Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

backblaze.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 158 posts

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#61

Post by quickthrower2 »

joshfee wrote: post #29

I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic ). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know wh…

For $9/month you would get a lot more features from the backup service. The interesting ones being File Sharing and Extended Version History. So it depends if you want those, as well as a nice web UI. And at 1TB the numbers get closer, at 2TB it becomes cheaper to use the backup service.

The main thing for me is legacy. In my will it is a lot easier to explain how to get files from the standard backup plan, rather than install a tool from Github etc.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#62

Post by tunesmith »

Recently got a Synology and have been considering cloud backup needs. Mine would roughly be a terabyte, and so far my thinking is shaking out as:

For incrementally backing up laptop data, the process needs to run on my laptop anyway, so I may as well just use Arq.

For NAS data that changes frequently enough to desire incrementals, choose Synology Hyperbackup.

For NAS data that doesn't change frequently and can just be sync'd, choose Synology Cloud Sync.

For NAS data that you don't need locally and only need to archive, choose Synology Cloud Sync with one-way-sync. (Less hassle than AWS Glacier.)

As for the cloud provider itself, I'm think I'll probably go with Wasabi, at $6/TB. I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.

Main things giving me pause: minimum block size on Wasabi (I'm sure some of my files are smaller; don't know what sticker shock I'll experience), and unsure why I should consider a command line tool like restic instead of the above.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#63

Post by midasuni »

autoexec wrote: post #41
joshfee wrote: post #29

I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic ). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know wh…

What plan are you using? Their website suggests that their plans for a single user costs are ~$6-$10 a month. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing It's still a pretty good deal though...

It says it can backup my PC but then says it needs windows? I can’t see a “personal” option for other OSes on a PC

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#64

Post by andrewxdiamond »

pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

Yeah turns out S3 is expensive because all those 9s cost $$$

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#65

Post by MobileVet »

tunesmith wrote: post #62

Recently got a Synology and have been considering cloud backup needs. Mine would roughly be a terabyte, and so far my thinking is shaking out as: For incrementally backing up laptop data, the process needs to run on my laptop anyway, so I may as well just use Arq. For NAS data that changes frequently enough to desire incrementals, choose Synology Hyperbackup. For NAS data that doesn't change frequently and can just b…

So many options… and the data is likely very precious so it is worth the time to review and test what you can.

I tried several different configurations and finally landed on the following.

I have a Synology that I have been running for a couple years now.

- RAID 0 w 2 14TB drives, 400GB is highly critical

The 400GB of highly critical is further backed up:

- external 1 TB SSD that lives at my sisters house and is updated monthly or so using Sync w encrypted EXT4 formatting

- B2 sync with 1 way, encrypted backup and nightly updates (using Backblaze’s encryption because Synology requires your device and if that goes… you are sol)

I friggin love it. I have restored things several times to test the process and it just works.

It only costs me $2/ mo for Backblaze B2 with that amount of data. Well worth it.

Good luck

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#66

Post by epcoa »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #61
joshfee wrote: post #29

I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend https://github.com/restic/restic ). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know wh…

For $9/month you would get a lot more features from the backup service. The interesting ones being File Sharing and Extended Version History. So it depends if you want those, as well as a nice web UI. And at 1TB the numbers get closer, at 2TB it becomes cheaper to use the backup service. The main thing for me is legacy. In my will it is a lot easier to explain how to get files from the standard backup plan, rather th…

That’s $9 per computer, not directly comparable to raw storage to use however you want. I get there are ways around this (host a local centralized backup) but that then sort of destroys the turnkey part anyway.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#67

Post by magicalhippo »

CharlesW wrote: post #57
gadders wrote: post #40

Yeah yeah. Just make your client software suck less. Crashplan is much better but went professional only, sadly.

> Crashplan is much better but went professional only, sadly. How do you mean? CrashPlan Essential (200GB) is $3/mo. CrashPlan Professional (unlimited) is $88/year.

Perhaps they reverted their decision, but they did indeed discontinue their Crashplan service for non-businesses[1].

I was using it at the time and had to find an alternative, which I never really did. I tried restic and similar programs, but they were all too slow finding what changed. The key to Crashplan was that it monitored the filesystem for changes, so it didn't have to do an expensive traversal.

In the end I settled for just using the daily full-image backups I was already taking and forego the Been missing it a few times, but overall surviving without.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16184430/crashplan-home-s...

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#68

Post by Manouchehri »

tempest_ wrote: post #24
pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

It has been a while since I looked but CFs R2 was cheaper than s3 the last I looked, never used it though.

It depends. Cloudflare R2 has unlimited free egress; if you’re using a Cloudflare Worker already and proxying the download, then Backblaze B2 becomes cheaper again because egress is free and unlimited.

Here’s my rough pricing notes:

https://gist.github.com/Manouchehri/733e6235457e60de24fdbb15...

One useful trick is if you’re already using a Cloudflare Worker, you can force cache fetches to Backblaze B2 (or any S3 provider). This is allowed by Cloudflare’s ToS as you’re using a Worker.

Re: The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods

#70

Post by Manouchehri »

frankjr wrote: post #36
pqdbr wrote: post #18

I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers. However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication. We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms…

The problem for us was the latency - sometimes it would take ~2s to serve an image. We ended up putting Cloudflare in front of it and that worked but might have actually been against their ToS (I know there have been some changes to it since then).

If you use a Worker in front of it, that’s allowed to serve any type of file.

If you’re just putting Cloudflare’s regular proxy in front of it, then I _believe_ their standard “web assets only” policy applies.

Post reply on HN