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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#141

Post by jve »

eyegor wrote: post #105
spullara wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html they are not using enterprise drives and 15 drives per RAID6.

As per https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv... it costs them $0.036/GB.

So 8TB space costs them 294,91$. Well they have other costs too. But if they had him as a customer for 5+ years, they can start profiting :) Actually more years, because electricity, traffic, rent, salaries, etc...

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#142

Post by vadfa »

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first.

Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#143

Post by throwaway2037 »

tgtweak wrote: post #88
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”

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&…

1) Thank you for the excellent, high level accounting analysis. That is pretty rare to see on HN, and helpful to understand their financial situation.

2) I agree: Their incredibly hard drive reliability reports are like catnip! Here is a sample post if others don't know about these reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#144

Post by olavgg »

throwawaysea wrote: post #76

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

ssh with zfs send/receive. No problems having hourly backup of your most important petabyte scale data on the other side of this planet.I even do this with Microsoft SQL Server using iSCSI.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#145

Post by ubercow13 »

vadfa wrote: post #142

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

rclone

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#146

Post by petecooper »

vadfa wrote: post #142

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

https://arqbackup.com/

I use the macOS version and it's excellent.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#147

Post by Maakuth »

vadfa wrote: post #142

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

Duplicity (https://duplicity.gitlab.io/duplicity-web/) has served me well with B2 and other backends. It does snapshots, encrypts transparently and supports a number of storage services. It runs best on Linux, but you could run it on WSL I suppose?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#148

Post by p00dles »

vadfa wrote: post #142

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

Not sure if it’s the same use case but I use Cryptomator with OneDrive and it’s worked well.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#149

Post by p00dles »

petecooper wrote: post #146
vadfa wrote: post #142

For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first. Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.

https://arqbackup.com/ I use the macOS version and it's excellent.

do you mind if I ask where you store the Arq backup? On a separate physical drive, in a cloud service, etc.?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#150

Post by jonplackett »

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”

I love backblaze too - but I don’t know why Apple haven’t copied their business out of existence (for apple users at least)

The original backblaze was literally Time Machine in the cloud.

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