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Yev from Backblaze here -> Loads of data :D

Yev from Backblaze here -> We love creating these and it's a team effort internally which a bunch of departments like to help with. Also appreciate the kudos and we share it with the org as well. You keep reading it and we'll keep making it! :)

Yev from Backblaze here -> It's all good and we love you being a happy customer! If you want to buy a backup license, feel free ;-)

Yev here -> we work pretty well with Movebot (https://community.movebot.io/hc/en-us/articles/360001557095-...) where you can set up a Gdrive to B2 sync/backup. And Rclone can do that as well (https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-rclon...) so there's a few ways to do this.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Thank you so much for sharing that story. I shared it internally - we love reading things like that, and I'm glad we could be there for you!

Yev from Backblaze here -> Wanted to touch on something you mentioned: if you don't have a lot of data, you might want to look into B2 Cloud Storage with one of the many backup integrations to back up your computer. It'll be $6/GB/Month, which may end up being more economical: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/integrations

Yev from Backblaze here -> thanks for your perspective Mike! We do work hard on making sure the client stays speedy and system-efficient, so glad that's coming across! Re: the disc prices -> The cost per GB of storage has somewhat plateaued over the recent years, something we discuss in this recent blog post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ and in addition to the raw storage costs there are others associated with running a cloud storage platform like electricity, cooling, bandwidth, and team members to keep things running smoothly. That's why we're constantly evaluating the market, economy, our costs, and customers usage patterns when thinking about pricing. It's all part of running a sustainable business. And re: Extended Version History, yes that feature will be made available for anyone with a Computer Backup license to enable after October 3rd at no additional charge.

Yev from Backblaze here -> that's for the feedback on the UI - we are working with an in-house UX team to get our UI updated as an upcoming project! As for browsing tools, I personally like Cyberduck. If it's easy enough for me to use, anyone can do it!

Yev from Backblaze here -> we've had increases on the Computer Backup service in the past but this is the first one for B2 Cloud Storage since launching it in 2015, however we hope the added value for both outweighs in the increased cost.

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's a factor of time and power! The 16TB drives consume more power so that's part of the calculation when we swap from the 4TBs, but we are monitoring them b/c we certainly want to avoid cluster failures and have what we call "rolling migration" projects going on all the time where we perpetually migration hard drives and hardware based on durability projections, power balancing, physical capacity, etc...

That I can't say. Part of why we started doing this was so others could chime in and we could compare notes but that hasn't really been the case and they continue to be locked silos for the most part. Maybe one day!

Yev here from Backblaze -> my guess? More :D

They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 ->

They should have:

1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.

2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human).

3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them.

Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh

Yev from Backblaze here -> You're welcome!

Yev here -> Thanks!

Yev from Backblaze here -> that maintenance window doesn't shut down the B2 Service each Thursday for two hours. We have lots of companies like Kanopy and Cloudspot that use us as an origin store without issue!

Yev from Backblaze here -> we have more than two data center locations, but we do have two regions (US-West, which is spread out across California and Arizona and EU-Central which is in Amsterdam). Slight nuance, but very different!

Yev from Backblaze here chiming in -> the computer backup service is designed to be easy to use by the vast majority of folks, and in order to provide that service we have purpose-built restore servers that handle the recovery of data (hence why we handle the restores). We have had feature requests asking for folks to be able to decrypt their backed up data on their own computers, and we're vetting that, but not on the roadmap at the moment.

For those that want something more zero-knowledge, we have Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage which has a lot of integrations, and you can even DIY your own backup schemes, including encrypting everything on your end before sending it up to Backblaze B2 for storage.

You bet - we sent an email out recently, but haven't run auto-update yet - but that's coming!

Yev from Backblaze here -> are you using version 8.0? It should be a lot more efficient on your machine.

Yev from Backblaze here -> thank you! We didn't want to fill it with a bunch of fluff first and then give bad news. Went with the most pressing information up front since it's the most relevant, and then tucked the offer towards the back. I'll make sure that the team sees the feedback :)

Yev from Backblaze here -> We go into it a bit in the blog post, but over the last two years our average data stored for Computer Backup increased by 15% - it's not just a handful of people pulling the number forward. That plus the rising cost of hardware over the last year and a half resulted in us having to make this adjustment.

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Backblaze originated in a founder’s one-bedroom apartment where five people committed to helping people save their data. Today, we are entrusted with well over an exabyte of data from customers in more than 175 countries.

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Yev from Backblaze here -> absolutely, the blog post was mostly intended to dive into the "how" we came to some of our decisions, for those interested and having never gone through one of these before!

Yev here -> It's actually changed over the years, but it's always been iterative and incremental changes - but that was one of the things we discussed!

Yev from Backblaze here -> Thanks! Yea, the conceptualization led to a lot of thinking internally about how we position ourselves and talk about our products as well, so the whole experience was very positive internally!

Yev from Backblaze here -> glad you like it! We hoped the post would be interesting to folks - a lot of times this just "gets done" but we like to talk about some of the decisions and how we got to them which hopefully provide some insight into our brains! :D

Yev from Backblaze here! We do it because it's interesting! Initially, since we're pretty transparent, we were hoping that others would join in the fun and share their stats so we'd know how our environment and hard drive stacked up against others - but no one at our scale has really done that yet. We do have a lot of off-the-record confirmation that our experience is somewhat similar to others, which is neat - but we were just trying to be transparent and share something interesting from our infrastructure. A lot of folks jumped on it and found it interesting so we keep it going!

Plus along the way some folks find out about us and sign up for the services we offer (B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup) and that's nice too! Plus we also like these conversations and at the end of the day, it's fun!

Yev from Backblaze here -> stay tuned!

Edit -> "hear you"