First time hearing about backblaze
The pricing looks too good to be true. What’s the catch?
The pricing looks too good to be true. What’s the catch?
1. They will delete all backups of your external hard drive if you do not plug them in and fully sync them for at least ~12 hours every 30 days. You can pay an extra fee each month to have your external drives stored longer to mitigate this problem [1]. The fee is per GB so it does materially change the Backblaze pricing if you have a lot of external data.
2. Their client is extremely extremely slow, even with performance settings set to their recommendations it just obliterates CPU (irrespective of the size of the actual changeset being backed up). I've always been able to feel my computers slow way down when the Backblaze client spins up. [This issue may be resolved on Apple Silicon, but it's been a nuisance on every Intel Mac I've ever had.]
There are some other weird quirks in their macOS client, like you can set your backup schedule to "Once Per Day" overnight and it will still, multiple times per day, just start running unexpectedly and then you have to deal with the slowness or hit "Pause Backup". Somehow this happens 2–3 times every single day. I've tweaked the settings, reinstalled the client, and all of the things, but this issue has persisted for 5+ years on every machine I've used their software on. Super annoying.
Sidebar: They have a native mobile app but it is really really bad. Slow, clunky, somehow always getting logged out. The mobile client sucks so bad that I usually just wait until I'm at my desktop to do a restore.
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-7-0-version-history....
Some would say there is a third. Decryption during restore is handled on the server, not on the client. They plan to support doing all encryption/decryption client side, but if that is something you need now Backblaze's client backup service may not be the right choice.
Here's a comment with more details and references [1].
Most users don’t use much in terms of HD space for their backups so they can absorb the extra cost for people who back up large amounts and since they are using their own lean-focused servers with consumer drives their cost per TB is much lower than a company backed by S3.
They are also the company that puts out drive stats every quarter.
And they open-source the hardware for their rack-mount “pods”.
They also added another revenue stream: B2. It’s an S3-compatible storage service with a decent profit margin that still manages to be 1/4 the cost of S3.
TL;DR: They have a solid business model built around providing that low price.