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Comment by maz1b | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate how Backblaze is always so consistent in these reports. Quality and disciplined reporting like this is appreciated, and I always find them very interesting.

Side note, does Backblaze not run any enterprise or datacenter SSDs?

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Yev from Backblaze here -> we do have SSDs in the fleet but they are primarily boot and data drives, so they're not really an apples:apples use-case. We're constantly looking for interesting news from our fleet though, so if there's something that pops out, our default approach would be to talk about it :D

Oh cool, thanks for commenting here. This is off-topic but I had a question from a post a few days back about google drive dropping unlimited storage. Someone mentioned that the economics just don't work long-term due to people who abuse it. How does this apply to Backblaze's unlimited backup service?

Yev -> Great question. The problem does lay with the abuse of the unlimited services. We've been offering our unlimited backup for 10+ years now and our only price increase was from $5 -> $6/month after 10 years of keeping them steady. It's possible to provide the service, but we have some natural "gates" that were built into the product to help mitigate abuse. Primarily our unlimited backup service is for Mac and PC computers – we don't back up NAS/Servers/Linus machines.

That helps quite a bit because it reduces the outer-bound of how much data can store with us from typical Mac/PC devices. Granted we do have people with 80+TB backed up with that service, but that VAST majority store A LOT less. The average is low enough that we can continue to provide the unlimited service - kind of like a buffet model. Some will eat more, most will eat less and buy a drink (Extended Version History).

Keeping it to Mac/PC only does make Linux, NAS, Server folks unhappy, but thus far no one has been able to crack the code on an unlimited, fixed-rate service that can back up those devices economically, but if we figure it out we'll let folks know :D

> Keeping it to Mac/PC only does make Linux, NAS, Server folks unhappy, but thus far no one has been able to crack the code on an unlimited, fixed-rate service that can back up those devices economically, but if we figure it out we'll let folks know

Please do! I really would prefer to use Backblaze.

In the meantime, CrashPlan for Small Business is an unlimited, fixed-rate service that supports NAS backup on macOS and Linux. I depend on it to backup a lifetime of photos (100K+), for example.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Backup/Back_up_networ...

I have a great relationship with the Code42 folk - they're good people and do good work! Their Small Business service is a bit more expensive, but yes at that increased rate they've been able to provide service to a few more platforms. I have no idea, but I do hope it works for them! I send people there all the time as an alternative if they don't want to use B2 Cloud Storage w/ an integrator (which is what I normally tell folks to use if they have Linux/Server/NAS but not a ton of data).

Thanks for the reply, Yev. I've been experimenting with B2 (via QNAP's HBS 3) as well — works great, but $20/month vs. CrashPlan's $10 — and I'd just ask that Backblaze consider whether there may be room for a "Personal+" or "Family" fixed-rate plan that supports home NAS devices. Thanks!

It's Orwellian to advertise a service as 'unlimited' and then characterize people who expect you to live up to your advertising by using the service as unlimited as abusers.

Expecting vendors to live up to their marketing claims is not abusive behavior; it's the cornerstone of markets based on informed decision-making by both buyers and sellers.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree at first glance. If I see unlimited, I expect to get the value. I only order the "unlimited free refills" coke if I'm going to sit and work somewhere for four or five hours, since it's otherwise pretty expensive. On the other hand, Backblaze doesn't price it's personal backup service like restaurants price "unlimited" coke. I've helped family and friends switch over from other services; some were so scammy they were charging thousands of dollars per year. As far as the average consumer is concerned, it's functionally unlimited in that the marginal gigabyte of data he backs up has no additional cost associated with it. I have a hard time calling that "Orwellian".

Edit: I just saw that another employee mentioned the largest customer is storing 430Tb. That's pretty darn unlimited for the price point.

Typically the term "abuse" is reserved for cases where you offer free backups of a phone and someone figures out how to mount their 16TB media collection into that, or unlimited email and someone writes emailfs. You can make a profit on the proposition as you intended it, but cannot sustain the retrofitted use cases.

It's not really "Orwellian" to do that, it's just standard, crappy, marketing doublespeak.

You know the term doublespeak comes from Orwell, right?

Yes, and you ALL missed the joke.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> the economics just don't work [for Unlimited] long-term due to people who abuse it. How does this apply to Backblaze's unlimited backup service?

So far, it has worked out for us (going on 14 years now). If you are curious about the size distribution of our customers, here is a histogram of our Personal Backup customer data sizes from the end of 2018: https://i.imgur.com/iVEuwUT.jpg (You will need to zoom in to see all the data points - the largest customer stores 430 TBytes for $6/month.) Backblaze never raised any funding, we're self sufficient with no deep pockets, so it works for us financially.

Just to be clear, Backblaze doesn't price the Personal Backup product as $6/month for an unlimited amount of storage to attract gigantic customers. Our driving force for almost every decision on the Personal Backup product was to make it "easy" for people who either are not experts at using computers, or just don't want to spend a lot of their time on it. My 88 year old father doesn't know the difference between a MByte or a GByte or a TByte, and he would be stressed out worrying about "paying per GByte". The fixed price of $6/month is intended to reduce "sales friction", not attract massive storage customers. Another issue for non-computer-expert customers is they don't know where all their files are. So to make it "easy", Backblaze simply backs up EVERYTHING by default, and only excludes things like the Operating System if we absolutely know what it is and know it can be recovered in other ways. So the Backblaze Personal Backup product can be installed with a username and password, ZERO CONFIGURATION, and the customer's data is backed up. But that wouldn't work very well if we charged per GByte, customers would think we were doing it just to increase how much they are charged. :-) So the "fixed price for any amount of storage" is part of the overall "easy to use" strategy.

What we ask of our above average storage customers is that they recommend the product to their less technical friends with less data. We get a good reputation by supporting the large customers, and those customers are often the "technical mavens" that recommend products to their friends and family.

I work on the Personal Backup client that runs on your laptop. Personally I like the super ultra big customers simply as quality assurance. If I can keep the client running for a customer with 400 TBytes, it will absolutely purr like a kitten for an average sized customer with 1 TByte of data.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hdd-vs-ssd-in-data-centers/

This article says Backblaze uses SSD a little bit. Somehow, I remember they used Samsung branded SSDs and they had very few failures that weren't DOA, but I can't find the relevant article, so that memory might be entirely fabricated.

SSDs have such an orderly and predictable failure regime that I doubt a quarterly reliability report would be of interest to anyone.

Firmware bugs (an overflowing counter, etc) are not predictable and this is where long-term enterprise usage data could be helpful as drives that are always-on for years are more likely to trigger those bugs than casual desktop usage.

Not my experience lately with Seagate Nytro Enterprise SSD's, had a few of them fail completely within the first few months of use. No warning just disappeared and no longer recognized on the bus.

Would love to see failure rates on SSD brands.

Backblaze mostly just stores data. The major advantage of SSDs is in their radically higher IOPS, but that doesn't matter for data at rest. SSDs also have higher maximum read/write speeds, but I wonder if actually the network connection of the storage pods is the bottleneck here.

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