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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

After Cloudflare's announcement this is likely a last act as people move away. Good luck if you invest but I can see them filing for bankruptcy in 2-5 years.

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I dont think every time a competitor launches it instantly eats all marketshare from the others. Backblaze seems to target different niches like small projects, also personal backup (cloudflare does not do this). Also cloudflare new storage seems like more "hot storage" cache-type service but backblaze seems like more "cold storage" and infrequent access. Also since backblaze is a member of bandwidth alliance the two might work well together and compliment instead of compete so much.

Backblaze makes 73% of their revenue from computer backups. I do not see how the Cloudflare announcement will eat into that.

I would agree that B2 is their high growth area, but I do not think Cloudflare directly opposes B2.

Yeah, I think it's more about CF hemming them in, curtailing growth opportunities. Especially since the line until recently had been "use Cloudflare and get free transit between CF and Backblaze B2!" Haha, so much for that.

I don't think they're targeting Backblaze, but their position as the foremost middleman of the Internet means they're going to hurt direct competitors and partners pretty much any time they launch a product, until they're out of partners that host "cloud services". Which is a position Cloudflare put themselves in entirely on purpose.

If the majority of their business is personal backups then the business is already in a decline. I've looked at them multiple times, and Google Drive and OneDrive are both much better deals.

Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.

It's a bit different to the original argument but there is the issue that people have more and more files created in those services and only existing within them (desktop Office tries its best to convince you to do this).

It's hard to convince people who go along with that "but you don't really have backups, you need to download everything locally and pay $5/month".

restic + rclone = Google Drive backup with snapshots and dedupe. Not sure if you are just unaware, or didn't take the time to look into anything else.

There's an infamous comment on the Dropbox launch that addresses this better than I can, but I can't find it. Suffice to say: yes, I'm aware there are solutions I can put together that are more work than I care to do to maybe save some portion of $65 a year. Putting those snapshots on Drive would tear through (expensive) space fast, so I'm not sure it's a savings. Backblaze provides incremental backup for my entire SSD. Even more if I ever fill that empty bay. I don't even pay for Drive since few things I do benefit from syncing, so this would probably cost more and be worse.

I actually got rid of backblaze a while back because I realised I had moved machines twice and didn't bother restoring files with it. I've had backblaze for years (maybe even a decade+?!)

Code is all on GitHub, all my docs and emails are in gsuite (and don't get backed up anyway by BB). The only thing that does get backed up is a load of cruft and junk I've accumulated which is actually nice to start over on tbh.

I imagine more and more people are like this. Designers who used to have to be meticulous at backing up their source files now all work in Figma, etc etc.

The major weakness now is if GH or Gsuite had a catastrophic error (or your account gets booted off for incorrect reasons). I actually think that is the more pressing backup need than local files for many.

I'm sure it depends on needs. I have gigabytes of raw photos, videos, renders, stems, asset packs I can't count on being available from the original source, etc. I never need to access it on other computers, so they're not synced to services that charge a premium for space for the value of syncing, but I can grab a file outside a synced folder from the Backblaze website or app in a pinch.

I was under the impression that their business was $70/year to backup your whole computer (all drives, completely managed). Their backup service grew 23% yoy, so I wouldn't call it in decline.

Can you go into why Google Drive is a better alternative? I can see 2 TB for $100/yr, but I don't think the products are exactly the same.

First, the $70/year backup is for personal use and Mac and PC only.. they do have limits, they just don't tell you what they are and they throttle even though they say they don't. The clients suck and are closed source. Also, the restore functionality is terrible.

At least with Google Drive, the 2TB plan you can store what you want and access it in the cloud like a regular file. It works with rclone and restic, so you can use it for regular backups as well and it is extremely fast. I can upload over 750GB per day in about 3 hours with Google Drive, but it would take over 3 days with Backblaze.

Just curious, are you currently or have you been a Backblaze customer?

Yes, I was until I switched to restic and saved a bunch of money. I still get unlimited storage with G Suite. You can also get 6TB of annual storage with Office 365 family plan for $80 at Costco.

Backblaze is $70/yr unlimited.

Did you save $-10?

That type of backup does not work on Linux or for network attached drives. I guess if you are willing to run Windows on your NAS then it technically works but it's a pretty ugly hack and the 'sync' will happily delete files that are accidentally deleted or corrupted.

I'm assuming they're using the other features that Office 365 offers.

No, not really.. I just got the family plan to have a 2nd restic backup in addition to my Google Drive, since it was the cheapest storage option.

How can you save a bunch of money when Backblaze is dirt cheap?

People are confusing backup and sync. Backblaze will run an incremental backup of 20TB and 20GB for the same price, but you have to have 20TB or 20GB of storage attached to the backed up computer. It won't let you access files not on your computer without awkward workarounds, but it also doesn't charge the huge premium sync services charge for the storage.

Im sorry but how does that work? If the purpose of online backup is for your data to be stored online, why would you need 20TB or 20GB (or any amount) of storage attached to the backed up computer? Backblaze, or any other online backup service stores everything on their storage, elsewhere, and that's exactly the point: that if your entire house burns to the ground with all your computers and external drives etc, you have a cloud copy of all their content in a secure, password protected external location, and you can then download them elsewhere from online. As for sync, most online backup service seem to offer at least a basic version by which your local data syncs with your externally backed up data so that they incrementally stay identical.

If I'm misreading your comment somehow, please correct me. Maybe I misunderstood something.

What they're trying to say is "Backblaze backs up an unlimited amount from one computer - but you can't back up more data than you have on one computer. So if you have 1234 GB in Backblaze, you must have 1234 GB of disk space"

This is in contrast to other cloud storage services which might (for example) allow you to save space on your phone by uploading your old photos to the cloud and deleting the local copies.

Yep. The nice thing about it is you just run it, log in, and it'll quietly keep an incremental copy of everything on any drive you tell it to back up without you having to think about it. You don't have to know what the heck an r-sink is, it Just Works (in the way most Just Works things do). The catch is they aren't going to back up a drive they haven't seen in 30 days, or 6 months if the licensed system is offline for more than that long.

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...

If I really need a long-term cold backup, it costs about half as much yearly (with a half terabyte SSD) to copy the whole thing over to a B2 bucket and get rid of the live backup. That's what I'd do if I were going to Mars.

Thanks for the clarification!

Backblaze does actually have caps, even though they don't publish them and they throttle even though they say they don't.

If they do, it's so high as to not matter for any reasonable use and quite a few unreasonable ones.

In 2018 they published a graph showing a user with a backup over 400TB. If they have space limits, they must be pretty high!

It sounds like there's no cap. Do you have a source to the contrary?

Are you referring to Cloudflare's R2 storage? If so, I'm not sure that's completely comparable as Backblaze has a huge focus on backup systems, not just cloud storage.

[Edit: didn't realize Backblaze has cloud storage, I still think of them as the cloud backup company.]

Backblaze offers "B2" storage, which is also API compatible with S3 (and cheaper, no ingress/egress, etc). I think their focus is more long term storage (slow, infrequent access but cheap per unit).

Backblaze B2 charges egress (at 1 cent/gb) with the exception of egress to bandwidth alliance members, B2 storage served via cloudflare is interesting because it means no egress charges, but unless you're just using it to serve normal webpages you're probably breaking cloudflares TOS.

I had a chat with Cloudflare about this, and you can use it for hosting downloadable files or really anything you want for personal or commercial. I had used it as the backend for my photo app with 10s of gigs of downloads per month (not a lot, but enough to prove it was free and CF was fine with it).

B2 definitely has egress charges, unless you are going to one of their partners.

B2 also has a 1GB/day free egress allowance, which is what HashBackup uses to keep remote backup space optimized at no cost (I'm the author).

To be honest, I'm a Cloudflare fan.

But I think the niche between them is totally different.

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