Backblaze IPO
sec.gov
sec.gov
===
Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)-
This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (version 1.5.2.390) that NO LONGER WORKS (too old, needs updating).
You are paying for a service you are not using. You have two choices:
1) Upgrade your Mac OS X 10.5 computer called "rlmmbp" to the latest Backblaze. Just visit our homepage and download it and install right over the top of what you have already, here is a URL: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm (Will take less than 5 seconds, totally free, you are already paying!)
2) Do nothing -> in 7 more days I will delete that machine's backup and all of the files in the backup, and you will be paying for an unused license. (I can provide instructions on how to cancel your billing if you need them.)
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at the email address below:
- Brian Wilson CTO, Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com
I want to like Backblaze I love their harddrive report but this is not helping.
Since the software version no longer works, they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway. Keeping their old data on the live servers longer could be a liability.
(just a guess, but i imagine it's something along these lines)
The Backblaze software doesn't handle restores, it just backs things up. To restore, you download zip files of selected folders from the website.
I agree that a better solution would have been to remove the backup to a secondary system that the client could later access if needed.
Deleting in 7 days is unreasonable.
It wouldn't have been unreasonable to move away from SHA1 in that time period, for example. They may have needed the original files to get a SHA256 hash.
I think it must have been blocking some organizational objective. I can't think of any reason why they would bother to send that email, much less to go all the way to the CTO to send that email.
1) You are paying for a backup service.
2) We decided that the version of your software is too old, even though it backed-up data.
3) Since you are a valued customer, we will delete your data.
4) We are a HAPPY company! Have a great day!For example if you plug in an external harddrive and back it up with Backblaze, if you don't plug it in at least once every 30 days, then its cloud copy is deleted. So no, the intention of Backblaze is not to keep your offline machine from several years ago securely backed up.
That being said, you can pay for unlimited revisions which just stores your data in b2 and you pay per month on the extra storage. In that case then yes I would expect the data from years ago to still be present. But that's a recent addition, and not what the OP was using.
source: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...
Suppose my house catches on fire. I might not immediately get around to booting all of my computers again (in fact, it might be months until I have the same set of computers again), but I sure don't expect Backblaze to just start deleting files even while I'm paying them!
Importantly they had the _choice_ to delete this data. Note that the email seems to indicate that the sender will personally delete the backup in a week.
Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I responded to this email right away.
He responded to my questions in a lengthy email, which I'll paste again here because I had the foresight to ask in advance for future permission to post publicly.
===
Hi Robbie, thanks for getting back to me! It's hard getting through the email marketing overload. :-)
> Would you be amenable to holding off on deleting the backup > for two weeks (instead of one)
No worries, the most important part is that you are aware the computer is no longer actually performing fresh backups of new data. We can wait a while.
> would you mind if I published your email publicly?
Go ahead, and one of our marketing guys (Yev) already saw your tweet go by, it made everybody in our office laugh too. I'm off in my corner watching logs and emailing the random old customer, they didn't know I do this. :-)
One of the things I've been amazed at doing backup software is how many assumptions I made at the start that aren't true and the MODERN Backblaze software works around:
1) assumption: your disk on your laptop will reliably store bytes or fail. Wrong, it can throw random bits, undetected unless Backblaze keeps its own parallel check sums.
2) assumption: laptop RAM works reliably. Wrong, I think there is a reason servers run ECC RAM, and I'm confused why many laptops choose not to. I guess saving $5 is more important than data Integrity?
3) assumption: the HTTP posts either work or fail. Wrong: WAY MORE OFTEN than the file system are undetected silent data corruption. Solution: client end to end SHA hashes.
4) assumption: customers are sane and won't "edit" the Backblaze internal data structures sitting on the customer's laptop. Nope! If customers are computer beginners they tend to behave nicely, and the most advanced customers are very careful, but there is this crazy middle ground who know enough to be dangerous to themselves. :-)
I really really think that the most modern version of Backblaze (2.3.1 and later) is quite stable and might run flawlessly for a decade on a computer, but some of those early versions like anything starting with a 1.0 or 1.5 scare me because there are too many assumptions in them, not paranoid enough. Yes, the old versions WILL WORK for 99 percent of customers, but at our customer numbers that means every day we have to explain why a restore failed to some poor guy who chose to edit his Backblaze data structures corrupting his own backup and we didn't detect it soon enough.
Our most recent client versions are deeply, profoundly paranoid software that basically assumes your laptop is right smack dab in the middle of melting down, throwing disk and RAM errors as an insane laptop owner not only ignores the warning signs of impending data Armageddon, but fights with Backblaze trying to defeat it from backing up because the customer is worried Backblaze is "wasting his bandwidth". I feel good about this, it's like my whole career was training up to write this incredibly important piece of software.
-- Brian Wilson. CTO Backblaze brianw@backblaze.com
I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer.
The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it.
-- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com
e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_...
It seems that they may be changing their tune, at least as of a few months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m3xynu/backblaze...
The current limit is 50 characters. There are reasons we don't let it get super long like 2,000 characters but we could easily double or triple the maximum length it if it was requested. Is there a number of characters you have in mind? I found a chart here: https://i.imgur.com/trR2u8g.jpg that says a randomly generated 17 character password would take 93 trillion years to crack. The chart doesn't even go up to 50 characters. Backblaze also supports 2-factor authentication via SMS or Google Authenticator codes which personally I would highly recommend to customers also.
> who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using
Backblaze has two product lines: "Backblaze Backup" where we wrote the app that encrypts data on your laptop before uploading into our storage cloud, and "Backblaze B2" where you use any third party tool (or write your own) so the encryption in that case is all under your control. You can see a list of 3rd party tools here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html (make sure you scroll down). There are little pictures of penguins by the software that supports Linux, little pictures of an apple for software that support Macintosh, and a little Window icon for the software that support Windows.
For "Backblaze Backup", we use a well known design where we use symmetric AES-128 to encrypt the file, but each file is encrypted with a different AES-128 key, and that key and an Initialization Vector (IV) is then encrypted by a 2048 bit RSA public/private key. You can read about the encryption flow we use in this blog post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-make-strong-encryption...
>The current limit is 50 characters. There are reasons we don't let it get super long like 2,000 characters but we could easily double or triple the maximum length it if it was requested. Is there a number of characters you have in mind? I found a chart here: https://i.imgur.com/trR2u8g.jpg that says a randomly generated 17 character password would take 93 trillion years to crack.
Usually the reason people want longer "password" options is because they're using a diceware style pass phrase of 4-6 randomly generated words. It's not so much about ultimate security as many people having trouble memorizing decent fully random passwords. Key stretching and multifactor helps further of course. Longest normal English words are something like 21 characters before getting into niche science terms, so very conservatively 160 characters is probably going to fit even an extremely conservative edge case passphrase. That'd be 8x of some of the very longest words (unlikely to be randomly chosen) and match a 128-bit key which is plenty [0].
>* Backblaze also supports 2-factor authentication via SMS or Google Authenticator codes which personally I would highly recommend to customers also.*
I hope you'll consider adding (via Webauthn online or OS or other toolkits to the application) standalone hardware token support (like Yubikeys or Nitrokeys). Those are enormously more secure, convenient, and also have the bonus of eliminating another set of 3rd party dependencies. If you looked at those in the past and skipped them due to lack of device support worth looking again, every major platform should have coverage at this point.
----
0: Also, rather then thinking in terms of "years to crack" which inherently depends on the processor power thrown at it, might be better off considering in terms of combinations (or entropy). A standard symmetric key at this point is 256 bits, which means 2^256 combinations, but with stretching 128 bits is probably a very very safe seed for the password component. So that could be a "password" of [01] 128 characters long. That'd be roughly equivalent to [0-9] 38 characters long, or alphanumeric cased (26*2+10=62) 22 characters long. Current Oxford English dictionary edition I think has around 170000 words. If we figure a diceware program throws out ultra short, ultra long, and ultra weird words for convenience (whole point is something people can remember) so maybe it's cut down to the 70000 most common words >3 characters, that'd take 8. At a more typical 4-6 words, equivalent to maybe a 17 character cased alphanumeric password.
Gotcha. I'll file a Jira ticket to see if we can easily and quickly raise it to 200 characters (round number). I think we can handle that easily and safely.
> standalone hardware token support (like Yubikeys or Nitrokeys).
I'll run the idea by a few groups and see what people say. For feature requests NOT related to security, traditionally it's kind of a customer voting system. If enough customers want a certain feature it sorts to the top of the priority list and gets done sooner.
For security things it is obviously different, like if a big exploit like Heartbleed is released in the world we drop everything else and focus on that.
This is sort of somewhere in the middle, it's security related so it gets some additional boost up the priority list for that, but it's also a security feature not all customers would choose to use, so it is still affected by whether our sales and support teams are hearing requests for it.
Thanks so much for the reply, and yeah that's done-forever territory. Even "just" tripling to 150 as you earlier suggested would almost certainly be plenty, into pathologic edge cases.
>I'll run the idea by a few groups and see what people say. For feature requests NOT related to security, traditionally it's kind of a customer voting system. If enough customers want a certain feature it sorts to the top of the priority list and gets done sooner.
>For security things it is obviously different, like if a big exploit like Heartbleed is released in the world we drop everything else and focus on that.
Sensible way to do it. And yeah I agree this is kind of a hybrid of both. It's not a flaw per se, but it's more than a feature enhancement as there are genuine security implications. If you haven't looked into it, there have been cases of SMS hijacking for example, you can find plenty of discussions on HN alone with a quick "sms hijack" search. It's better than nothing but SMS infra just is fundamentally not very secure. One time tokens with a seed are better, but less convenient or secure then a blackbox that can enforce operator presence requirements or at least completely sequester keys.
Even a couple of years ago it would have been more annoying to integrate but the standards are progressing well enough now that it's probably worth another look. Adoption of hardware keys in business also finally seems to be hitting critical mass, though if we're in an S-curve at last this time around it's well before the steep slope.
Anyway, thanks again and best of luck with everything! As it happens plan to link up a new TrueNAS installation with B2 starting tonight :).
You can't have it both ways, demanding privacy and respect from software publishers then crying when the software doesn't serve your use case exactly and make assumptions about your intentions.
I wonder whether it’s their marketing and PR spin/strategy. Apple’s I’d definitely think so.
And no I don’t hate the companies itself. I am a paying b2 customer and I am satisfied with that service and I’m an iPhone mini user I (kinda) like the phone at that size and price; but moving away from these will be just one or a half medium to major fuckup away.
I have rarely read any fandom about Backblaze. There may be just a few mentions whenever there is a topic of backup or S3 alternative.
But I remember vividly there were at least a few hundred if not thousands of hateful comments on HN when they swear to god they will never use them again because of a mistake they made with Facebook analytics. Anyone who defended Backblaze at the time for its possible engineering mistakes were borderline being attacked. I dont know if there is any Stockholm syndrome on Backblaze but I definitely see Facebookphobia on HN and on Twitter.
You’ve never met people who use iPhone or a Mac? What planet are you from?
Backblaze + Dropbox have saved me multiple times.
Love his web page on dutch bikes in Amsterdam. Inspired me to get a real dutch bike and put 30k miles on it! https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/
Ha! That's my half second of viral fame right there.
You have no idea how blindly I stumbled into making that webpage. I haven't ridden bicycles more than a handful of times since college, and something possessed me to start taking photo after photo of bicycles without much thought. I was just travelling home from Europe to the USA with a short layover in Amsterdam when I took them. When I got home I stared at this unorganized pile of photos of bicycles and almost deleted them. I honestly thought nobody would ever, in a million years, care about a webpage about bicycles. I blasted that web page out in one continuous stream of tongue in cheek caffeine fueled frenzy, threw it up live, and went to bed.
About 3 or 4 months later my website couldn't serve enough pages to keep up with the load. I called my ISP and they said, "looks legit", I said "not possible, my website is at the ass end of the internet, nobody ever goes there". I bought an analytics package from them just to prove them wrong. All the traffic was to one web page: "Amsterdam Bicycles". A page about bicycles. (sigh)
Totally by accident, without intending to or knowing what I was doing, I stumbled upon several groups of people that are just PASSIONATE about bicycles. First of all, unknown to me there are people that are really, really into bicycles. They have mailing lists, they have websites. Who would have known?
But the group that just floored me was the Dutch people themselves. They are beyond passionate about bicycles, and there is a rich and amazing history behind it. For example, in World War 2 the Germans confiscated all the Dutch bicycles, and there is literally still a saying (in Dutch) that loosely translates to "I want my bicycle back" as an inside joke about still being resentful about this affront. And overlay that with the Dutch actually seem to have a great sense of humor and sense of self, and don't mind it if somebody pokes a little fun at them and they laugh right along. I wasn't disrespectful and mostly just expressed confusion over the situation which was completely honest at the time. So the city of Amsterdam sent me a T-shirt, a bicycle bell, and a bicycle light, and clippings from local newspapers about my silly web page. They were just so over the top great about it.
And the best part was the people from the photos reached out to me, like the woman pedaling here: https://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pp9b_amsterdam_b... contacted me. In the caption for that photo I asked "Why is the guy riding, and the woman pedaling?" The answer is this: the owner of the bicycle always pedals. OF COURSE I offered to take the photo down if she wanted and she said, "Are you kidding, I love it!"
Well, I'd rather be lucky than good.
Also wouldn't the honest thing to do be to stop billing, or refund for, the unused license? "I'll delete all your data and keep charging you" seems not great.
I liked Backblaze and paid well in advance. At the time of this issue, something like a year's credit left on my account. I migrated one Macbook Pro to another (the old one had a hardware issue) and followed Backblaze's documentation to ensure the migrated computer was still backing up, taking over the previous backup.
Cue my surprise a couple of months later when I get an email saying my account is unpaid and data will be deleted. After months (literally) of email with Support it turns out the Backblaze documentation was incorrect, and the steps to ensure the migrated computer took over the old backup also created a new, empty backup before taking over the old one (this was part of installing the software.) That backup was never used - it was created as part of installation unknown to me. But the unused, empty backup showed up in the account as unpaid. Despite a year's credit on my account, Backblaze's response was that deleting data for all other backups on the account was their best action.
I couldn't get Support to fix this. I ended up emailing Brian. He forwarded it on to someone who also didn't fix it. It's a remarkably simple problem (delete the unused backup, verify the account status is ok) but once again, Support seemed inactive.
I got desperately tired of emails that had no effect. I'm now buying a local NAS and plan to back it up via rsync.net. I wish them good luck with the IPO, but if you're a decision-maker looking for a backup solution, you have to question if you want to trust a company who's unable or unwilling to fix a straightforward issue, or if you want to trust a backup company whose default response seems to be that they'll delete your data. I don't.
Backblaze did look into farming Chia at some point[1], don't know if they've done similar experiments with Filecoin, but it definitely seems like there is a profound disconnect between these two worlds (which could be the result of some other factor, like the USD value of Bitcoin).
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-...
This is actually analogous to an expense. That $21 million per day is not revenue that is flowing to the shareholders (or in this case, the Filecoin holders), but rather new shares that are being printed and distributed to the people offering storage to the network. Filecoin's annual expenses to maintain that 13 EiB are roughly $7.5 billion per year, and those expenses manifest as inflation of the total coin supply.
> Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now).
They can't because Filecoin mining requires pairing storage with massive GPUs and servers that have 128 GB of RAM. To move all of their storage over to Filecoin mining, Backblaze would have to make a massive infrastructure investment that is otherwise completely out of the scope of what their business does (as none of their existing products leverage such hefty compute).
The cryptographic system that enables people to prove storage is called 'Proof of spacetime'; which sounds cringey, but it's pretty clever (begins at page 10): https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
Note that if you went to Backblaze and wanted to store 2 EB, it's unlikely they'll be able to serve you immediately (they probably can't get enough HDDs from their channels that quickly). However, you CAN store 2 EB on Filecoin the same way you can auto-scale on AWS.
I wonder when (if) it will stop?
I also wonder if crypto valuations are a reflection of truly "free market" economics. Where there is little-to-no barrier to entry as a creator or an investor, and there is complete impossibility of counterfeiting assets.
As a storage service you don't know what you're storing, generally. Maybe you're storing proof of extrajudicial assassinations, or hilarious Winnie the Pooh memes, just to name two things that can get a person locked up forever.
At this point it's all equal, neither Backblaze nor Filecoin has any idea about it.
But if The Government discovers you're storing this stuff, suddenly you have a big problem. They will "stop at nothing" to make you give them all the metadata and delete the goods.
If you're Backblaze and you're on NASDAQ and you have a relationship with regulators, etc. etc., you can throw up your hands and do whatever they tell you. You'll be fine.
If you're a decentralized crypto-storage conglomerate, you probably can't actually do anything. At which point, The Government's best hand may be to declare everything you do illegal and everybody doing it a terrorist. And then all your miners/storers/whatever flee (or are captured) and the system shuts down, at least anywhere The Government can reach.
Thus it seems like Filecoin has a built-in risk to its longevity that is completely separate from its financials, whereas Backblaze really just has to make more than it spends.
https://file.app/ says it's 0.0000394/GiB/year
So for 4TiB HDD used for 4 years: 0.0000394 * 4000 * 4 = USD 0.6. Wut? I guess I'm missing something. :)
If I’m a blackblaze customer, how likely am I to switch to filecoin. Is that even an option?
I couldn't care less about any company doing ICOs or anything else crypto related when it comes to backup services.
I want a backup company doing one thing: backups, safe, reliable, paid by me.
Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!
Another reason can be - investors are more interested in growth multipliers. X% YoY etc. As long as the potential for profitability exists on paper.
So in your example, and offer of 13% annual yield but with %400 commission is not a profitable one.
I'd be interested in what their strategy is and what they want to dominate. Corporate backups? The problem is corporate stuff is mostly in the cloud already. Home use it is handy but it is competing with Apple and Microsoft, and I use them mostly for the "Dropbox Reason" that they make it easiest to backup my drive. I never think about them and forget I am a customer. If they could backup iPhones simply I think that'd help but apple probably has that garden walled off.
We offload some of our Veeam backups to it.
I think they could compete with an S3 provider that’s better than Glacier or so. Especially if you can start presenting it to say…Linodes or something.
So the market isn't really irrational. You might argue our interest rates and monetary policies are irrational. I would agree with you.
It's also a bet that they will fail quick enough to make this the best opportunity for your money.
This doesn't happen until trades from the IPO "settle" t+2 (standard time for a trade from a buyer to a seller to be booked, and for a buyer to actually receive ownership of the shares. Ownership in this case meaning you can lend / margin them etc)
Options usually won't be listed for a week or so at the earlier until after the IPO, so whoever mentioned that below is wrong.
Varies deal to deal and if traditional listing / direct but that is the gist.
You cannot short post IPO until the stock becomes marginable.
What you can do, if have a lot of $$, is have one of the desks immediately at after the IPO write you a synthetic short position using an over the counter option.
Up, or down, there are always sales at hand in price movements. And, everyone has a price.
The common upward bump is partially because, why would you IPO if you didn't think there was long value? But also (I think) because in the first few days there isn't that much interest (volume of shares that are 1. tradeable and 2. which people want to let go of ~ IPO price), so the supply is constrained and the supply/demand value dynamic is biased up.
These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive.
If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free.
It's a fools errand to pursue this market and I assume the pivot to B2 was to build something more sustainable with a much higher price and usage ceiling.
Regardless, roughly 85% of the user-base are paying $7/mo for "unlimited backup".
I wish them good luck.
The product is really aimed at people are either vaguely aware or fully aware that they need a backup product but don't know where to turn and want something simple.
It's aimed at people like me who need to recommend a backup product to friends, family members, etc. that I can simply direct them to install (or install for them) and requires next to no configuration to get up and running. It's minimally configured and just runs reliably in the background, rarely to be thought of again. All for a small, consistent monthly fee.
It is not targeted at backup enthusiasts, and DEFINITELY not the DataHoarder crowd, though I know some in that community do find ways to somehow use the service.
To that end, BackBlaze has made strategic choices to increase the chances that they are unlikely to be an attractive option to the DataHoarder or backup enthusiast or 20TB homelab folks:
1) As I said, the client offers little configuration compared to more powerful and flexible backup options. When you backup using their backup client, it is all done under their storage and retrieval preferences and paradigm. (In my experience, these communities tend to want more ability to configure, not less)
2) They don't offer a Linux client
3) They don't allow you to backup network shares. Nor do they allow you to back up a drive and then disconnect it. (After BackBlaze can no longer see the file, it will only retain it for 30 days)
I would imagine that these strategic choices have worked, because from what I see, the BackBlaze Unlimited service does not seem to be all that popular within the DataHoarder or "I need to store 100TB for $5/mo. and retrieve it all every few weeks" communities.
And then the other 10,000 are data hoarders like me with Terabytes of data.
I used to be a Crashplan customer - tried them and Backblaze, and liked Crashplan more. They eventually pivoted to Business only.
I was at AWS Re:invent and came up to their booth and bemoaned the loss of a great service. They said "How much data were you backing up?" I told them. They said "yeah, we lose a ton of money on every user like you."
Fair enough!
Such an interesting statement. It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it. Like ISPs with their "unlimited" plans, they market that stuff and then they get mad if you actually saturate their link 24/7.
I actually emailed backblaze about this years ago. I asked them if they were really okay with me just dumping 10-20 terabytes of encrypted data that can't be deduplicated on their servers for such a low monthly price. I actually got a reply saying there was no problem.
> Thanks for writing in! Our system is truly unlimited.
> You can backup move than 15TB of data if you have that amount without hitting a cap or any extra fees.
> The business product just adds options for multiple backups and users.
Really surprising... I almost subscribed to their service on the spot. I gave up because transfering 20 TB over the internet is insane: it would take days to restore a backup. Also, they had no Linux software.
I didn't sense that they were bitter about it. But in both cases I do have some sympathy for the business.
There is "unlimited" in the sense of what a regular average p50 user would consider reasonable ("every photo i've ever taken with my cellphone of my grandchild")
Then there is "unlimited" for a professional p99 user("Every RAW file of every photo i've ever taken as a professional photographer")
And then there is "unlimited" for a data hoarder p99.99 user ("Every movie i've ever torrented in 4k, plus multiple seasons of every TV show ever made")
As a business you design your model to attract to the p50 customer so that Grandma doesn't have to worry about deleting photos, taking things too far, and losing something important. Unlimited is powerful here. The hope is that the p99 use case gets offset by the person who's paying for the service but barely using it.
The p99.99 user? They're just a pain in the butt. You can't chase them away without also chasing away grandma (You can't say "Data cap of 1TB" - people have no idea how much data anything uses).
So of course you tolerate them. But ultimately? They're the reason you go out of business. They're the reason Crashplan switched to B2B, and why Backblaze isn't making any money. Can't feel good.
That would still allow some pretty heavy users, but it would stop the people trying to dump hundreds of terabytes onto the service.
They sell "unlimited". That's what their marketing always promises. Nowhere does it say "unlimited, but only if you're a normal everyday 50th percentile person". They always say it's "unlimited".
So they should absolutely be obligated to keep their promise and deliver unlimited service to even the 99.9999th percentile users. That's what they sold consumers, that's what consumers should get.
Well, yes, it's like a all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that nonetheless isn't going to let you bring in a giant cooler and fill it up to take home.
Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. They can't just lie to their consumers, cash in and then pull the rug from under them later because they violated their assumptions about likely usage patterns. They sold the consumers unlimited usage and assumed they would not use it. Some crazy person actually decided to use the service to the fullest possible extent? They must honor their promises.
No, not everybody does, which is why they have to have signs saying you can't take food home.
Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing.
"Unlimited backup (of data stored on the internal storage of a single personal-use laptop or desktop running Windows or MacOS X)" is not fundamentally different from "Bottomless coffee (consumed by one person only in a single visit)" or "A year's supply of fuel (really a $3000 balance fuel card)". There's a "reasonable person" standard here, and the man on the Clapham Omnibus knows that these sorts of offers have fine print which it behoves you to read.
I don't understand how it's possible to misunderstand all-you-can-eat buffets. The words correctly describe the service: you can eat there until you're literally full. There is no "unlimited" anywhere. Those people must be acting in bad faith.
> There's a "reasonable person" standard here
It's perfectly reasonable to assume unlimited really means unlimited and not some industry-specific, lawyer version of the word.
> these sorts of offers have fine print which it behoves you to read
The presence of these hidden "fine prints" is proof of deceptive advertising. This is why marketing cannot be trusted and why consumer protection laws really ought to put an end to these industry practices.
Nobody really reads or understands these terms. It's not like people will hire lawyers to analyze the legalese for them. This is not a deal between equal parties, consumers are severely disadvantaged. Just force them to deliver what they promised. They'll stop promsing soon enough.
No-one is being "severely disadvantaged". The unsophisticated users backing up their regular PCs are getting exactly what they paid for - a backup of their PC without having to even know what a terabyte is - and the /r/datahoarder types with a rack of JBODs full of every TV series ever made knew full well that they weren't going to get away with backing that up on a $7/month consumer single PC plan. In the event that one among the latter really was that credulous, sure, give 'em their 7 bucks back and now they're square.
If you look at BackBlaze's histogram, 1/3 of the users are under 100GB and 2/3 are under 500GB. BackBlaze makes a nice profit on those users. But let's say I have just one moderately large drive that's mostly full. Looking at the sales at Best Buy right now, let's say that's a 14TB drive. BackBlaze would lose a ton of money on that, even though it's really hard to argue it's unreasonable in any way, completely unlike a cooler at a buffet.
They now have a service that ships your data to you on a hard disk, and the cost is refunded when you return the disk.
Most people's precious data isn't actually that large. Unless you're backing up large amounts of media (photographer, movie collector, whatever) it's not easy to fill even 1TB.
I’d rather want something that charges more and doesn’t offer that gimmicky unlimited storage and gives me unlimited versioning and external media and doesn’t delete anything as long as I’m paying and am within my storage limit. That simple.
That’s why I preferred CrashPlan which had a desktop app much less polished than Backblaze but they were a true backup service.
So Backblaze Personal Backup service is a bullshit wrapped in a sophisticated app. My aversion to them is on the same lines of of those VPN and cloud storage companies (pCloud, Koofr etc) offering lifetime plans.
And that’s an unsustainable rate!! I mean what else is there to be argued. Data hoarder crowd often use them.
Lifetime, unlimited are one word gimmicks which ought to be treated as red flags on giant billboards.
BackBlaze is pretty clear on what it offers: for $7 a month, you can backup your entire computer with 30 days of history. Nothing more nothing less*
Your post is like being angry at Ford that the F150 is a pickup and not a bicycle. It's true...but it isn't being marketed as such. You are just in the market for a different product.
* Well, if you dig deeper you can pay extra for unlimited data retention
And also Vorta (which uses borg) -> rsync, borgbase; Tarsnap -> Tarsnap's S3 (I guess).
Vorta so far has been really good and has lots of potential.
(Badly need a restic GUI here. May drop restic anytime - I am not comfortable having a personal backup setup without a GUI)
I mean does it have standard differential backup features ie dedup, diff, compress, e2e, snapshot etc?
I wish that were the case and I wish that all customers were like you.
However, I have been tracking - and discussing - these rates with this target market for longer than Backblaze has existed and this market segment is pretty ruthless. They expect google-quality infrastructure at $0-$5 per month and are constantly shopping providers.
We don't market to them at all anymore ... although, I personally can't resist posting in /r/datahoarder from time to time because I like the group ...
Most users:
1. Realize they should back up their stuff.
2. Hunt around for a backup solution provider. At this moment, they are probably very highly price sensitive.
3. Pick one and set it up.
4. Forget about forever, or until the house burns down.
You will never ever see or hear these people on forums and stuff like they because they don't give a crap about backups any more than the average tooth-owner spends time discussing dental hygiene on the Internet. It's just a problem to be solved and forgotten as soon as possible.
What has been on my radar is that my laptop has a small SSD, and in addition I have an external hard drive containing files that I want to back up but I rarely use. Backblaze used to require that I regularly plug in that hard drive and then keep it plugged in for a few hours. This was a total chore, and meant that I couldn’t just forget about my backups. I seriously considered switching backup providers because of that. Luckily Backblaze eventually introduced a slightly more expensive plan where I don’t have to do that. So at the moment I’m a satisfied customer, and I’m not actively looking for alternatives.
- One of those fickle users who bought all the extra credits he could at the original price.
They could double their prices tomorrow, and their customers (myself included) would likely complain loudly, but ultimately very few of them would actually cancel because there is no real alternative to switch to since every one of their former competitors have given up on this model and either introduced caps/usage-based pricing or pivoted to businesses.
I certainly would keep paying my subscription at double the price because I'm backing up more than enough data to justify the cost. In fact I currently also subscribe to Crashplan's "Business" backup product at $10/month in addition to Backblaze in order to get an extra level of redundancy in my backups. (Crashplan markets to businesses but there's not much stopping any individual from signing up and using it the last time I checked).
I think B2 is a leverage of their scale to offer something that is profitable per unit cost. At the end of the day they need to chase economy of scale. So it is a great addition.
My biggest concern is the cost of HDD not failing as fast as they have predicted, and that is part of the reason why they raised the price from $5 to $7. The recent announcement from WD only aims at 2.5x platter density increase by 2030 without using EAMR, suggest to me EAMR is expensive, and while HDD capacity will go up, unit cost wont go down as much. This is similar to NAND. We may be arrive at the end of the S curve in terms of storage cost reduction.
I don't think we are competitors.
I have publicly criticized flat-rate storage pricing for many years[1].
That being said, I wish them good luck and will watch with great interest.
[1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...
Although if you happen to be within the target audience for their business model (like I am) then it works pretty well, especially as a secondary off-site backup option. But yeah, if there's a threshold of, say, 2TB and > 5GB/day bandwidth that makes someone an unprofitable customer, then they should just set caps accordingly rather than claim unlimited.
I'd agree that customers can be fickle - especially technically inclined customers. It's actually very easy to switch backup systems.
I would have been very happy to keep paying.
- one of the salty people on Reddit who ended up building another NAS off site to make up for it.
To add a Linux plan, which could be lots of larger servers, I would add something like $7/TB/mo rounded up to the nearest TB. This is priced similarly to the flat-rate plan but also accommodates larger servers.
1) It has the same advantage of the unlimited plan that most customers will not be backing up a TB, increasing their margins
2) even if they do backup a TB, B2 is currently priced at $5/TB, so the Linux backup is higher margin
3) there will be an average unused space of 500GB per backup, even for customers backing up more than a TB, further increasing their margins
It's data hoarding of a different nature, like the millions of rented physical storage sheds full of stuff that should have been tossed a decade or more ago, but aren't because it's "cheap enough, for now" a decade ago, then inertia.
I ended up dropping them for Arq - $140 vs $60. No brainer.
At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial).
Amazon charges us something like $5,000/month, almost entirely due to PutObject calls. (I'm sure there are ways we could better architect this, but it is what it is).
If we moved this to Backblaze, we'd essentially only be charged for the storage, which is maybe 1TB at most. We're going to bombard the service with tens of millions of requests for like $5/month in storage costs.
How can this work for them?
[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...
~ 300 million 10-40MB jpegs, peanuts compared to what S3 was.
In my use case, it's probably more like 10,000 PUTs for the same amount.
Backblaze, if you're reading this, I don't think anyone will mind if you put in place some kind of surcharge for people like me. I haven't moved to the service, and it's almost because I feel _bad_, like I'm abusing your terms, or something.
It's almost hard to even present a project to switch:
"Why should we authorize this project?"
"Because it eliminates our $5,000/month AWS spend on the task"
"How does it eliminate it?"
"It's free on Backblaze."
"What's wrong with Backblaze that it's free?"
Still, even if they had some ridiculously high surcharge for excess PUTs, I think it would be understandable, and would encourage people like me to architect a different solution that doesn't involve tens of millions of PUTs.
I don't think I've seen a SaaS company with < $100 Million in ARR in the year it listed.
The raw data is worth gold, though.
https://www.netroadshow.com/custom/IPO/Backblaze/retail/road...
I applied for IPO shares from Robinhood. Robinhood is my play brokerage, but they do have the best IPO platform.
Apparently, Fidelity got my birthday wrong in their system from that last IPO and is now refusing to allow me access to their system until I fill out 5 pages of forms (which I can mail or fax in) or drive into a local office to sort things out.
Good times!
> We expect the public offering price to be between $15.00 and $17.00 per share.
I have never got it to backup my files ever.
Their settings dialog integrates with macOS preferences and freezes while it scans for files to backup without giving me any status update. It uploads so damn slowly it’s pretty useless. If I was to move/rename things around it would take weeks more to reupload. Every time I try to ignore some files so it’s actually useful, it blocks my system prefs again and takes forever to rescan.
I honestly don’t know how anyone uses it.
Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.
> I have never got it to backup my files ever.
Why are you signing up for a two-year plan twice if you can't get it to work? They offer a free trial, so it's not like they're forcing you to pay before figuring out if it works.
I also bet if they couldn't figure out the issue, a refund wouldn't have been out of the question.
> Carbon Copy Cloner on the other hand is excellent software. Entire backups of 4TB drive in less than <20mins. And excellent support.
That's not the same thing. That's a local backup. Of course a local backup will seem blazingly fast compared to a network backup.
It takes a few weeks to upload everything, and by that time the trial has expired.
This drive must be mostly empty, otherwise 4TB/(20*60) yields on the order of 3GBps. That's B as in Bytes.
Wait. What’s the other segment?
It depends how you're going to access your data/ compliance needs.
B2 per/TB storage is much cheaper than what R2 will be.
R2 will enable cross-region availability which can be necessary for many companies choosing to adopt.
It's my opinion that R2 targets more the likes of S3/ integrated storage providers rather than just being a "low cost" provider like Wasabi/Storj/B2/etc.
https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/
Maybe you're referring to the "Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content"?
https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/#28-limitation-on-serving-n...
Another real tech IPO once again.
Suffice to say I'm pretty happy with my portfolio with them today.
A 9 TByte backup costs Backblaze about $35/month to provide in raw storage costs (electricity, rent for where to store the drives, etc), and that doesn't include the extra money we need to employ "G&A" people (General and Administrative)
I'm not sure why it's quite that high, but 1/60th of a server is another $150 and 1/60th of keeping that server housed and powered is going to eat another chunk of that $7 monthly fee.
And then add another 20% to all the costs to account for the capacity spent on parity.
Don't ever feel bad for businesses that advertise and then you happen to use the product as intended.
I think of these free-pooling companies in a similar vien as insurance firms. Some customers are very profitable and some are not. But they did the ROI for marketing it as "Unlimited" which brings new customers (again some profitable and others not so much). There is probably a regression equation that models profitability of such a business.
I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?
Then Crashplan killed the consumer service, leaving the Small Business service for rather more money. Recently they announced that they'll be instituting restrictions on file types and deleted file retention.
I moved to IDrive for my endpoints because of the pricing being more competitive than any other option. Their Web UI isn't as good as Crashplan, the client UI is also pretty poor, it's more difficult to figure out what the client is actually doing, and I had times when it would get stuck on files for days/weeks on large backup sets. However, it's actively developed and they've fixed some issues in recent months. It's cheap enough that it's hard to complain.
For my Windows Servers, now I use Duplicacy, which can target a few different cloud storage providers. I tried Backblaze B2 first, which was a bit expensive for me in the end when I realized how large the backup set was- after a year it would have been cheaper to build a NAS and stick it at a friends house and mirror to it. Currently I'm using Google Drive as a storage target using a Gapps for business account, as the storage limits are currently "suggestions". Though I am aware that is something that could go away eventually as well. Hopefully by then I'll be out of graduate school and able to afford a less-makeshift storage target. That aside though, Duplicacy works pretty well if you're looking for something for larger backup sets that does a bit more than Rsync/Rclone (specifically deduplication) which can target both local and cloud backends, and has both command-line and graphical interfaces. The optional GUI for Duplicacy is pretty simple local web interface but it works.
The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy.
- snip -
The market for such talented personnel is particularly competitive in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is located. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do and can frequently offer such personnel substantially greater compensation than we can offer. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business would be harmed.
Is it even possible to get shares _before_ an IPO? I thought there were only private investments and shares(after an IPO). One wouldn't call private investments the same as "shares" would they? Even if so, then why is the same bank/financial institution that manages the IPO involved in making a private investment in a company? Wouldn't you need to contact the founders of the company as they are the owners until the IPO?
I thought the SEC filing shows X number of shares being brought to the IPO, which meant they would hit the market at open, but then it never is too simple ;-)
I always thought retail-facing brokers are just too small fishes to be involved.
Apple has a history of buying “feature” companies (the famous feedback Jobs gave to Houston on Dropbox).
Apple eventually built this itself for iOS and it doesn’t seem like MacOS has much priority these days.
It would’ve been interesting if DropBox would sell to Apple back in the days, what would’ve the OSs looked like today.
- drive you send arrives damaged
- drive you send gets lost in transit
- your friend hears about this great new offer and sends 100TB of drives expecting $7/m offer to stand and someone at Backblaze to build pods out of his random drives.
- etc etc
This is an interesting olive branch to class A shareholders, but is there a reasonable way for them to prevent class B holders from just extending the deadline by amending the articles?
Let's say you had your old laptop backed up and upgraded your hardware/freshly reinstalled your OS. Now your choices are: 1) Delete your old backup and continue with the new computers backup 2) Keep your old backup and don't backup your newly installed machine
And if you are restoring files, you are forced to download them as zip (which is created asynchronously - so good amount of wait time) -> no automatic restore of files to selected locations.
A lot of these weird constraints seem to be around keeping the egress and storage costs down which is fine but that makes them just another provider not in anyway the best.
Lot of people like them but that's probably only because they haven't actually restored any of their backups. Just mindlessly paying their monthly subscription fees.
B2 accounted for $14M in ARR as of June 2020, and $21.8M as of June of 2021.
That sector of the business could well outstrip the consumer side in a few quarters if growth continues.
In the case of Backblaze they've only raised $5.3m over three rounds so that's unlikely. There wouldn't be much VC cash to hack growth with after 14 years.
There are a number of sites that cater to social seed investing, and other early rounds, as well as sites specific to accredited investors. I started out on sites like Seedinvest, Fundersclub, Startengine, and a few others. There are other sites if you are writing really big checks, instead of little ones.
There are a few sites like Sharespost & Equitzen selling pre-IPO shares too, so you can express interest in a company and get some stock if someone doesn't want the very long lockup period prior to a liquidity event.
It is also possible to buy into a SPAC that has stated intentions to buy a pre-IPO company and bring it public.
also that formatting, damn.