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Yev here -> Double good news for you this morning: we're now signing BAAs for B2 Cloud Storage ;-) Just contact sales and they can get you sorted out!

Yev here -> Anyone can write to the B2 Native API or our S3 Compatible API, we have tons of integrations that do it, here's a list -> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

Yev from Backblaze here -> the Nodecraft folks did a great job with that project -> https://jross.me/free-personal-image-hosting-with-backblaze-...

Yev here - it's interesting, we don't really chat about that often - what I would do is get the least expensive drive that has the most capacity and make sure the NAS is backed up somewhere in case of failure or theft. Personally I think the Toshiba drives are pretty good, but Seagates are affordable and do a good job. Plus there's always HGST which are rock-solid, but tend to run a bit more expensive.

Yev here -> You're welcome! The conversation's always fun :D

Yev here -> This question's beyond me, lemme see if I can get a dev on the line :D

*Edit - sounds like BBR is used in some of the environment!

Yev here -> great question! We are a bootstrapped company and we focus on inexpensive storage (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). Because we've built a robust system that doesn't use a ton of expensive components we can provide hot cloud storage (B2 Cloud Storage) and computer backup at an affordable rate while still making decent margins. To learn more about our business and decision making, we have a pretty cool series of entrepreneurship blog posts that might be interesting to some: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/entrepreneurship/

Yev here -> Thanks! Out of curiosity, does your school provide backup to all the students?

Is it a cool keyboard?

We do have a datacenter in the EU (Amsterdam) - and if you set up your account there you'll be able to transfer data to it. That's a popular destination for folks living closely to it, but even before that one went "live" we had lots of people using the our West Coast Data Centers without much issue. If you have a ton of data you can take a look at the Fireball (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball...) which allows you to rapidly ingest data to us.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We're definitely more affordable and our integrations (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html) make it easy to get your data to us. We even have partnerships with companies who can help transfer data from S3 into Backblaze B2!

No Linux client on the horizon - B2 is your way to go!

Yev here -> We love open source (our erasure coding, storage pods, other stuff is all out there) and after we got his email we did realized our error and wanted to make things right with Daniel and libcurl, it seemed like the fair thing to do!

Yev here -> Gleb's email is above, but if you do already have some hardware from 45 Drives or FreeNAS - Backblaze B2 may already be integrated into them!

Yev here -> well that chart hasn't been updated in a while. For starters we're just $0.01/GB for downloads (we dropped the price last year). Our performance is generally pretty good, and we're partnered with cloudflare (free egress) if you need more umph. But most of the time folks don't have any issues with just our regular service.

Good question and nope. They're simply too expensive for us. As they get lower in price they do become more interesting, but their $ to density is just nowhere near where we'd need it to be in order to continue providing our service at the rate we do. Some of our boot drives are becoming SSDs though, and they are in the "raw" data that we publish.

Yev here -> we do have remote hands available in some cases, but we try to have our own teams in place where possible, but yes - it's one of the things we optimize on our end!

Sort of, but not really, we just wrote APIs that let people talk to our pods directly. You can read about our architecture here (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...) and check out the APIs and how we built them here (backblaze.com/b2/docs/).

Yea, that was a fun "should we do this" conversation around the office...

Yev here -> Yes, that's basically the trade-off for us. Is the drive available and reliable vs. how much does it cost. One of the reasons we have so many Seagate drives is because they are available in abundance, are affordable for us, and have failure rates in-line with the other drives that we're testing.

Yev here -> there's no minimum for our Groups feature (which Business Backup runs on) - so you can have Groups with 1 or 2 people in them, no minimum of 5.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, the Toshiba drives are great! If the price was lower, they'd likely play a larger role in our hard drive mix!

Yev here from Backblaze -> the company started by providing unlimited online backup, and that's a great industry for us. About 4 years ago we released Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which allows developers or sysadmins or enthusiasts to directly upload/retrieve data to/from our data centers. Our core competency is data storage - so while most folks do use us for a backup (either of their Mac or PC on the consumer side or servers/NAS devices with B2 Cloud storage) - what we really do is store and retrieve data.

Yev here -> There's no way to avoid drive failure. We circumvent drive failure issues by using our vault architecture (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). It's essentially like a giant RAID++. Anything mechanical will break down eventually, which is why we try to push people towards having backups - the more copies of the data you have the less chance you have of all those mediums failing simultaneously, resulting in loss.

Yev here from Backblaze -> the Computer Backup service does not offer an unlimited Linux backup service. We do have support for Linux with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and our integration partners (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html?platform=linu... - I filtered the list by Linux for you). On the business side the NAS backup is also done via our parnterships and B2. On the consumer end, we haven't found a way to make unlimited backup sustainable with NAS/Linux since those devices/platforms typically have WAY more data than the average user.

Yev here from Backblaze -> Mainly it's the OS and log files - the reason we make a distinction is that the boot drives typically do not have as much load as the data drives, so it wouldn't be a real 1:1 comparison.

Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.

I think what's at play is definitions of Syncing, Archiving, and Storage (I wrote this up a while ago, but could use a refresh - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/sync-vs-backup-vs-storage/). It's important to know what your services do. In your case it sounds like you want more of an archival storage solution - which you can do with our B2 service. On the computer backup side, we try to be pretty explicit about the 30 day version history (now 1 year and forever is available) - so that customers aren't caught unaware - and if we don't see an external drive or your computer for a while, we'll send a notification alert to try and make sure you know what's going on. We know we'll likely not be the right service for everyone, but we try to good enough for most!

You bet! These days are fun for me because I get to hang out on the internet all day and answer questions :)

No, but don't do that. :P