5tb?! They may not want your business ;)
> I backed up 11TB. As long as we are outliers I don't think it's an issue.
I work on the backup client, and I like larger customers for the reason that if the client works for the larger customers today, then it will work really really well for average size customers for several years to come. Larger customers help stretch and test the datastructures for me. :-)
We politely ask the larger customers to recommend Backblaze to their friends and family with less data. We live on the averages, so as long as that works out, we're happy to free customers from worrying about exactly how much they store.
And I just double-checked and it looks like I'm only backing up a little less than 2TB in Crashplan after all.
That said, 5TB isn't a huge number. It could be as low as $200 of hardware cost. With them paying $60 a year, they may or may not end up being a drain on the company's resources. Though they're definitely not paying a full share of the fixed costs the company has.
Edit: Though the full scenario is paying for three clients, so $180 for that much data, and that should easily be profitable.
Their blog posts say it's about $3500 without drives.
I didn't pull $200 out of nowhere. If you stuff a $3500 chassis with 60 $325 12TB drives (current amazon price) and you're getting 80% storage efficiency, that's exactly $40 per usable TB.
Add an extra 25% for safety, and then add a big $400 per month for power/data/space and replacing the one-ish drive per year that fails. Assume you throw the entire thing in the garbage after five years. These are pretty pessimistic numbers, but it's still only $92 per TB per 5 years. With three accounts that's $460 dollars of direct costs on a revenue of $900.
To be profitable on 5TB in one account is much trickier. It depends on the hosting costs far more than the hardware costs, and those are hard to guess. If they're over $150, it might be impossible to break even on direct costs, even given more than five years.
B2 is clearly going to be profitable per byte. It would charge $20 for 4TB and $25 for 5TB.
In comparison to that, $18 for 4-5TB is probably not losing money.
They published that they use 17:20 erasure coding. Have they published exactly how much overhead they get from their filesystem? I don't think it's unreasonable to blindly guess 5% for that.
The published drive failure rates are about one drive per year per 60 drive vault, which is exactly what I said. And we can estimate the labor cost of replacing that drive as tiny. What we don't know is the cost of power, networking, and physical space for the server. So I picked $400 (minus the drive fraction) per month as a nice round "this is double what I can find for many colocation offers, but still avoids losing money" number.