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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#151

Post by quickthrower2 »

jve wrote: post #141
eyegor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

let’s hope there is no egress!

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#152

Post by michaelt »

helloworld11 wrote: post #129
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.

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…

What they're trying to say is "Backblaze backs up an unlimited amount from one computer - but you can't back up more data than you have on one computer. So if you have 1234 GB in Backblaze, you must have 1234 GB of disk space"

This is in contrast to other cloud storage services which might (for example) allow you to save space on your phone by uploading your old photos to the cloud and deleting the local copies.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#153

Post by vadfa »

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.

That means that every time I buy something and there's a profit marging someone is stealing from me.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#154

Post by viraptor »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #132
m0zg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like prices will pretty much inevitably go up after they're public, and I'll finally have the motivation to set up my own remote backup by exchanging hard drives with a friend of mine on the other end of the country.

Yup. Just like every other cloud company: hook people cheap, get them super dependent, and then go public telling investors they'll make a goldmine when you jack prices. The extra fun bit is that just exfiltration will cost you.

Fortunately you likely don't have to pay for that for personal accounts. B2 - sure. Backups? Just make a new one and leave the BB account running for a couple of months - for most people keeping backups beyond 2 months is just not useful.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#155

Post by cupofjoakim »

A friend in the music industry told me about a very cool backblaze moment.

They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not insane for a company) backblaze actually flew a guy with a physical hard drive to their location.

Saved ~5 gigs from being canceled, and my friend has been a die hard backblaze evangelist ever since.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#156

Post by HanaShiratori »

tgtweak wrote: post #89
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.

They made 27M gross profit in 2020 - You'll see how much value your revenue created shortly here :) edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D

How does deduplication work on encrypted files though? I thought they advertise their personal backup plan to be fully encrypted - this would mean that backblaze shouldn't be able to access / identify the data...

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#157

Post by sreitshamer »

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.

Arq will encrypt/decrypt the backup data with a key that never leaves your computer. The encryption and data format are documented here: https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/d...

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#158

Post by ronyfadel »

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.

How much does it cost you to back your data up (and on which cloud provider)?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#159

Post by OnlyMortal »

HanaShiratori wrote: post #156
tgtweak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made 27M gross profit in 2020 - You'll see how much value your revenue created shortly here :) edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D

How does deduplication work on encrypted files though? I thought they advertise their personal backup plan to be fully encrypted - this would mean that backblaze shouldn't be able to access / identify the data...

It doesn’t.

But, if it’s a key generated at their end, they could dedupe the original data. S3 bucket encryption been an example.

Source: I work in deduplication for a well known company.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#160

Post by gchokov »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #155

A friend in the music industry told me about a very cool backblaze moment. They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not in…

Seriously impressive service. Thanks for sharing!
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