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Comment by bryik | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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