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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#191

Post by jonplackett »

ethbr0 wrote: post #186
ahartmetz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious about Apple's cloud strategy. "Cloud, but only for iUsers" seems... weird, from a scaling perspective? 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.

I think their plan is to just always make a little bit more from every hardware customer

Plus, to make their hardware more attractive by having that service available.

Storing backups is probably also quite cheap to do since the data would be infrequently accessed. You don’t need fancy ssds. Cheapo hard drives will be fine.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#192

Post by throw7 »

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…

If you haven't heard the stevie wonder story check it out. I don't get why artists don't have backups (well, I do, but...).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_70th_Birthday_T...

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#193

Post by jpalomaki »

helloworld11 wrote: post #128
Osiris wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is core part of their business model. They can provide unlimited backup capacity, because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer. So this effectively limits your storage space.

Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#194

Post by frakkingcylons »

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…

Why’d they send a person and not just the hard drives? Was it because they couldn’t get it there fast enough by normal air cargo so they used commercial passenger flights instead?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#195

Post by dandellion »

ahartmetz wrote: post #161
jonplackett wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anything that would be a good reason for them to do it. "X, but overpriced" is Apple's niche.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#196

Post by vort3 »

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…

As someone who lives in Kazakhstan, I can confirm, backups are basically useless here because speeds are so bad it's faster to fly a plane than download files…

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#197

Post by patentatt »

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:…

Network drive or any kind of NTFS reparse point such as a symlink (I suppose because that’d be a way around the no network drive rule). An unintended consequence of which is that it doesn’t back up iCloud or one drive files, which use reparse points to do the download on demand stuff. So instead of happily paying $60/year to back up single digit gigabytes, I pay more like ~$20/year to store blobs from a different backup client.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#198

Post by dave84 »

throw7 wrote: post #192
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…

If you haven't heard the stevie wonder story check it out. I don't get why artists don't have backups (well, I do, but...). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_70th_Birthday_T...

Did he ever find the hard drive?

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#199

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

helloworld11 wrote: post #128
Osiris wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not accurate.

You are not forced to backup your entire hard-drive. There is a 3rd party program called: rclone

That program let's you choose which files/directories get copied over to BackBlaze. We have 150+TB (+10TB/week) stored at BackBlaze and I use rclone exclusively to upload our content for backup.

Note, it's a CLI program that works on Linux/BSD. I'm not aware of any other platforms that it works on.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#200

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

jpalomaki wrote: post #193
helloworld11 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is core part of their business model. They can provide unlimited backup capacity, because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer. So this effectively limits your storage space. Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.

>because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer.

This is not accurate, please see my response to helloworld11

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