge the huge premium sync services charge for the storage.

Backblaze does actually have caps, even though they don't publish them and they throttle even though they say they don't.

If they do, it's so high as to not matter for any reasonable use and quite a few unreasonable ones.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#103

Post by snypher »

spullara wrote: post #93
hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

LOL. So S3 would charge $22k and you are paying them $60. Yeah, I am impressed that they let you steal the money. That is bad and you should feel bad. Just buying the drives to store that much is $1500.

If something is being sold at a loss, why should the purchaser feel bad about it? Some 'personal unlimited' type plan is allowing this behavior and if the company is concerned with it they can change or terminate their product.

What if the whole point of the personal plan is "hopefully they can be encouraged to spend +$x with us"?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#104

Post by mkr-hn »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #97
mkr-hn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.

restic + rclone = Google Drive backup with snapshots and dedupe. Not sure if you are just unaware, or didn't take the time to look into anything else.

There's an infamous comment on the Dropbox launch that addresses this better than I can, but I can't find it. Suffice to say: yes, I'm aware there are solutions I can put together that are more work than I care to do to maybe save some portion of $65 a year. Putting those snapshots on Drive would tear through (expensive) space fast, so I'm not sure it's a savings. Backblaze provides incremental backup for my entire SSD. Even more if I ever fill that empty bay. I don't even pay for Drive since few things I do benefit from syncing, so this would probably cost more and be worse.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#105

Post by eyegor »

spullara wrote: post #93
hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

LOL. So S3 would charge $22k and you are paying them $60. Yeah, I am impressed that they let you steal the money. That is bad and you should feel bad. Just buying the drives to store that much is $1500.

So for fun I decided to see how cheap you could actually do this in a reliable way. Cheapest gb/$ for a good widely available drive is a 6tb refurb enterprise drive around $110. For this many drives I'd want raid 6 (especially refurbs), so you're looking at $1650 pre tax.

As a public company there's no chance backblaze will let this dude keep ripping them off.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#106

Post by mkr-hn »

martinald wrote: post #78
mkr-hn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.

I actually got rid of backblaze a while back because I realised I had moved machines twice and didn't bother restoring files with it. I've had backblaze for years (maybe even a decade+?!) Code is all on GitHub, all my docs and emails are in gsuite (and don't get backed up anyway by BB). The only thing that does get backed up is a load of cruft and junk I've accumulated which is actually nice to start over on tbh. I i…

I'm sure it depends on needs. I have gigabytes of raw photos, videos, renders, stems, asset packs I can't count on being available from the original source, etc. I never need to access it on other computers, so they're not synced to services that charge a premium for space for the value of syncing, but I can grab a file outside a synced folder from the Backblaze website or app in a pinch.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#107

Post by haggy102 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #69
hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

Weird scenario where you have 80TB of data, but a tight budget to back it up. I guess it is some kind of hobby thing.

What hobby has 80TB of data?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#108

Post by AnonC »

hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

An opinion that may be contrary to some of the other replies here. Don’t feel bad about it. There is a commercial (and capitalistic) contract between Backblaze and you where it provides a service for a payment. Both ends are keeping up the deal. If Backblaze deems your usage as “abuse” (many companies use unpublished soft and hard limits for making such decisions), it will let you know and give you options. Your main concern should be having some sort of alternative if/when Backblaze tells you that your contract with it cannot be supported any longer or if Backblaze has such poor business sense that it has a lot of customers like you and goes bust (the latter is unlikely).

Also consider that many other users may be using far less than what $60 could buy for Backblaze.

Even if Backblaze is suffering a huge loss on account of your usage, the fact that you commented here about it and indicated that there haven’t been any repercussions is a marketing message for the company treating paying customers in a decent way.

I’m sure people on r/datahoarders (Reddit) would already know of use cases like yours or may be thrilled to know of it.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#109

Post by eyegor »

haggy102 wrote: post #107
quickthrower2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird scenario where you have 80TB of data, but a tight budget to back it up. I guess it is some kind of hobby thing.

What hobby has 80TB of data?

Video editor keeping raw footage around? Or if they're on hn, maybe they're a data scientist who loves big datasets and cannot lie.
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