Backblaze S-1 IPO

Presumably because Backblaze's margins are far too low for Apple, so Apple would have to do "Backblaze, but overpriced", which could look bad - or be content with low margin.

Being cash-flow positive does not necessarily imply being profitable. The one is a day-to-day indication on whether or not you are able to make ends meet without outside funding, the other one is the basis on which you will pay - or not - taxes. It is absolutely possible to be cash-flow positive but not yet profitable, especially while growing.

There are many reasons why cash-flow and profitability can be out of step with each other, for instance, you might have capital expenditures that are going to influence future years' books, you might have an interest carrying bank loan, you may have invested money into acquiring users whose lifetime value is larger than the cost to acquire them but you haven't broken even on that yet, it's possible to have the reverse and so on.

Accounting for all this - and doing so properly - is not as easy as it may seem to be for an outsider or someone who is used to just sell their own hours, where you can immediately see the difference between income and costs and label that profits.

And even there the situation can get more complex, for instance, if work is done in one year but the invoice is sent in the next. Profit wise you are booking that money in the year the work was done, even if the actual cash only lands in the next. Pre-paid services are even more complicated (here you typically partition a chunk of the income month-by-month until the total amount is accounted for).

I tried Backblaze's backup plan.

Their software is just not good, I would say it's even bad. It just didn't work for me.

Something poorly written that they just didn't bother to improve. I guess because most of their customers can't tell the difference anyway whether it's working or not.

Not the parent comment but I use Arq on windows and mac machines at home. This is only for personal data mind you.

What I backup: Three machines currently, my laptop, my desktop, and my wife's laptop. I don't do a full drive backup as I have no problem re-installing software, losing settings, etc. I just backup documents and media for the most part. This includes wedding photos, rental agreements, bank statements, my own git repos, etc.

All of the photos and most documents also sit in a dropbox folder and are downloaded across all 3 machines. We don't do every photo from our phones because we take a lot of rubbish but usually pull over holiday snaps etc pretty quickly.

When I backup: Each machine has a daily backup using Arq which goes up to AWS S3. I then have weekly backups to Backblaze B2. Only reason to not have daily going to B2 is just to keep costs low. This backup frequency feels comfortable for our uses and we feel fairly comfortable with photos being on dropbox and synced in real-time as those are the most important to us.

I also have a separate backup from my wife's computer which runs hourly and just stores documents related to her studying to minimise loss of work if the laptop crashed during the day.

All in all this costs about $3-$5 a month on AWS and a bit less for Backblaze B2. We then pay for dropbox individual plus at £95 a year. All the backups are compressed and encrypted by Arq and it rolls up and ages off backups for us as I don't really care too much about recovering something from several years ago. Looking at the S3 dashboard we're storing 168.3 GB in total across 4 buckets.

I'm sure many people will say this is insanely little data to backup, but it's not important to us to backup everything really, we'd rather have a simple and cheap system to backup the data that's important to us. With the prices I'd have no problem expanding it to more data if needed though.

In the future I'll probably look at buying a NAS and hooking it up to Arq as well, but that'll have to wait until we've bought our first house.

Final note of praise for Arq, UI is really simple (my wife who's not a techie understands it), you can setup email alerts, and recover individual documents from specific backups without needing to restore everything.

I think Backblaze only stores 30 days of revisions anyways, so to migrate you only have to maintain two backup service subscriptions for a month. And you might want to do that anyways since if you have a lot of data, it might be weeks before you get all of your backups on the second service.