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Backblaze IPO

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Re: Backblaze IPO

#251

Post by caf »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #188
caf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it. Well, yes, it's like a all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that nonetheless isn't going to let you bring in a giant cooler and fill it up to take home.

No. All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. You go there, eat until you're satisfied, and then you pay. There is no lie to be found. Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. They can't just lie to their consumers, cash in and the…

All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that.

No, not everybody does, which is why they have to have signs saying you can't take food home.

Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing.

"Unlimited backup (of data stored on the internal storage of a single personal-use laptop or desktop running Windows or MacOS X)" is not fundamentally different from "Bottomless coffee (consumed by one person only in a single visit)" or "A year's supply of fuel (really a $3000 balance fuel card)". There's a "reasonable person" standard here, and the man on the Clapham Omnibus knows that these sorts of offers have fine print which it behoves you to read.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#252

Post by qorrect »

olalonde wrote: post #229
kottaram wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CTO just said the truth. How else would he say that the customer's data will be deleted? Sure it was straight up blunt, but I think he was just speaking casually.

I am very confused by the email, especially the second point. I've never used Backblaze so maybe I'm missing some critical information. To me, it sounds like Backblaze was happily keeping a backup for a paying customer until said customer booted their laptop. They then threaten to delete the backup if customer doesn't update their software. I understand about warning that the software no longer works but why threaten…

I'm with you , that email does not in any way make me feel like Backblaze has my best interest in mind , sounds like they were knowingly charging you for a defunct account then threatened to delete all your data in 7 days ?!

I want to like Backblaze I love their harddrive report but this is not helping.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#253

Post by pclmulqdq »

carlivar wrote: post #60
henning wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. They also said the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

In reality when debt/funding is exceptionally cheap, conditions exist for these sort of companies to be fine. Or to put it another way, when there's few options to park money and expect a reasonable return, risk threshold for unprofitable companies becomes lower. So the market isn't really irrational. You might argue our interest rates and monetary policies are irrational. I would agree with you.

All asset valuations have a numerator and a denominator. I think people sometimes forget that - if dollars are cheap, stocks with 100x multiples aren't that expensive. There is an inflation assumption baked into that price, but it seems to be coming true.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#254

Post by bluedino »

I found this interesting with the current 'trend' of remote work:

The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy.

- snip -

The market for such talented personnel is particularly competitive in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is located. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do and can frequently offer such personnel substantially greater compensation than we can offer. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business would be harmed.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#255

Post by leokennis »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #78
rsync wrote: post #38

I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…

For a backup service they have too many ifs and gotchas. I’d personally stay as far away from them. I’d rather want something that charges more and doesn’t offer that gimmicky unlimited storage and gives me unlimited versioning and external media and doesn’t delete anything as long as I’m paying and am within my storage limit. That simple. That’s why I preferred CrashPlan which had a desktop app much less polished th…

I don't get the vitriol.

BackBlaze is pretty clear on what it offers: for $7 a month, you can backup your entire computer with 30 days of history. Nothing more nothing less*

Your post is like being angry at Ford that the F150 is a pickup and not a bicycle. It's true...but it isn't being marketed as such. You are just in the market for a different product.

* Well, if you dig deeper you can pay extra for unlimited data retention

Re: Backblaze IPO

#256

Post by jinto36 »

KZeillmann wrote: post #102

It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc. I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?

I originally was on Crashplan until they killed the consumer service- my main motivation for going with Crashplan was based on 1) ability to set set deleted files to never be removed from backup sets automatically, and 2) no restriction for running the client on Windows Server. I've definitely had cases where I only realized that I had removed a file I wanted after the 30 day window that Backblaze sets for keeping deleted files. Also, I happen to run Windows Server on a couple of boxes in my house for fun and I'd like to back them up- something I can't do with the Backblaze client.

Then Crashplan killed the consumer service, leaving the Small Business service for rather more money. Recently they announced that they'll be instituting restrictions on file types and deleted file retention.

I moved to IDrive for my endpoints because of the pricing being more competitive than any other option. Their Web UI isn't as good as Crashplan, the client UI is also pretty poor, it's more difficult to figure out what the client is actually doing, and I had times when it would get stuck on files for days/weeks on large backup sets. However, it's actively developed and they've fixed some issues in recent months. It's cheap enough that it's hard to complain.

For my Windows Servers, now I use Duplicacy, which can target a few different cloud storage providers. I tried Backblaze B2 first, which was a bit expensive for me in the end when I realized how large the backup set was- after a year it would have been cheaper to build a NAS and stick it at a friends house and mirror to it. Currently I'm using Google Drive as a storage target using a Gapps for business account, as the storage limits are currently "suggestions". Though I am aware that is something that could go away eventually as well. Hopefully by then I'll be out of graduate school and able to afford a less-makeshift storage target. That aside though, Duplicacy works pretty well if you're looking for something for larger backup sets that does a bit more than Rsync/Rclone (specifically deduplication) which can target both local and cloud backends, and has both command-line and graphical interfaces. The optional GUI for Duplicacy is pretty simple local web interface but it works.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#257

Post by Taek »

femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

> I'm not entirely clear what would be analogous to revenue for Filecoin, but they "mine" ~330K coins per day, which at current prices is about $21 million

This is actually analogous to an expense. That $21 million per day is not revenue that is flowing to the shareholders (or in this case, the Filecoin holders), but rather new shares that are being printed and distributed to the people offering storage to the network. Filecoin's annual expenses to maintain that 13 EiB are roughly $7.5 billion per year, and those expenses manifest as inflation of the total coin supply.

> Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now).

They can't because Filecoin mining requires pairing storage with massive GPUs and servers that have 128 GB of RAM. To move all of their storage over to Filecoin mining, Backblaze would have to make a massive infrastructure investment that is otherwise completely out of the scope of what their business does (as none of their existing products leverage such hefty compute).

Re: Backblaze IPO

#258

Post by megous »

femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Filecoin doesn't make sense to me:

https://file.app/ says it's 0.0000394/GiB/year

So for 4TiB HDD used for 4 years: 0.0000394 * 4000 * 4 = USD 0.6. Wut? I guess I'm missing something. :)

Re: Backblaze IPO

#259

Post by snarf21 »

femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Pyramid schemes shouldn't be compared to real companies.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#260

Post by matheusmoreira »

caf wrote: post #251
matheusmoreira wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. You go there, eat until you're satisfied, and then you pay. There is no lie to be found. Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. They can't just lie to their consumers, cash in and the…

All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. No, not everybody does, which is why they have to have signs saying you can't take food home. Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. "Unlimited backup (of data stored on the internal stor…

> they have to have signs saying you can't take food home

I don't understand how it's possible to misunderstand all-you-can-eat buffets. The words correctly describe the service: you can eat there until you're literally full. There is no "unlimited" anywhere. Those people must be acting in bad faith.

> There's a "reasonable person" standard here

It's perfectly reasonable to assume unlimited really means unlimited and not some industry-specific, lawyer version of the word.

> these sorts of offers have fine print which it behoves you to read

The presence of these hidden "fine prints" is proof of deceptive advertising. This is why marketing cannot be trusted and why consumer protection laws really ought to put an end to these industry practices.

Nobody really reads or understands these terms. It's not like people will hire lawyers to analyze the legalese for them. This is not a deal between equal parties, consumers are severely disadvantaged. Just force them to deliver what they promised. They'll stop promsing soon enough.

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