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Comment by sjml | Hacker News Reader

Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as I can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just straight storage? For me, a lot of the benefit of Backblaze comes from a (mostly) good client solution that handles the automated backup. The backup history upsell is also great for someone (like me) whose travel patterns often mean going months without reliable internet.

I know I could use some open source stuff to get similar functionality, but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would rolling my own crypto. Does Wasabi have some client solution that I'm missing?

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By coincidence I just spent several hours today comparing exactly these two services (Wasabi vs B2) and even though I am familiar with Backblaze and have used it before, I went with Wasabi. It's basically the same price, has more regions, a very simple interface, and rather than having to manage both hot and cold storage Wasabi is cheap enough to just throw everything into hot.

The only downside I found is that they limit free egress to 100% of your storage (so if you store 1tb, you get 1tb egress). In practice I don't think this will be an issue for my use case.

So I'm an example of a person who this morning had almost never heard of Wasabi, knows Backlaze well, and after an hour or two of research I have completely switched over.

Isn't B2 cheaper than Wasabi? B2 is $6/TB while Wasabi is $6.99/TB. Why would you have to manage hot and cold storage with B2?

Wasabi also treats every object as having a minimum 90-day storage period. So if you upload something and delete it, it's still considered "stored" for billing purposes for that 90-day minimum.

B2 also gives you 3x storage as free transfer compared to 1x for Wasabi.

I'm not saying you shouldn't go with Wasabi, but the reasoning you've articulated doesn't seem to track.

Additionally, Wasabi bills you for a minimum of 1TB of active storage, which is $6.99/month. For my modest backup needs it is way cheaper to use any service that bills per GB.

https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq

Wasabi also charges objects at a minimum 4KB of storage, which isn’t great if you have millions of files at 1-2KB.

Wasabi used to be the cheaper option when B2 didn't offer variable free egress. B2 was basically "cheaper S3" as it still charged $0.005/GB for egress, while Wasabi was free egress (I think their upper limit used to be >1x your storage, so maybe that changed, or I'm misremembering?).

If your storage was fairly consistent, not tiny, and you intended to pull it regularly, Wasabi would come out on top. B2's egress change probably shifted the scales to favor B2 for those cases.

>Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as I can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just straight storage?

That's addressed in the article:

>Since 2021, Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage segment revenue growth has outpaced its legacy Computer Backup segment. In Q4 2024, the company announced that its B2 Cloud Storage segment generated $17.1 million in revenue, surpassing its Computer Backup revenue of $16.7 million.

Even if Wasabi isn't a straight replacement for Backblaze's entire business, it's a replacement for its biggest and fastest growing segment.

how in the world do they only make $17.1 in revenue, everyone I know is on BackBlaze, even if they're only used by techy people I'm surprised they're not making $100m+/quarter.

They're cheap (the reason many people use them), and the number of people we know that use them is ridiculously outsized compared to the general population, because we know people in the tech sphere.

Anecdotally most people, even "techy people" don't do actual backups. At best, they have icloud/google backup turned on for their phone, and upload important files are on dropbox/onedrive.

I would've guessed their B2 business is much bigger than the personal backups side.

Maybe you know their entire customers base.

I know nobody who use them, so it all balances itself.

I mean, my B2 monthly bill is like 17 cents.

If they don’t have enterprises and people storing large amounts of data...

Turns out big enterprise was right in not adopting such a small player lol.

Appreciate the intro to Wasabi, happy to learn about others too while evaluating backblaze.

I used to be a customer of computer backup, but had issues with it and their support suggested I delete my backup and start over with a new account. I was flabbergasted. On macOS btw.

I ended up rolling my own solution with rclone and testing b2 and r3, going with b2 because of the price and speed.

Years ago I used Backblaze and it twice "lost" my entire backup with their support staff shrugging and suggesting I start it again. At that point I didn't have fibre so a full backup was weeks if not months. Needly to say I opted out of their service. I am not overly surprised that this is not a solved problem.

Yeah, it's clear it has bugs and doesn't work well. rclone to B2 works fine for me. And I tested with Cloudflare R2 and can switch to it if BB goes under.

R2 was slower than B2, in my tests. I think it's slightly more expensive, too, but not much IIRC.

You’re missing the point. Enterprise customers where they would presumably see the bulk of their profits is what they’re losing to wasabi. Commercial “unlimited backups” is not a wildly profitable business which is why basically every other competitor in the space either failed or intentionally exited the market segment.

Ah, got it; that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

> but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would rolling my own crypto

Is there a Restic frontend for Windows that you'd be comfortable setting up a family member with?

It's not Restic, but Kopia has an optional GUI and runs on Windows: https://github.com/kopia/kopia

Backblaze business is 50% object storage (from financial statements)

That's where Wasabi is taking customers

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