181–190 of 253 posts
Question for the HN crowd: what’s the best way to back up a NAS using client side encryption?
If I were to start over, I would likely choose kopia, which does everything restic does and more (better performance, compression, GUI, etc.), and seems to provide a better out-of-the-box experience. That said, I haven't tried it out yet.
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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.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...
If I really need a long-term cold backup, it costs about half as much yearly (with a half terabyte SSD) to copy the whole thing over to a B2 bucket and get rid of the live backup. That's what I'd do if I were going to Mars.
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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 spec…
At some point, I'd imagine it's an optimization problem between (cost of failure) vs (liquidation value) vs (revenue per GB), where running them all the way into the dirt doesn't make sense. Or maybe it does?
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Backblaze offers "B2" storage, which is also API compatible with S3 (and cheaper, no ingress/egress, etc). I think their focus is more long term storage (slow, infrequent access but cheap per unit).
Backblaze B2 charges egress (at 1 cent/gb) with the exception of egress to bandwidth alliance members, B2 storage served via cloudflare is interesting because it means no egress charges, but unless you're just using it to serve normal webpages you're probably breaking cloudflares TOS.
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They didn't say they were profitable - they said they were cash-flow positive. And if you look at the cash flow statement in the S-1, they were indeed cash-flow positive in 2019. It looks like much of the difference comes down to stock-based compensation. This doesn't cost the company any cash, but under GAAP, it has to be recorded as an expense. (IANAA, so take what I say with a grain of salt).
Backblaze was tweeting about being profitable as late as 2020: https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1242481625004273665
Judging from their current numbers the service is profitable on a per user basis, less marketing expenses.
This is a pretty reasonable way to look at it. Being cashflow positive means you can turn up marketing to grow and turn it down if needed.
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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.
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.
Granted, there are more Apple device customers than any other possible bucket, but is it enough to drive economies down to the point of competing on cloud pricing?
And if not, then they're still stealing iDevice margin to price cloud competitively.
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.
As others mention a lot of closed source tools offer local encryption, including Backblaze (although I believe they need your key in order to do restores, which might or might not defeat the purpose depending on your use case).
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…
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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 spec…
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This caught me by surprise as well because I am pretty sure they have stated before that they were profitable.
Yeah, what gives? I remember they prided themselves on being profitable, self-funded and not beholden to VCs. Sure enough, I was able to confirm that with a quick search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074289 >Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised som…