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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

My problem: I just want to back up 5 terabytes.

It's on an external SSD, used for photos. Backblaze has forgotten how to count terabytes at all, preferring to play games about how I need to have it attached and for how long, so people don't play games with their "unlimited" offering. "Did you plug in the external drive to a computer, and leave the computer on for 24 hours without it going to sleep, and reattach the drive regularly every 30 days? I'm sorry, it looks like we'll be erasing your backup. You can make another one and it will take several days to upload despite your very fast connection."

I don't want to play these games either way, I just want to back up 5 terabytes. I don't even necessarily need an agent. You offer a similar pricing scheme to Backblaze ($N/mo/computer). Does your service support my use case, or should I keep looking?

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First and foremost: don't use an SSD for cold storage: depending on the chips in your external drive, the bits can decay in as little as 6 months: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

Lots of copies keeps stuff safe.

If you don't mind the hassle, you can buy a couple HDDs (maybe a 2.5" and a 3.5" from different manufacturers), rsync to both of them, and hand one to a friend or family member that lives an hour or two away from you.

You may want to encrypt the drive, depending on contents and trust if the remote storage location.

Repeat quarterly/annually depending on your data change velocity/appetite for data loss/willingness to muck with it.

This should cost under $200, and the HDDs should last at least 5 years, so that amortizes to $40/year of 2 remote backups. No cloud offering can get close to that.

Backblaze also supports that pricing model with B2, which is a fixed cost per gigabyte stored per month. B2 also has an S3 compatible API, which lets you use any backup software you want.

This. I use B2 to backup my NAS and it costs me a couple dollars a month. 5TB will cost you $25/month.

The only way I know to go cheaper is Glacier “deep archive” storage which is roughly $1/TB, but a pain to manage, access time is measured in hours and it might cost 100x more in egress fees to download it all.

This matches my price research exactly, and my conclusions. Stay away from Glacier because the gotchas are not worth it. The moment you need any of your data your cost will skyrocket. Plus dealing with AWS unpredictable pricing is totally not worth it.

I b2 everything nowadays.

Not sure when you last looked into Glacier, but they did away with the "peak hourly request" fee which could be insane if you restored data too quickly. Pricing is much more reasonable now. You still have to wait hours to download your data, but Glacier deep archive is about $.001/GB per month for storage and about $0.29/GB to download (plus some transaction fees that aren't usually significant).

Depending on your access patterns, Wasabi (https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/) could be cheaper, since they charge more $5.99/TB, but don't charge for egress ($0.01/GB at B2) or API calls ("GetObject" at $0.004 per 10,000 at B2).

Note that you can only egress as much as you have stored in total per month with Wasabi. So if you've stored 10GB on Wasabi, you're only allowed to egress 10GB each month. So yes, really depends on your access patterns.

Thank you for pointing that out. I definitely hadn't internalized that point.

https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy

> If your use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress policy on a regular basis, we reserve the right to limit or suspend your service.

Sounds like it's a soft limit, so ok for backups. I normally pull about 100GB/month (just verifying files) on a 4TB backup set, so I don't usually hit this.

I do think this should be more clearly started in the pricing page, though.

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The other gotcha with Wasabi is you pay for a minimum of 90 days of storage for each file (so if you upload, then delete it immediately, it's billed for 3 months regardless). This, again, is fine for backups for me, but definitely has made some early months where I was figuring out my backup strategy a bit more expensive than it might otherwise have been.

Jottacloud offers unlimited (in reality after 5TB they start slowing your upload speed to them) with a cli, or rclone + restic support.

It's worth noting that for most uses the throttling doesn't matter up to about 16TB, where you hit a harsh inflection point.

And really, at that point, don't be a cheapskate, it's already super cheap (and reliable), so buy another account (or two, or three).

>We charge you $9 / month per computer. Each computer is allowed to backup up to 5 TB of data.

Seems to be exactly how much you want to backup.

You can make a snapshot of a Backblaze Personal and then store it in Backblaze B2. Works fine.

“5 terabytes is so little that I've forgotten how to count that low.”

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

yesthatisthejoke.heic

Well, pardon me for explaining the joke for people who might not know the reference.

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