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Comment by general_ai | Hacker News Reader

Not the same thing, obviously, but 1/10th the price: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html.

Note 5 cents/gb to restore/access data though. Worth considering before you need to restore 8tb of data.

IIRC You can have them send you a harddrive with your data on it and you'll get the cost of the drive refunded if you send it back to them within 90 days or so.

The comment you replied to was referencing restore costs, not storage costs.

I was referencing restore costs. You can have B2 send you a Harddrive containing the contents of a bucket and send it back to get a restore for cheap.

Does it work with Linux? All docs that I read talk only about Windows and Mac.

Last I looked, the Free software python client worked fine. It was off to a bit of a rough start in the alpha release - but then quickly got some love.

Note that I for now tend to mirror data between servers/vps' I control/rent, so I haven't really used b2 in anger.

Absolutely! We've been using it as a special remote backend for our multi-TB git-annex repos, and it has been both painless and cheap. They have supported integrations for HashBackup and Rclone, and you can roll your own with their S3-ish (though not straight compatible) API. They have recently added native snapshots as well.

That said, as others have mentioned, b2's value differentiator is in cold storage. For us, it's largely insurance against failure of our other backup modalities. If you are pulling a lot of data back on a regular basis, the pricepoint is much more in line with the top tier providers.

I dropped backblaze when I read that you have to reattach external disks every 30 days or so or they'd just wipe the whole backup of that disk.

Their desktop backup is a completely separate product from B2.

Keep in mind that most "unlimited" backup systems have one or more gotchas. Like: * horribly inefficient clients written in java * annoying retention policies * limited compatibility, often no linux * bandwidth throttling * IOP throttling etc. * horrible restore times

However if you skip that an pay as you go you typically get much more control, much more compatibility (including linux), and much better performance. Like say using S3 or Backblaze's B2.

Currently using B2 for syncing my restic backups. It's pretty nice and cheap even compared to AWS Glacier.

It will be great if it can be used for individual backup needs with the help of an awesome desktop app like their desktop consumer backup app. (Arq doesn't fit my needs).

Or with something like Borg.

That pricing looks great, does it work with Borg?

Some people mentioned that b2 is "get what you pay for" with heavy usage throttling bandwidths and stuff like that.

(I cannot verify these claims since I have never used b2, I'm just noting what people told me).

I switched from Crashplan to Backblaze a few months ago and at least in my case the Backblaze client uploads a lot faster.

I've done the opposite. For me it doesn't matter how fast the uploads are (within reason), it matters whether I can restore reasonably quickly if something craps out. CP does have a disadvantage though: their client is written in Java and if you have a lot of files it takes up a ton of RAM.

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