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Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

Neat! Pricing wise it might not always make sense though to use the commercial blob storages, especially for solo usage.

1 TB is roughly 20-30 USD per month at AWS/GCP only in storage, plus traffic and operations. R2 is slightly cheaper and includes traffic.

Compared to e.g a Google AI plan where you get 5 TB storage for the same price (25 USD/month) + Gemini Pro thrown in.

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Backblaze is a lot more affordable

Yes, and they have features like default soft delete with hard delete after x days that makes it a very compelling backup choice (guard against malware and mistakes). I'm a satisfied customer.

If only they had data centres in Asia so latency would be better for me.

A family member has uploaded a backup of all of the family photos to Amazon Glacial Storage, on the order of a few hundred GB, and gleefully sends me screenshots of the <$1/mo charges.

AWS Glacier is cold storage, for things like legally mandated retention that you never need to access, or for humans, say digitizing your grandma's 35mm slides. It's not the same use-case as typical file backup, with performance that's probably not acceptable if you want a file (or even a listing) <now>. Good rule of thumb: Glacier is for things that you might need but ideally will never access again.

And then has to pay hundreds to get the data back

Retrieval is $0.03 / GB, so more on the order of 10’s of dollars. This use case is offsite location of the 3-2-1 storage backup rule. I think this is an underserved market with current consumer-facing backup providers.

One time retrieval is 1.5x times more expensive than HDD that would fit the data.

Stop paying for Google, give it to Bezos instead!

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