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Comment by hatware | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

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According to Backblaze's calculator[0], it would cost $4,800/yr to store 80TB on Backblaze B2 and you're storing it for $60/yr. Cases like these are why unlimited storage plans don't make sense...

Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine?

0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

1 - https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665478-Why-d...

It makes more sense if you see it as lead generation, like the free plans for stuff like Slack or Notion. Some of those people will pick B2 or their group management platform if they do a startup and do well enough. They probably spend less on data hoarders than similar-size companies spend on free plans.

If you mount your NAS using iSCSI it will be considered local drive and be available for backup by Backblaze.

Or just buy an 8 TB external, hook it up to your Backblaze-enabled PC and back up your NAS to the external with rsync. And the additional benefit is that you've also implemented 3-2-1 doing so.

Are we sure that the proprietary desktop clients don't use convergent encryption (allowing for deduplication), especially for media files?

It's pretty difficult to build up 80TB of stuff that's not original data.

Wat? The easiest way to build up a large collection of files, especially one that is only worth it to back up if you can do so inexpensively, is downloading movies. I would guess this describes most people who store lots of data.

Also, the lesser number of people storing large amounts of original data (eg videographers) probably create enough community goodwill to make up for the cost.

Windows Storage Spaces are handled by Backaze. Granted I am only doing that with 2TB, which is a drop in the bucket these days.

It makes perfect sense because just like every other cloud company, they hook you pre-IPO. Post IPO or buyout, with lots of customers dependent upon them, they can raise their prices to a bit above market price because their customers will resist moving.

Think about it: if you have a backups stored with them via their proprietary backup client, you have to stick with them or lose all your backup revisions; there's no way to move revision history.

That's why they charged below their own rates, they knew people would be trapped.

Backblaze backup plan pricing is about to skyrocket.

I think Backblaze only stores 30 days of revisions anyways, so to migrate you only have to maintain two backup service subscriptions for a month. And you might want to do that anyways since if you have a lot of data, it might be weeks before you get all of your backups on the second service.

They now have options to store 1 year or indefinitely for an extra charge.

Network drive or any kind of NTFS reparse point such as a symlink (I suppose because that’d be a way around the no network drive rule). An unintended consequence of which is that it doesn’t back up iCloud or one drive files, which use reparse points to do the download on demand stuff. So instead of happily paying $60/year to back up single digit gigabytes, I pay more like ~$20/year to store blobs from a different backup client.

An opinion that may be contrary to some of the other replies here. Don’t feel bad about it. There is a commercial (and capitalistic) contract between Backblaze and you where it provides a service for a payment. Both ends are keeping up the deal. If Backblaze deems your usage as “abuse” (many companies use unpublished soft and hard limits for making such decisions), it will let you know and give you options. Your main concern should be having some sort of alternative if/when Backblaze tells you that your contract with it cannot be supported any longer or if Backblaze has such poor business sense that it has a lot of customers like you and goes bust (the latter is unlikely).

Also consider that many other users may be using far less than what $60 could buy for Backblaze.

Even if Backblaze is suffering a huge loss on account of your usage, the fact that you commented here about it and indicated that there haven’t been any repercussions is a marketing message for the company treating paying customers in a decent way.

I’m sure people on r/datahoarders (Reddit) would already know of use cases like yours or may be thrilled to know of it.

Brian from Backblaze posted a graph for 2018 showing how much data customers were backing up. More than 50% of customers were backing up less than 300GB. They're paying $6/mo for backups that would cost only $1.50/mo on B2. The graph did show one customer backing up over 400TB, which I would consider abusive, but as long as it's just one / a few customers doing crazy shit like this, it's not worth changing their unlimited backup offer to an unlimited* offer, and having fine print saying there actually are limits.

If it were me, I'd continue offering the $6/mo unlimited plan, throttle upload bandwidth for personal backups larger than a TB, and offer a high-performance option for $6/mo/TB with no throttle that also supports Linux, network drives, and anything else you want to backup. That's still a 20% premium over B2, and they have control over the client behavior which is also an advantage.

They made 27M gross profit in 2020 - You'll see how much value your revenue created shortly here :)

edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D

How does deduplication work on encrypted files though? I thought they advertise their personal backup plan to be fully encrypted - this would mean that backblaze shouldn't be able to access / identify the data...

It doesn’t.

But, if it’s a key generated at their end, they could dedupe the original data. S3 bucket encryption been an example.

Source: I work in deduplication for a well known company.

Not sure how the keys are generated (I'm not a backblaze user) but since one apparently has to use their software for backup jobs there might be chance that they also store the keys on their servers for this exact purpose...

This would definitely limit the inconvenience caused by personal users with huge amounts of data - like op with his 80 TB

Backblaze has options to supply your own key, but it's an optional feature. I'm gonna guess that over 90% of Backblaze users do not supply their own keys.

It would be very easy to test this by backing up a new Windows machine and monitoring outgoing network transfers. If you can backup an entire newly-installed Windows machine and don't see any significant transfers, it is being deduped.

People ask about numbers like this all the time on the subreddit, and their people always say it's allowed. The main point they bring up is B2 is better suited for large amounts of data.

For example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/g26lgt/max_capac...

https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/arnlyr/10tb_on_b...

They said somewhere it's also a marketing investment. If they have people saying "Yeah I backed up a TON of data and it's really unlimited" then more people feel comfortable and become paying customers.

I can't find the link.

p.s. "Right now we have computer-wide deduplication, but not farm-wide or account-wide!" 4 year ago http://disq.us/p/1q3efbb

I'd feel deeply uncomfortable backing up 80tb of data to a $60/year plan, tbh.

It's probably not very important 80 tb.

It isn't, and the super important stuff is backed up a lot more times, a lot more ways.

What you should be more uncomfortable with is the fact that there's basically no way to exfiltrate that data in any cost-effective, practical manner and there's zero recourse if a backup storage company goes "oops" and loses all your data or one day decides to just close up shop.

I don't think backblaze has a chance at losing data, but I really use it as the last resort "oh shit" place. If I lose a drive I'll pay a bit of a premium for whatever multiple of 8TB needs to be sent my way, I'm going to be replacing a $2-300 drive anyways.

Weird scenario where you have 80TB of data, but a tight budget to back it up. I guess it is some kind of hobby thing.

What hobby has 80TB of data?

Video editor keeping raw footage around? Or if they're on hn, maybe they're a data scientist who loves big datasets and cannot lie.

Porn?

Video editing

I haven’t looked at their numbers at all but Amazon was also famously unprofitable for like the first 10 years even after ipo, sometimes it’s just accounting games.

Amazon has also occasionally paused their rapid expansion for one quarter, just to prove that they can be profitable when they want to. Then, they continue spending all the money that comes in and more, to expand again. If you think the money is well-spent (big if), then being unprofitable might just mean you are spending now to be more profitable later because you can.

The main issue is that if you haven't tried to be profitable, how do you know for sure you're spending the money wisely?

How did you ever think backing up 80TB for $60 a year was good for the company? You didn't need financial filings to know it wasn't.

LOL. So S3 would charge $22k and you are paying them $60. Yeah, I am impressed that they let you steal the money. That is bad and you should feel bad. Just buying the drives to store that much is $1500.

If something is being sold at a loss, why should the purchaser feel bad about it? Some 'personal unlimited' type plan is allowing this behavior and if the company is concerned with it they can change or terminate their product.

What if the whole point of the personal plan is "hopefully they can be encouraged to spend +$x with us"?

So for fun I decided to see how cheap you could actually do this in a reliable way. Cheapest gb/$ for a good widely available drive is a 6tb refurb enterprise drive around $110. For this many drives I'd want raid 6 (especially refurbs), so you're looking at $1650 pre tax.

As a public company there's no chance backblaze will let this dude keep ripping them off.

As per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html they are not using enterprise drives and 15 drives per RAID6.

As per https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv... it costs them $0.036/GB.

So 8TB space costs them 294,91$. Well they have other costs too. But if they had him as a customer for 5+ years, they can start profiting :) Actually more years, because electricity, traffic, rent, salaries, etc...

let’s hope there is no egress!

That means that every time I buy something and there's a profit marging someone is stealing from me.

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