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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#121

Post by seaish »

mindslight wrote: post #91
bryik wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Backblaze's calculator[0], it would cost $4,800/yr to store 80TB on Backblaze B2 and you're storing it for $60/yr. Cases like these are why unlimited storage plans don't make sense... Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine? 0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 1 - https:…

Are we sure that the proprietary desktop clients don't use convergent encryption (allowing for deduplication), especially for media files?

It's pretty difficult to build up 80TB of stuff that's not original data.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#122

Post by eikenberry »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #66
eikenberry wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were talking about switching if they got more expensive and rsync.net is already a lot more expensive unless you have very little data (<300GB).

rsync.net is a very different product though. I recently evaluated a bunch of cloud storage/backup services. rsync.net is a ssh-accessible ZFS filesystem (including support for zfs send/recv) in the cloud, B2 is object storage. rsync.net has a cheaper version aimed at people doing borg backups. Unfortunately it's still 3x the cost of B2 for 1TB of data.

I currently use B2 for my offsite backups, only around 1.5TB, using rclone. Works well and costs just under $7/mo.

I looked at rsync.net and really liked the idea, but costing 5x as much just doesn't justify the features.

Where do they offer the 3x cost solution? Cheapest pricing I can find is 2.5cents/GiB/mo (the 5x price).

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#123

Post by PaywallBuster »

Osiris wrote: post #99
tgtweak wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you consider the increase in assets (total value of the # of servers, racks, network gear etc) from the purchase of hardware to accommodate that growth, in order to satisfy those revenues and future revenues, it makes sense. It is entirely intentional and desirable for any gross margins to go fully back into growth or assets to support growth - especially in the cloud game where infrastructure costs and R&…

Thank you for the very insightful accounting perspective. I have a hard time understanding all the complexities of modern account and how a "loss" isn't always a loss. On a side note, I'm a very happy Backblaze customer and the same time curse Dropbox for not offering a 100GB $5/mn plan. Backblaze pricing is very customer friendly.

It's still a loss (for the current year).

But this is a SaaS, working with recurring revenue.

Some metrics to consider are:

- Cost of Customer Acquisition

- Lifetime Value

They could spend 200$ to get an average customer, but they will renew their subscription for an average of 5 years and generate over 2000$ in revenue during that time.

As long as you keep track of these metrics you know you're in a good direction or digging yourself a hole.

Besides other costs R&D, Admin, Marketing and Sales can be scaled up and down as needed, and become a smaller part of the costs as the company grows.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#124

Post by divbzero »

metalliqaz wrote: post #77
throwawaysea wrote: post #76

Question for the HN crowd: what’s the best way to back up a NAS using client side encryption?

I use rclone.

I use rclone as well and it has worked reliably for years. Keeping the password [1] separate allows me to restore files to a fresh computer as needed. Backblaze B2 is just one of many backend options [2].

[1]: https://rclone.org/crypt/

[2]: https://rclone.org/overview/

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#125

Post by eikenberry »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #65
autarch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I back things up to Backblaze B2 from Linux using borg. It works really well and it's incredibly cheap. I'm paying less than $1/month to keep about 155GB of data there. About half the data is from Borg backups, the other is rcloned copies of my music files.

What's your process for backing up to B2 using borg? I'm currently doing borg backups to a local server, then using restic to back up my borg backups to B2. My reason for using restic over rclone is so that if the local backup is corrupted I've got history on the remote to fall back to. I'm hoping to find a less cumbersome way to do this.

Rclone only uploads/overrides the remote if the meta-data (size/date/etc) shows a difference. Most disk corruption doesn't change these so it still works as a corruption backup.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#127

Post by georgeburdell »

tiffanyh wrote: post #20

I love Backblaze. Kind of surprised they aren’t profitable. >” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”

Amazon was notorious for having a profit of about 0 for years and years due to investment in capital (to produce future earnings). Your spending today includes both the operational costs of creating what you have today, plus the investment you're making to generate additional revenue in the future. Obviously this excludes other important expenses like depreciation, but you get the idea.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#128

Post by helloworld11 »

Osiris wrote: post #99
tgtweak wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you consider the increase in assets (total value of the # of servers, racks, network gear etc) from the purchase of hardware to accommodate that growth, in order to satisfy those revenues and future revenues, it makes sense. It is entirely intentional and desirable for any gross margins to go fully back into growth or assets to support growth - especially in the cloud game where infrastructure costs and R&…

Thank you for the very insightful accounting perspective. I have a hard time understanding all the complexities of modern account and how a "loss" isn't always a loss. On a side note, I'm a very happy Backblaze customer and the same time curse Dropbox for not offering a 100GB $5/mn plan. Backblaze pricing is very customer friendly.

I tried Backblaze but couldn't get over its insistence on first backing up my entire primary hard drive instead of allowing me to simply choose directly my most important files in my external drives, or from wherever I prefer. Seems arbitrarily forceful to me, though the pricing and security options are good. Also, the interface of deselecting things to not back up via exclusions, instead of simply being able to specifically select what you WANT to back up is absurd, it complicates things unnecessarily if out of dozens of folders, you only want to select a few essentials for cloud storage.

As far as pricing goes, $5 per month for 100GB seems steep. SpiderOak offers 400GB for less than that and so does Nordlocker (though Nord has its own problems). On the other hand, iDrive has been offering a whopping 5 terabytes for a whole year for just $3.98 in a deal I saw just a few days ago.

Overall, zero knowledge backup is the best route, Backblaze plays at that, on the other hand I wouldn't touch any backup offering by Google with a 10 meter cattle prod. Grotesque that they reserve the right to snoop right through your files unless you first encrypt them externally via third party apps.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#129

Post by helloworld11 »

mkr-hn wrote: post #37
dreadlordbone wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you save a bunch of money when Backblaze is dirt cheap?

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.

Im sorry but how does that work? If the purpose of online backup is for your data to be stored online, why would you need 20TB or 20GB (or any amount) of storage attached to the backed up computer? Backblaze, or any other online backup service stores everything on their storage, elsewhere, and that's exactly the point: that if your entire house burns to the ground with all your computers and external drives etc, you have a cloud copy of all their content in a secure, password protected external location, and you can then download them elsewhere from online. As for sync, most online backup service seem to offer at least a basic version by which your local data syncs with your externally backed up data so that they incrementally stay identical.

If I'm misreading your comment somehow, please correct me. Maybe I misunderstood something.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#130

Post by mey »

bryik wrote: post #70
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.

According to Backblaze's calculator[0], it would cost $4,800/yr to store 80TB on Backblaze B2 and you're storing it for $60/yr. Cases like these are why unlimited storage plans don't make sense... Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine? 0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 1 - https:…

Windows Storage Spaces are handled by Backaze. Granted I am only doing that with 2TB, which is a drop in the bucket these days.
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