Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

My most important data is around 50 GB and I pay Backblaze B2 about 80 cents per month for a year of retention. I use restic, too.

Right. Why, is the name of the service an issue? In Backblaze B2 you basically pay per storage, which I thought is what you wanted but perhaps I misread you and you wanted pay per machine instead?

I actually prefer pay per storage because I think pay per machine (i.e. an infinite storage promise) is not a sustainable model and just leads to a bad surprise down the road, when the service becomes too popular -- perhaps a sudden large price increase, the service being shutdown or even bankruptcy/sale of the business.

Although this means I do have to be somewhat selective of what I backup, it's not a big effort for me. I basically just exclude some large unimportant media files, my OS/installed programs (no need to backup those) and downloaded files, which can also be redownloaded again whenever I want.

> If so, how much (in your currency) does it cost you to backup say 3TB with daily (x7), weekly (x4), monthly (x12) snapshots available for a year?

I currently have a total of 496 snapshots, all the way back to a year ago, corresponding to a total of about 240-260 GiB of compressed data each snapshot.

The number of snapshots is a bit misleading because many of them are of a separate folder which almost never changes.

Still, it's 1 year's worth of almost daily backups of about 250 GiB of data.

This month I paid exactly $2.00 USD plus $0.35 VAT (I'm not in the US but the bill comes in USD). I don't recall ever having paid more than that.

> Using their own calculator and assuming in a year you have a total of 10TB stored (3TB of "active" data and the rest point-in time) they estimate B2 to cost a whopping $1110AUD/yr.

restic doesn't actually care very much about what kind of backend storage you use, it's really extremely flexible. So for that kind of storage, you may also want to take a look at all the backends that are available in restic, including those available through rclone (IIRC?) as a mediator, although Backblaze B2 is usually among the cheapest, if not the cheapest.

In your case, I think I'd probably just look into renting a cheap server with lots of storage and just use restic in SSH mode.

You might have to look around a bit, as there are many, many options available, but most of them are priced very high. To get the cheap ones you need to find specific providers (e.g. like Hetzner for dedicated servers) that usually charge much lower prices than the competition.

The cloud/VM servers are usually much cheaper, although personally I prefer to pay more and get a dedicated server in a cheap provider like Hetzner or OVH's Kimsufi (but that's because I can afford it, of course). But the cloud/VM servers should work fine as well, and there are many cheap providers for those.

However, be aware that the servers that have the amounts of storage that you're looking for are sometimes named "seed boxes" or "backup" / "storage" servers rather than just cloud or dedicated servers, as the latter ones usually have SSDs/NVMe storage which, although faster, is smaller and/or more expensive per TB than HDDs.

Some providers have storage devices available over the local network which can be flexibly provisioned and this might be cheaper than getting servers with large HDDs, as usually you only pay for the amount you use (or the amount you reserve). This is sometimes called "block storage" or perhaps "object storage". That said, most of these are backed by SSDs so they can be really expensive.

I've never rented a server with such a large amount of storage, so unfortunately I can't recommend a specific server type off the top of my head. But Hetzner has some storage boxes you might want to have a look into:

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

The "DataHoarder" and "Seedboxes" subreddits might also be useful to find good options.