Backblaze S-1 IPO
sec.govA friend in the music industry told me about a very cool backblaze moment.
They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not insane for a company) backblaze actually flew a guy with a physical hard drive to their location.
Saved ~5 gigs from being canceled, and my friend has been a die hard backblaze evangelist ever since.
If you haven't heard the stevie wonder story check it out. I don't get why artists don't have backups (well, I do, but...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_70th_Birthday_T...
Did he ever find the hard drive?
He hasn’t seen it since
As someone who lives in Kazakhstan, I can confirm, backups are basically useless here because speeds are so bad it's faster to fly a plane than download files…
A counter fact: Backblaze is also the company that has scheduled maintenance every Thursday afternoon between 2 and 4 p.m. Pacific Time, when there may be disruptions to the services. [1]
This is important to be aware of, but there is some nuance.
According to this BB blog post[0] certain functions are unavailable ("making a new purchase, installing new trials, signing in to your account, creating new accounts, enabling B2, and creating a master Key"), and two B2 API calls (b2_create_bucket, b2_delete_bucket).
If these are the only disrupted features, then impact depends on the details of the use case (perhaps get object and friends have to be on demand but other changes can be async).
Now, why these specifics are in their blog post and not in the Scheduled Maintenance page itself, that is a fair question, because it leaves room for doubt that only this exact set of functions are affected each and every window.
[0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/227807447-Backb...
It's amazing how many musicians today are dependent on data storage for live performances.
While the person in this story did have (remote) backups, it always amazes me how many people who rely so heavily on their main laptop for their trade/work/business in realtime (e.g. a touring DJ) don't a) carry around a second identical one that b) has everything (apps, data) preloaded on to it.
Yeah, I get ya. Much music is made directly on laptops, and if you figure the surrounding stuff as well (sound samples, animated backdrops, VST's etc) the assets required for a gig can be several GiBs big.
VSTs are lighter than pedals.
Why’d they send a person and not just the hard drives? Was it because they couldn’t get it there fast enough by normal air cargo so they used commercial passenger flights instead?
If I were on a 5 stop tour and my choice was between "hand-delivered by a Backblaze employee" and "left to fate with multiple countries' postal and customs services," I would choose the hand delivery every time. The nearest data center to Kazakhstan is in Amsterdam.
We're talking unreleased songs on that drive and high value assets surrounding the act. Both the sensitive nature of the data as well as the speed of delivery are better handled by having a person fly them in personally.
If it wasn't for the content and that they needed it ASAP I think regular air cargo would've sufficed.
Seriously impressive service. Thanks for sharing!
I get that backblaze is a cool business, but why would anyone invest in these companies that just lose massive amounts of money?
Mostly because they believe other investors will invest in these companies and hence their investment will pay off. Seems like 90%+ of tech companies religiously lose money, or maybe its just the 12 that I've worked for in my career? I remember a time when losing a billion/year would result in massive layoffs. Most don't even blink at a mention of a billion lost in a year as far as I can see.
I love Backblaze. Kind of surprised they aren’t profitable.
>” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”
I think if you consider the increase in assets (total value of the # of servers, racks, network gear etc) from the purchase of hardware to accommodate that growth, in order to satisfy those revenues and future revenues, it makes sense. It is entirely intentional and desirable for any gross margins to go fully back into growth or assets to support growth - especially in the cloud game where infrastructure costs and R&D are high and front-loaded. Once you purchase a hard drive and place it in a network-connected server, it will cost a few pennies each month to keep it spinning while it will generate revenue for 5 years (or more) after. You can see this by looking at reported Total Assets increasing from $38M in 2019 to $54M in 2020. That is after depreciation mark-down of <2020 equipment which is typically very high for IT equipment (upwards of 33% per year of the original value). The increase in annual revenue over time from previous cohorts is very attractive and shows that customers do appreciate the cost effectiveness and quality of service compared to other offerings.
If you consider they bought & added, net of depreciation, about $16M of assets to their balance sheet in 2020, the loss of 6M doesn't seem terrible. Using the bean counter approach - no new marketing, no spending on growth, no unnecessary R&D - they could have cleared about $20-25M of ebit in 2020.
Deciding to use your gross profit to fuel further growth (especially considering they're compounding it at a healthy rate and doing so without giving up equity or interest) is a wise move. If anything, it probably would have made sense to take some debt or finance more of the hardware purchases early on (as I see they are doing now at some scale as of 2020) in order to put those proceeds towards customer growth.
The only thing I see which is a marginal concern with these numbers is that it's difficult to see the split between marketing spend on b2 customers and backup customers (They spent $8M in 2019 on sales and marketing to generate 42k new customers, and $11.9M in 2020 to add 40k). It is very possible and likely that those marketing dollars went towards new enterprise customers (on b2 storage vs backup) and the revenue-per-customer number increasing during that timeframe seems to support that. Are blog posts calculated in the sales/marketing spend? Seems lots of the customers came from the organic content play.
Very cool to see the company who's free blog post about which harddrives are most reliable (when some had >5% annual failure rate and others <1% for the same price) nearly 10 years ago come around to s1.
Thank you for the very insightful accounting perspective. I have a hard time understanding all the complexities of modern account and how a "loss" isn't always a loss.
On a side note, I'm a very happy Backblaze customer and the same time curse Dropbox for not offering a 100GB $5/mn plan. Backblaze pricing is very customer friendly.
I tried Backblaze but couldn't get over its insistence on first backing up my entire primary hard drive instead of allowing me to simply choose directly my most important files in my external drives, or from wherever I prefer. Seems arbitrarily forceful to me, though the pricing and security options are good. Also, the interface of deselecting things to not back up via exclusions, instead of simply being able to specifically select what you WANT to back up is absurd, it complicates things unnecessarily if out of dozens of folders, you only want to select a few essentials for cloud storage.
As far as pricing goes, $5 per month for 100GB seems steep. SpiderOak offers 400GB for less than that and so does Nordlocker (though Nord has its own problems). On the other hand, iDrive has been offering a whopping 5 terabytes for a whole year for just $3.98 in a deal I saw just a few days ago.
Overall, zero knowledge backup is the best route, Backblaze plays at that, on the other hand I wouldn't touch any backup offering by Google with a 10 meter cattle prod. Grotesque that they reserve the right to snoop right through your files unless you first encrypt them externally via third party apps.
This is not accurate.
You are not forced to backup your entire hard-drive. There is a 3rd party program called: rclone
That program let's you choose which files/directories get copied over to BackBlaze. We have 150+TB (+10TB/week) stored at BackBlaze and I use rclone exclusively to upload our content for backup.
Note, it's a CLI program that works on Linux/BSD. I'm not aware of any other platforms that it works on.
I think the parent post is about the PC Backblaze backup service, not B2. The PC backup service does backup everything, and part of the reason for that is to make it extremely easy to setup. If they allowed selection of what to backup, it would be another user interface, more documentation, and then if the user deselected something important, they'd be mad if they had a problem and something wasn't backed up. Since it doesn't affect the flat-rate price, it's easier just to back up everything.
Noted, but Backblaze's insistence on "simplicity" by obligating a full main drive backup so that users can't later complain that something was missed is silly. Why not just offer this as a default but also offer the choice of creating your own completely custom backup selections, you know, on the assumption that some users of the service might actually know what they want and how to select it.
If you want to get hired by them, propose it, get it approved, implement and test this 2nd code path, and maintain it for foreseeable futures, go right ahead.
Idk about on first run, but I'm pretty sure you can pick and choose which drives it scans, including boot drive, and set up excludes as needed (handy to avoid backing up .git or node_modules)
You can exclude folders. I use it for a few things where there's no point in backing it up.
As far as I know, Backblaze lets you exclude folders from accessory drives and so forth, but not from the main PC drive itself. Also, the selection by exclusion itself is deeply annoying, because, as I said above, if out of many folders you only want to back up a few, selecting just those would be much easier and more intuitive than deselecting a whole pile of them to only leave a few. This was a deal breaker for me.
I definitely have folders excluded on the main drive.
Ahh thanks, I hadn't thought about that. I can't edit my post.
I was thinking about B2.
Furthermore, in response to the comment above, my reference was to using Backblaze alone and with Windows, as many people without any technical knowledge of computers at all might use it. Having to add in the use of Linux or rclone would mean a very different use case from the usual.
This is the exact reason why I didn't use backblaze, that and their linux support. I didn't want my entire PC backed up, and wanted to hand select a few hefty folders.
You can specify what gets backed up by using rclone.
This is core part of their business model. They can provide unlimited backup capacity, because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer. So this effectively limits your storage space.
Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.
>because you can only use them to backup stuff from drives that are connected to your computer.
This is not accurate, please see my response to helloworld11
Has Backblaze ever published their EOL costs?
At some point, I'd imagine it's an optimization problem between (cost of failure) vs (liquidation value) vs (revenue per GB), where running them all the way into the dirt doesn't make sense. Or maybe it does?
It's still a loss (for the current year).
But this is a SaaS, working with recurring revenue.
Some metrics to consider are:
- Cost of Customer Acquisition
- Lifetime Value
They could spend 200$ to get an average customer, but they will renew their subscription for an average of 5 years and generate over 2000$ in revenue during that time.
As long as you keep track of these metrics you know you're in a good direction or digging yourself a hole.
Besides other costs R&D, Admin, Marketing and Sales can be scaled up and down as needed, and become a smaller part of the costs as the company grows.
Based on my experience, that COCA is high, and the LV is low. They don't work hard to keep current customers.
1) Thank you for the excellent, high level accounting analysis. That is pretty rare to see on HN, and helpful to understand their financial situation.
2) I agree: Their incredibly hard drive reliability reports are like catnip! Here is a sample post if others don't know about these reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...
Its probably because they don't have great customer service. So they keep losing customers. And as we know, its much more expensive to get a new customer than keep a current customer - even more so with Backblaze where the initial startup charge is large due to them uploading everything.
They don't even need to keep the hard drive spinning since there are no guarantees of immediate access. They can keep them off and spin them up when you need to download a backup.
Regardless, there is a cost associated with having that harddrive (on or not) sitting in a server in a datacenter with air conditioning and resilient power. My point was not accurate to the exact operating cost per drive, but if you want that, here it is:
1) 2.5kWh per month of drive-on power. Datacenter grade power: 30-40c/kWh normalized =~ $1.00 in power per drive. 2) 60 drives per 4U space. 10 storage pods per 1 rack. 600 drives per rack. full rack in a colocation facility: $250-$500 =~ $0.40-0.80 in physical space.
Total cost per year to keep that drive up is, very ballpark, $16-22. The cost of running the drive is minimal vs the initial cost of $500 for the drive and storage server/rack/installation/network equipment etc. Network costs to transfer data from/to that drive are obviously nontrivial but again, the majority of the hurdle is outlay for capital.
Amazon was notorious for having a profit of about 0 for years and years due to investment in capital (to produce future earnings). Your spending today includes both the operational costs of creating what you have today, plus the investment you're making to generate additional revenue in the future. Obviously this excludes other important expenses like depreciation, but you get the idea.
This caught me by surprise as well because I am pretty sure they have stated before that they were profitable.
Yeah, what gives? I remember they prided themselves on being profitable, self-funded and not beholden to VCs. Sure enough, I was able to confirm that with a quick search:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074289
>Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised something like $150 million which comes with "pressure to grow fast or die". Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006216
> Yev here -> we HAVE to be cash-flow positive since we're not VC-funded. When we started the company it was bootstrapped, so "making enough money to survive" has always been a part of the equation!
That last comment was from 2019, yet according to the S-1, they were actually unprofitable. What's going on here? Were they profitable before, then suddenly taking on a massive loss? Their loss in 2020 was huge compared to the one in 2019.
They didn't say they were profitable - they said they were cash-flow positive. And if you look at the cash flow statement in the S-1, they were indeed cash-flow positive in 2019.
It looks like much of the difference comes down to stock-based compensation. This doesn't cost the company any cash, but under GAAP, it has to be recorded as an expense. (IANAA, so take what I say with a grain of salt).
Backblaze was tweeting about being profitable as late as 2020: https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1242481625004273665
Can the service itself be profitable but the company not be? I mean how do we define profitable?
Presumably the employees are working below-market in exchange for equity, so the company is not really profitable yet - it's sort of "ramen profitable" in that it's profitable if you don't count the full rate of the workers' time.
If the service is provided by employees who are compensated with equity, why would you not count that in profitability numbers?
Because that's literally one of the reasons to use equity based compensation.
The figures above are with GAAP standards but as a private company do they actually have to use that?
It certainly helps if you plan on going public at any point in the future.
Taxation, I guess?
There's a lot of ways to measure "profitable".
Judging from their current numbers the service is profitable on a per user basis, less marketing expenses.
This is a pretty reasonable way to look at it. Being cashflow positive means you can turn up marketing to grow and turn it down if needed.
Being cash-flow positive does not necessarily imply being profitable. The one is a day-to-day indication on whether or not you are able to make ends meet without outside funding, the other one is the basis on which you will pay - or not - taxes. It is absolutely possible to be cash-flow positive but not yet profitable, especially while growing.
There are many reasons why cash-flow and profitability can be out of step with each other, for instance, you might have capital expenditures that are going to influence future years' books, you might have an interest carrying bank loan, you may have invested money into acquiring users whose lifetime value is larger than the cost to acquire them but you haven't broken even on that yet, it's possible to have the reverse and so on.
Accounting for all this - and doing so properly - is not as easy as it may seem to be for an outsider or someone who is used to just sell their own hours, where you can immediately see the difference between income and costs and label that profits.
And even there the situation can get more complex, for instance, if work is done in one year but the invoice is sent in the next. Profit wise you are booking that money in the year the work was done, even if the actual cash only lands in the next. Pre-paid services are even more complicated (here you typically partition a chunk of the income month-by-month until the total amount is accounted for).
If you examine the financial statements you will see that they were Cash Flow positive in 2019 (but not in 2020).
It’s also important to note that being cash flow positive is not the same as being GAAP/IFRS profitable (Net Income).
Ahhh yes, Crashplan, the company that purposefully locked everyone out of their backups when they shut down their personal backup service.
I had a drive fail and I thought I was OK...and then I discovered that my Crashplan backup archives on my own server were unreadable after they shut down Crashplan personal backup services.
I couldn't even install the client, either - they silently updated the client to have a logic time bomb and refuse to install.
It's also not a really bad profit margin. $54M in revenue, $6M in net losses. It's not hard to see how they can right the ship -- perhaps they have scaled up enough to stop needing to spend so much, or they'll just continue to gain economies of scale.
They apparently build 500+ of their pods at close to $9k each (as of the older version--can't find cost on the latest) every year in 2016. That could represent the cost of growth in free trials through 2020 with people getting their home offices set up. A few hundred thousand people added over 2020 not paying for 15 days, and possibly not paying at all if they cancel, would be expensive.
They were unprofitable in 2019 as well…
And the cost of the pods will be capitalized and depreciated so a large surge in buildings won’t necessarily lead to bad financials.
> And the cost of the pods will be capitalized and depreciated so a large surge in buildings won’t necessarily lead to bad financials.
I was curious about this as well:
Sounds like this is captured in their cost of revenue.Cost of revenue consists of expenses for providing our platform and cloud services to our customers. These expenses include operating in co-location facilities, network and bandwidth costs, and depreciation of our equipment and capital lease equipment in co-location facilities. Personnel-related costs associated with customer support and maintaining service availability, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation are also included. Cost of revenue also includes credit card processing fees, amortization of capitalized internal-use software development costs, and allocated overhead costs. We intend to continue to invest additional resources in our infrastructure and related personnel, and our customer support organization, to support the growth of our business. Some of these investments, including costs of infrastructure equipment (including related depreciation) and expansion, are incurred in advance of generating revenue, and either the failure to generate anticipated revenue or fluctuations in the timing of revenue could affect our gross margin from period to period.50% gross profit is not great compared to a SaaS company, but still not terrible compared to <insert literally any other company that isn't enabled by tech>.
They also generate ~$12M in net cash from operating activities. So "profitable" is a weird one here. They'll have to continually invest in data centers and hardware, but generally speaking they are turning cash pretty well.
Sounds to me like prices will pretty much inevitably go up after they're public, and I'll finally have the motivation to set up my own remote backup by exchanging hard drives with a friend of mine on the other end of the country.
Yup. Just like every other cloud company: hook people cheap, get them super dependent, and then go public telling investors they'll make a goldmine when you jack prices.
The extra fun bit is that just exfiltration will cost you.
Don't even need to go public! Take $1 billion in VC cash to build an app that can't possibly make that much revenue then lock people in with long term contracts.
We use multiple great SaaS tools that in the last two years have removed DIY 'tiers' or 'plans' billing you can do online and forced us to sign yearly contracts, deal with pushy sales reps, and changed to opaque and stupid complicated pricing.
Oracle behavior! we have no choice but to bend over.
They are great tools which is why they can do this ;)
Fortunately you likely don't have to pay for that for personal accounts. B2 - sure. Backups? Just make a new one and leave the BB account running for a couple of months - for most people keeping backups beyond 2 months is just not useful.
They've already put prices up once, but are still supremely affordable for a "fire and forget" backup service.
Sure, you can probably do it cheaper with your "friend with a hard drive" solution, but there's zero redundancy there, you'll need to replace the hard drive when it eventually goes bad etc. etc.
For some people that's a tradeoff worth making, but for me, a few extra $ a month for peace of mind is worth it.
Tried rsync.net?
They were talking about switching if they got more expensive and rsync.net is already a lot more expensive unless you have very little data (<300GB).
rsync.net is a very different product though.
I recently evaluated a bunch of cloud storage/backup services. rsync.net is a ssh-accessible ZFS filesystem (including support for zfs send/recv) in the cloud, B2 is object storage.
rsync.net has a cheaper version aimed at people doing borg backups. Unfortunately it's still 3x the cost of B2 for 1TB of data.
I currently use B2 for my offsite backups, only around 1.5TB, using rclone. Works well and costs just under $7/mo.
I looked at rsync.net and really liked the idea, but costing 5x as much just doesn't justify the features.
Where do they offer the 3x cost solution? Cheapest pricing I can find is 2.5cents/GiB/mo (the 5x price).
You need to look at their pages for specific tools, e.g. for Borg Backup: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html (starts from 1.5 Cents Per GB / Month)
It's not just that. It's also that I don't really trust anything centralized anymore, and internet speeds are such that homegrown solutions are becoming more and more attractive. Another benefit is that I'll also be able to easily backup my Linux machines, which BB currently does not support. At the moment I just periodically copy data to windows on cron so that it's backed up - not ideal to say the least.
I back things up to Backblaze B2 from Linux using borg. It works really well and it's incredibly cheap. I'm paying less than $1/month to keep about 155GB of data there. About half the data is from Borg backups, the other is rcloned copies of my music files.
What's your process for backing up to B2 using borg?
I'm currently doing borg backups to a local server, then using restic to back up my borg backups to B2. My reason for using restic over rclone is so that if the local backup is corrupted I've got history on the remote to fall back to.
I'm hoping to find a less cumbersome way to do this.
Why not just use restic directly to back up?
That was my plan, but restic doesn't do compression so that would increase costs and backup time.
Some use-cases, like photo libraries, won't benefit much from compression, so I may use restic directly for those.
Rclone only uploads/overrides the remote if the meta-data (size/date/etc) shows a difference. Most disk corruption doesn't change these so it still works as a corruption backup.
I'm worried, in part, about files getting deleted. If I delete or otherwise lose my repository, rclone will helpfully delete it on the other side. Some amount of deletion is expected, like when borg prunes the old stuff out, so having rclone not delete anything might not be an option either.
I'm sure there are ways to manage this though, I just haven't figured them out yet.
Ah, looking more close, I'm just using rclone to put the backups on B2. So first I do a backup to a local drive, then I run `borg with-local ... rclone sync ...`.
Ah, ok. That's basically what I'm doing, except I'm using restic instead of rclone.
I've done borg for local backups for a while and figured I could just replace it with restic, then I discovered that restic doesn't do compression so I just pointed that at the borg repositories.
I'll probably use restic directly for things that don't benefit from compression and continue to use borg for things that do.
I'm open to better options though, layering two tools that basically do the same thing seems like a bit of a hack job.
What would happen if your backup harddrive at your friends' place was stolen / destroyed / went bad?
I'd have to send him another hard drive, obviously.
25 dollars per TiB/mo? LOL.
Try backupsy. Good prices.
I love backblaze too - but I don’t know why Apple haven’t copied their business out of existence (for apple users at least)
The original backblaze was literally Time Machine in the cloud.
Presumably because Backblaze's margins are far too low for Apple, so Apple would have to do "Backblaze, but overpriced", which could look bad - or be content with low margin.
I'm curious about Apple's cloud strategy. "Cloud, but only for iUsers" seems... weird, from a scaling perspective?
Granted, there are more Apple device customers than any other possible bucket, but is it enough to drive economies down to the point of competing on cloud pricing?
And if not, then they're still stealing iDevice margin to price cloud competitively.
> but is it enough to drive economies down to the point of competing on cloud pricing?
More than Enough. When you have 1 Billion iPhone customer who are also in the highest paying basket. The purchasing power is likely over 50% of the total market. As similarly shown in App Store market.
The problem is Apple has always had an Asset Light strategy. Keeping many Datacenter of Storage running just isn't their thing. That is why they are still relying on Azure, AWS for iCloud Storage.
>And if not, then they're still stealing iDevice margin to price cloud competitively.
Currently the iCloud Services ( or in fact all Services Revenue ) are masked by App Store profit and Google's Search Engine Deal. i.e most of their other Services like Apple Music, iCloud, News+ are low margin business but are used to dilute down their extremely high margin profits from App Store and Search Engine.
Absolutely, Apple can charge $1.5 for something everyone else can charge $1 for, but I was looking it from a cost of goods sold perspective, instead of pricing power.
If it costs them $1.25, and everyone else can do it for $0.75 because they have scale and capital... that doesn't seem long-term stable.
If one cloud provider becomes dominant, Apple loses. If Apple loses market share, they lose negotiation power, and Apple loses.
The only way Apple wins is if cloud stays a multi-polar race AND Apple stays cloud-portable AND Apple retains significant market share AND cloud stays commoditized.
I'm not saying it's a bad bet (I'm sure Wall Street loves the resulting financials), but it does seem like a dangerous long term strategy, if cloud becomes more of product.
>If one cloud provider becomes dominant, Apple loses.
Apple has been basically funding Azure Expansion. Microsoft needed Apple to scale their Cloud business in a multi-year contract. And Apple using Microsoft to drive AWS price down. I think for one reason or another ( politics, strategic, or technical ) they have avoided GCP. Apple also partner with other Cloud Services Provider in different Region. And they are doing exactly what you described as Multi Cloud. Even their CDN are split between Akamai, ( used to be Limestone and they switch to something else I cant remember ) and their own.
I would not be surprised if their next move is to fund Cloudflare R2 Storage services. ( Once it becomes mature enough )
It's an interesting turn. Microsoft invested $150 million to save Apple long ago, now Apple is investing in Microsoft's services platform as they both try to transition into services companies.
I think their plan is to just always make a little bit more from every hardware customer
Plus, to make their hardware more attractive by having that service available.
Storing backups is probably also quite cheap to do since the data would be infrequently accessed. You don’t need fancy ssds. Cheapo hard drives will be fine.
If anything that would be a good reason for them to do it. "X, but overpriced" is Apple's niche.
Pretty bold to IPO with those kind of revenue #s these days... I guess the iron is hot though.
Not really. They've taken very little outside funding (mostly venture debt and a series A), and have been around for 10+ years. They'll likely get a better valuation from the public market than they would privately and the founders who have been waiting 10 years can take some money off of the table.
Smart move IMO.
>They'll likely get a better valuation from the public market than they would privately and the founders who have been waiting 10 years can take some money off of the table.
This is really all there is to it. You don't actually have to build a business anymore to get rich. You just put together something that looks like one, pay yourself a handsome salary for 10 years, then cash out and retire to New Zealand.
Sweet gig if you can get it.
> Sweet gig if you can get it.
Did you also start a business from the ground up and run it to the size that generates $50M in revenue? What exactly about Backblaze is a "sweet gig if you can get it"...achieving this is not trivial...
>..achieving this is not trivial...
Of course it's not. You need to have gone to the right school, made the right friends, be the right ethnicity/gender (white or asian male), and have access to the right VC. But given all that, it's a cakewalk.
Car companies are going IPO without any product at all and no track record showing they can run a sustainable business.
A lot of investors/backers in that industry though are backing it literally because they want one, not because they think it's a good investment per say.
SPACs don't even have a business idea, and they trade above cash. They literally sell the potential of possibly getting into some sort of business one day.
Well, growth empirically beats all, won't it?
What's even revenue to say in the face of growth.
3x% is kinda mediocre for a SaaS company at those revenue #s though.
They could be profitable at the drop of a hat, they'd just have to slow down their growth. This isn't rare for tech companies that IPO, in fact, these losses are rather modest for the level that they are operating at.
I have not looked at the financials, but equity compensation to employees can often be vesting at a significant higher rate around the time of an IPO and push an otherwise profitable company into a short-term net loss.
Me too, but maybe their lack of profitability and my happiness is correlated.
Capitalized expenses for growth?
For those looking at the risks, it might sound a little pessimistic, however when compared against other 'emergent growth' S-1's we've seen this year, it appears to be an otherwise normal filing with the normal amount of CYA. I hope they do well, and I hope they don't change too much in the pursuit of a profit. Not being profitable in the SaaS business is not necessarily the scarlet letter that it is in other fields, so I'm optimistic for their future.
Also, congrats Backblaze! The next adventure begins :)
I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.
According to Backblaze's calculator[0], it would cost $4,800/yr to store 80TB on Backblaze B2 and you're storing it for $60/yr. Cases like these are why unlimited storage plans don't make sense...
Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine?
0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
1 - https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665478-Why-d...
It makes perfect sense because just like every other cloud company, they hook you pre-IPO. Post IPO or buyout, with lots of customers dependent upon them, they can raise their prices to a bit above market price because their customers will resist moving.
Think about it: if you have a backups stored with them via their proprietary backup client, you have to stick with them or lose all your backup revisions; there's no way to move revision history.
That's why they charged below their own rates, they knew people would be trapped.
Backblaze backup plan pricing is about to skyrocket.
I think Backblaze only stores 30 days of revisions anyways, so to migrate you only have to maintain two backup service subscriptions for a month. And you might want to do that anyways since if you have a lot of data, it might be weeks before you get all of your backups on the second service.
They now have options to store 1 year or indefinitely for an extra charge.
It makes more sense if you see it as lead generation, like the free plans for stuff like Slack or Notion. Some of those people will pick B2 or their group management platform if they do a startup and do well enough. They probably spend less on data hoarders than similar-size companies spend on free plans.
If you mount your NAS using iSCSI it will be considered local drive and be available for backup by Backblaze.
Or just buy an 8 TB external, hook it up to your Backblaze-enabled PC and back up your NAS to the external with rsync. And the additional benefit is that you've also implemented 3-2-1 doing so.
Network drive or any kind of NTFS reparse point such as a symlink (I suppose because that’d be a way around the no network drive rule). An unintended consequence of which is that it doesn’t back up iCloud or one drive files, which use reparse points to do the download on demand stuff. So instead of happily paying $60/year to back up single digit gigabytes, I pay more like ~$20/year to store blobs from a different backup client.
Windows Storage Spaces are handled by Backaze. Granted I am only doing that with 2TB, which is a drop in the bucket these days.
Are we sure that the proprietary desktop clients don't use convergent encryption (allowing for deduplication), especially for media files?
It's pretty difficult to build up 80TB of stuff that's not original data.
Wat? The easiest way to build up a large collection of files, especially one that is only worth it to back up if you can do so inexpensively, is downloading movies. I would guess this describes most people who store lots of data.
Also, the lesser number of people storing large amounts of original data (eg videographers) probably create enough community goodwill to make up for the cost.
An opinion that may be contrary to some of the other replies here. Don’t feel bad about it. There is a commercial (and capitalistic) contract between Backblaze and you where it provides a service for a payment. Both ends are keeping up the deal. If Backblaze deems your usage as “abuse” (many companies use unpublished soft and hard limits for making such decisions), it will let you know and give you options. Your main concern should be having some sort of alternative if/when Backblaze tells you that your contract with it cannot be supported any longer or if Backblaze has such poor business sense that it has a lot of customers like you and goes bust (the latter is unlikely).
Also consider that many other users may be using far less than what $60 could buy for Backblaze.
Even if Backblaze is suffering a huge loss on account of your usage, the fact that you commented here about it and indicated that there haven’t been any repercussions is a marketing message for the company treating paying customers in a decent way.
I’m sure people on r/datahoarders (Reddit) would already know of use cases like yours or may be thrilled to know of it.
Brian from Backblaze posted a graph for 2018 showing how much data customers were backing up. More than 50% of customers were backing up less than 300GB. They're paying $6/mo for backups that would cost only $1.50/mo on B2. The graph did show one customer backing up over 400TB, which I would consider abusive, but as long as it's just one / a few customers doing crazy shit like this, it's not worth changing their unlimited backup offer to an unlimited* offer, and having fine print saying there actually are limits.
If it were me, I'd continue offering the $6/mo unlimited plan, throttle upload bandwidth for personal backups larger than a TB, and offer a high-performance option for $6/mo/TB with no throttle that also supports Linux, network drives, and anything else you want to backup. That's still a 20% premium over B2, and they have control over the client behavior which is also an advantage.
They made 27M gross profit in 2020 - You'll see how much value your revenue created shortly here :)
edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D
How does deduplication work on encrypted files though? I thought they advertise their personal backup plan to be fully encrypted - this would mean that backblaze shouldn't be able to access / identify the data...
It doesn’t.
But, if it’s a key generated at their end, they could dedupe the original data. S3 bucket encryption been an example.
Source: I work in deduplication for a well known company.
Not sure how the keys are generated (I'm not a backblaze user) but since one apparently has to use their software for backup jobs there might be chance that they also store the keys on their servers for this exact purpose...
This would definitely limit the inconvenience caused by personal users with huge amounts of data - like op with his 80 TB
It would be very easy to test this by backing up a new Windows machine and monitoring outgoing network transfers. If you can backup an entire newly-installed Windows machine and don't see any significant transfers, it is being deduped.
Backblaze has options to supply your own key, but it's an optional feature. I'm gonna guess that over 90% of Backblaze users do not supply their own keys.
People ask about numbers like this all the time on the subreddit, and their people always say it's allowed. The main point they bring up is B2 is better suited for large amounts of data.
For example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/g26lgt/max_capac...
https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/arnlyr/10tb_on_b...
They said somewhere it's also a marketing investment. If they have people saying "Yeah I backed up a TON of data and it's really unlimited" then more people feel comfortable and become paying customers.
I can't find the link.
p.s. "Right now we have computer-wide deduplication, but not farm-wide or account-wide!" 4 year ago http://disq.us/p/1q3efbb
I'd feel deeply uncomfortable backing up 80tb of data to a $60/year plan, tbh.
What you should be more uncomfortable with is the fact that there's basically no way to exfiltrate that data in any cost-effective, practical manner and there's zero recourse if a backup storage company goes "oops" and loses all your data or one day decides to just close up shop.
I don't think backblaze has a chance at losing data, but I really use it as the last resort "oh shit" place. If I lose a drive I'll pay a bit of a premium for whatever multiple of 8TB needs to be sent my way, I'm going to be replacing a $2-300 drive anyways.
It's probably not very important 80 tb.
It isn't, and the super important stuff is backed up a lot more times, a lot more ways.
Weird scenario where you have 80TB of data, but a tight budget to back it up. I guess it is some kind of hobby thing.
What hobby has 80TB of data?
Video editor keeping raw footage around? Or if they're on hn, maybe they're a data scientist who loves big datasets and cannot lie.
Porn?
Video editing
I haven’t looked at their numbers at all but Amazon was also famously unprofitable for like the first 10 years even after ipo, sometimes it’s just accounting games.
Amazon has also occasionally paused their rapid expansion for one quarter, just to prove that they can be profitable when they want to. Then, they continue spending all the money that comes in and more, to expand again. If you think the money is well-spent (big if), then being unprofitable might just mean you are spending now to be more profitable later because you can.
The main issue is that if you haven't tried to be profitable, how do you know for sure you're spending the money wisely?
How did you ever think backing up 80TB for $60 a year was good for the company? You didn't need financial filings to know it wasn't.
LOL. So S3 would charge $22k and you are paying them $60. Yeah, I am impressed that they let you steal the money. That is bad and you should feel bad. Just buying the drives to store that much is $1500.
If something is being sold at a loss, why should the purchaser feel bad about it? Some 'personal unlimited' type plan is allowing this behavior and if the company is concerned with it they can change or terminate their product.
What if the whole point of the personal plan is "hopefully they can be encouraged to spend +$x with us"?
That means that every time I buy something and there's a profit marging someone is stealing from me.
So for fun I decided to see how cheap you could actually do this in a reliable way. Cheapest gb/$ for a good widely available drive is a 6tb refurb enterprise drive around $110. For this many drives I'd want raid 6 (especially refurbs), so you're looking at $1650 pre tax.
As a public company there's no chance backblaze will let this dude keep ripping them off.
As per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html they are not using enterprise drives and 15 drives per RAID6.
As per https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv... it costs them $0.036/GB.
So 8TB space costs them 294,91$. Well they have other costs too. But if they had him as a customer for 5+ years, they can start profiting :) Actually more years, because electricity, traffic, rent, salaries, etc...
let’s hope there is no egress!
Good news for their pod suppliers.
Are they still affiliated with 45drives? I was never clear on the history of the two companies.
I tried Backblaze's backup plan.
Their software is just not good, I would say it's even bad. It just didn't work for me.
Something poorly written that they just didn't bother to improve. I guess because most of their customers can't tell the difference anyway whether it's working or not.
That's what I heard as well
For a long time I have wanted to use one of these systems, but I would never upload anything to the cloud unless I encrypted it with an algorithm that I trust like GNU's gpg first.
Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned tarsnap[0].
It can apparently run via WSL. The main selling point is that it's made by colin percival[1], so if you really care about the security of your backups, you can't get any better.
Additionally, it's fairly reasonably priced. When s3 dropped their prices so that tarsnap became cheaper to run, he passed that on directly to customers[2]
[0] https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Percival
[2] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-02-tarsnap-price-cut...
Who on earth would pay 0.25$/GB for encryption, that is offered freely by countless programs?
It’s like orders of magnitude more expensive than S3 and b2.
Not sure exactly what you're after, but if it's FOSS then I would definitely recommend https://github.com/restic/restic or https://git-annex.branchable.com.
As others mention a lot of closed source tools offer local encryption, including Backblaze (although I believe they need your key in order to do restores, which might or might not defeat the purpose depending on your use case).
I use Borg: https://www.borgbackup.org/ works well on client machines and servers.
Especially easy with Vorta [1] and hosted on BorgBase [2]. It's definitely for the technically literate user, but if you are, then it's a dream, and the tutorials by borgbase are super nice.
I was searching for something the could replace Backblaze on Linux for me, and Vorta+BorgBase was even better than that.
Encrypted and compressed by default, deduplicated, life-long (if desired) and diffable history, every snapshot can be mounted locally, alerts on missing backups, just a breeze to use, and works for my personal machines just like my VPS.
I use the macOS version and it's excellent.
do you mind if I ask where you store the Arq backup? On a separate physical drive, in a cloud service, etc.?
Cloud and local servers.
I use B2 for cloud, and two NAS boxes on my network. I used to use OneDricd thanks to a legacy plan that was generous, but that appears to have stopped working for unknown reasons.
All data is encrypted with a paraphrase I supply, so short of some spectacular amount of brute force I consider it safe.
I use Arq and backup to B2. I use it instead of backblaze directly for the encryption.
How much does it cost you to back your data up (and on which cloud provider)?
Not the parent comment but I use Arq on windows and mac machines at home. This is only for personal data mind you.
What I backup: Three machines currently, my laptop, my desktop, and my wife's laptop. I don't do a full drive backup as I have no problem re-installing software, losing settings, etc. I just backup documents and media for the most part. This includes wedding photos, rental agreements, bank statements, my own git repos, etc.
All of the photos and most documents also sit in a dropbox folder and are downloaded across all 3 machines. We don't do every photo from our phones because we take a lot of rubbish but usually pull over holiday snaps etc pretty quickly.
When I backup: Each machine has a daily backup using Arq which goes up to AWS S3. I then have weekly backups to Backblaze B2. Only reason to not have daily going to B2 is just to keep costs low. This backup frequency feels comfortable for our uses and we feel fairly comfortable with photos being on dropbox and synced in real-time as those are the most important to us.
I also have a separate backup from my wife's computer which runs hourly and just stores documents related to her studying to minimise loss of work if the laptop crashed during the day.
All in all this costs about $3-$5 a month on AWS and a bit less for Backblaze B2. We then pay for dropbox individual plus at £95 a year. All the backups are compressed and encrypted by Arq and it rolls up and ages off backups for us as I don't really care too much about recovering something from several years ago. Looking at the S3 dashboard we're storing 168.3 GB in total across 4 buckets.
I'm sure many people will say this is insanely little data to backup, but it's not important to us to backup everything really, we'd rather have a simple and cheap system to backup the data that's important to us. With the prices I'd have no problem expanding it to more data if needed though.
In the future I'll probably look at buying a NAS and hooking it up to Arq as well, but that'll have to wait until we've bought our first house.
Final note of praise for Arq, UI is really simple (my wife who's not a techie understands it), you can setup email alerts, and recover individual documents from specific backups without needing to restore everything.
I use B2 with a single bucket, so I pay the going rate for that. I’m storing a few hundred gigabytes with a few gigabytes ingress per month…a few dollars a quarter on the billing front.
Arq will encrypt/decrypt the backup data with a key that never leaves your computer. The encryption and data format are documented here: https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/d...
Duplicity (https://duplicity.gitlab.io/duplicity-web/) has served me well with B2 and other backends. It does snapshots, encrypts transparently and supports a number of storage services. It runs best on Linux, but you could run it on WSL I suppose?
Not sure if it’s the same use case but I use Cryptomator with OneDrive and it’s worked well.
I would try BorgBackup or restic. Both support encryption and compression.
rclone
Congrats to the backblaze team!
Long time customer of their backup product, and I'm considering B2 for an upcoming project as a result. They seem to be good at doing what they do, which is always great to see :) Especially great to see an IPO from a company that isn't exploiting privacy, or gig workers, and instead simply providing a great service.
I've always enjoyed reading their blogs, they seem to be a company focused on doing one thing very well and customer's like this.
I'm surprised how small Backblaze is.
Am I reading this right that they only had 53 million USD in Revenue in 2020?
That's a tiny fraction of, say, Dropbox's revenue. I would have expected them to be in the 30-50% range of Dropbox on size.
And with 164 employees to boot, that's only $323,000 revenue per employee. I wonder what the compensation is like there.
Why? It’s a pure commodity business. They are competing against your iCloud subscription and little USB drives that cost $30.
Not sure what the long term strategy is, but I hope going public doesn’t kill them — seems like a nice little business that could just coast for years.
Yes - and the danger for them is as an iPhone user I feel almost forced to use iCloud, and if I do that I might drop backblaze as I can use iCloud for everything.
Why am I forced, because if I don't back up my phone using iCloud, then I need to back it up using iTunes, or not at all. That they have made copying photos off the iPhone terrible and iTunes terrible, is a good tactic to make me use iCloud.
For now I am holding out, sticking with backblaze (I love the do-nothing and it's backed up workflow) and probably will go the iTunes YUK route for backing up.
I was very disappointed in that myself. I’m very resistant to increasing my iCloud spend past the free bit.
I ended up setting up Nextcloud for myself and my wife. It isn’t fun to sync everything if your phone is already full, but a fresh install would have a very native feel with some setup and a fast host for your backup ( I currently self host at home, but I wfh so it matters little. )
I believe iOS has always supported a “camera view” when plugged into a computer, where all videos and photos are readable as files. Doesn’t help for backing up anything else but seems like a straightforward enough path for backups.
Yeah copying files from there just crashes out on my pc.
"Not sure what the long term strategy is, but I hope going public doesn’t kill them — seems like a nice little business that could just coast for years."
Yes, it does seem just like that and I believe we are witnessing an entity (backblaze, in this case) trying to switch from one zone of attraction:
Nice little business that throws off a ton of cash and grows organically but doesn't make anyone a billionaire ...
... to another zone of attraction ...
Scaled up enterprise that requires a sales and marketing effort (and accompanying infra) capable of revenue generation that matches the demands of an IPO and public shareholders ... and could possibly make someone a billionaire.
There's a big, deadly valley between those two zones of attraction and you have to push very hard to make that change. Very unlikely any kind of corporate culture or "human touches" survive that movement.
" ... seems like a nice little business ..."
Sometimes that's enough for people. Sometimes it's not.
Sometimes you paint yourself into a corner where the (IPO) is the only choice one has.
I wish them the best.
Given the number of 164 person pre-revenue startups, I’m not sure what to make of numbers anymore.
But yeah I tend to agree: why do they have such a large footprint?
New sales staff in 2020? Adds costs (going to profitability) and head count.
Less than an angel round, or a 2-pizza team's salary. Ok I exaggerate. Less than that in 2023.
Carbonite - which is rarely mentioned on hn, had a $300M+ run-rate when they were acquired in 2019
I think brand awareness of Backblaze is insular - I remember Carbonite had the strategy of advertising on right-wing radio in the 00's which seems to have worked for them.
I tried to get onto their business backup product without success. Something about how they do their accounts, sales, software stuff just was not smooth?
I had to buy a separate product MSP360, and then even then configuring that to work with Backblaze wasn't easy (at all). I got stuck and gave up.
Hope they smooth out the kinks.
> Something about how they do their accounts, sales, software stuff just was not smooth?
I'm not sure, sorry
Question for the HN crowd: what’s the best way to back up a NAS using client side encryption?
I use restic, so far it has worked very well.
I use Restic + Backblaze B2, and I'm quite happy with it, but I had to spend quite a lot of time customising scripts/configuration to work properly.
If I were to start over, I would likely choose kopia, which does everything restic does and more (better performance, compression, GUI, etc.), and seems to provide a better out-of-the-box experience. That said, I haven't tried it out yet.
ssh with zfs send/receive. No problems having hourly backup of your most important petabyte scale data on the other side of this planet.<
I even do this with Microsoft SQL Server using iSCSI.
Borg
I use rclone.
I use rclone as well and it has worked reliably for years. Keeping the password [1] separate allows me to restore files to a fresh computer as needed. Backblaze B2 is just one of many backend options [2].
How does one use this with something like a Synology NAS? Or is that not really the intended workflow? I’m imagining something like a local backup plus a backup to cloud.
If you want to backup just data, restic works very well; however, you're not backing up configurations or applications. Use HyperBackup. B2 S3-api is compatible.
I’m not 100% on which workflow you are looking to set up. If you are trying to backup to Synology NAS, you could mount the NAS and use rclone’s “local filesystem” storage backend.
I was thinking that I could use a readymade NAS (along with their software) to backup things locally but then I also want a secure and privacy backup of that NAS to a cloud.
You can run it on synology via docker, there are guides online. But it's not really straightforward.
B2 is a fantastic service. I upload everything I want backed up to a private bucket via Cyberduck. 0 issues for many years.
I liked how Backblaze storage is innovative and how they described in detail it's architecture and algorithms used.
Good for these guys and for Expensify and some other very small revenue companies. For those that say there aren’t opportunities to get in, these may be them. For those that say the market is getting kind of crowded - getting harder to argue.
>"We make it astonishingly easy to store, use, and protect data"
What does this even mean? And how is their business even remotely competitive with the big 3? Bit pushing is a volume game, and it doesn't seem like they have much of it.
I'm the author of HashBackup.
What I like about Backblaze B2 is that is has simple, no gimmick pricing, unlike almost every other cloud storage company. It doesn't have delete penalties, where they charge for storage you've deleted. It doesn't have minimum file sizes, where they charge for storage you aren't actually using. It doesn't have a minimum payment every month.
For backups, their business is very competitive with the big 3, especially considering that they will mail a physical drive to you with your data.
They essentially market themselves as "S3 without the surprise costs" as well as "trust as more than amazon" which I think they hold up to. What they lack is the insane amount of reliability and scalability that S3 offers. I'm not saying this as a fanboy of S3. They (aws) have their share of issues and AWS has never been transparent about their pricing structure. If you don't believe me there just Google "surprise AWS costs". Just like everything in life B2 is a tradeoff. I love healthy competition and I hope backblaze continues to crush it!
Surprised at how small they are, given the scale of most IPOs these days.
90% gross retention is really good, even if 110% NRR is bottom quartile for public SaaS. Wouldn't be surprised if they become profitable soon.
Backblaze is the best AAS I use by far. My only issue with them is that the UI on the site is a bit janky (the other day, for example, I couldn't get the end date for my backup to actually 'stick' - it would refresh and reset).
Don't invest in them. They have terrible customer service. I highly doubt its going to get better.
After Cloudflare's announcement this is likely a last act as people move away. Good luck if you invest but I can see them filing for bankruptcy in 2-5 years.
I dont think every time a competitor launches it instantly eats all marketshare from the others. Backblaze seems to target different niches like small projects, also personal backup (cloudflare does not do this). Also cloudflare new storage seems like more "hot storage" cache-type service but backblaze seems like more "cold storage" and infrequent access. Also since backblaze is a member of bandwidth alliance the two might work well together and compliment instead of compete so much.
Backblaze makes 73% of their revenue from computer backups. I do not see how the Cloudflare announcement will eat into that.
I would agree that B2 is their high growth area, but I do not think Cloudflare directly opposes B2.
Yeah, I think it's more about CF hemming them in, curtailing growth opportunities. Especially since the line until recently had been "use Cloudflare and get free transit between CF and Backblaze B2!" Haha, so much for that.
I don't think they're targeting Backblaze, but their position as the foremost middleman of the Internet means they're going to hurt direct competitors and partners pretty much any time they launch a product, until they're out of partners that host "cloud services". Which is a position Cloudflare put themselves in entirely on purpose.
If the majority of their business is personal backups then the business is already in a decline. I've looked at them multiple times, and Google Drive and OneDrive are both much better deals.
Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.
It's a bit different to the original argument but there is the issue that people have more and more files created in those services and only existing within them (desktop Office tries its best to convince you to do this).
It's hard to convince people who go along with that "but you don't really have backups, you need to download everything locally and pay $5/month".
restic + rclone = Google Drive backup with snapshots and dedupe. Not sure if you are just unaware, or didn't take the time to look into anything else.
There's an infamous comment on the Dropbox launch that addresses this better than I can, but I can't find it. Suffice to say: yes, I'm aware there are solutions I can put together that are more work than I care to do to maybe save some portion of $65 a year. Putting those snapshots on Drive would tear through (expensive) space fast, so I'm not sure it's a savings. Backblaze provides incremental backup for my entire SSD. Even more if I ever fill that empty bay. I don't even pay for Drive since few things I do benefit from syncing, so this would probably cost more and be worse.
I actually got rid of backblaze a while back because I realised I had moved machines twice and didn't bother restoring files with it. I've had backblaze for years (maybe even a decade+?!)
Code is all on GitHub, all my docs and emails are in gsuite (and don't get backed up anyway by BB). The only thing that does get backed up is a load of cruft and junk I've accumulated which is actually nice to start over on tbh.
I imagine more and more people are like this. Designers who used to have to be meticulous at backing up their source files now all work in Figma, etc etc.
The major weakness now is if GH or Gsuite had a catastrophic error (or your account gets booted off for incorrect reasons). I actually think that is the more pressing backup need than local files for many.
I'm sure it depends on needs. I have gigabytes of raw photos, videos, renders, stems, asset packs I can't count on being available from the original source, etc. I never need to access it on other computers, so they're not synced to services that charge a premium for space for the value of syncing, but I can grab a file outside a synced folder from the Backblaze website or app in a pinch.
I was under the impression that their business was $70/year to backup your whole computer (all drives, completely managed). Their backup service grew 23% yoy, so I wouldn't call it in decline.
Can you go into why Google Drive is a better alternative? I can see 2 TB for $100/yr, but I don't think the products are exactly the same.
First, the $70/year backup is for personal use and Mac and PC only.. they do have limits, they just don't tell you what they are and they throttle even though they say they don't. The clients suck and are closed source. Also, the restore functionality is terrible.
At least with Google Drive, the 2TB plan you can store what you want and access it in the cloud like a regular file. It works with rclone and restic, so you can use it for regular backups as well and it is extremely fast. I can upload over 750GB per day in about 3 hours with Google Drive, but it would take over 3 days with Backblaze.
Just curious, are you currently or have you been a Backblaze customer?
Yes, I was until I switched to restic and saved a bunch of money. I still get unlimited storage with G Suite. You can also get 6TB of annual storage with Office 365 family plan for $80 at Costco.
Backblaze is $70/yr unlimited.
Did you save $-10?
That type of backup does not work on Linux or for network attached drives. I guess if you are willing to run Windows on your NAS then it technically works but it's a pretty ugly hack and the 'sync' will happily delete files that are accidentally deleted or corrupted.
I'm assuming they're using the other features that Office 365 offers.
No, not really.. I just got the family plan to have a 2nd restic backup in addition to my Google Drive, since it was the cheapest storage option.
How can you save a bunch of money when Backblaze is dirt cheap?
People are confusing backup and sync. Backblaze will run an incremental backup of 20TB and 20GB for the same price, but you have to have 20TB or 20GB of storage attached to the backed up computer. It won't let you access files not on your computer without awkward workarounds, but it also doesn't charge the huge premium sync services charge for the storage.
Im sorry but how does that work? If the purpose of online backup is for your data to be stored online, why would you need 20TB or 20GB (or any amount) of storage attached to the backed up computer? Backblaze, or any other online backup service stores everything on their storage, elsewhere, and that's exactly the point: that if your entire house burns to the ground with all your computers and external drives etc, you have a cloud copy of all their content in a secure, password protected external location, and you can then download them elsewhere from online. As for sync, most online backup service seem to offer at least a basic version by which your local data syncs with your externally backed up data so that they incrementally stay identical.
If I'm misreading your comment somehow, please correct me. Maybe I misunderstood something.
What they're trying to say is "Backblaze backs up an unlimited amount from one computer - but you can't back up more data than you have on one computer. So if you have 1234 GB in Backblaze, you must have 1234 GB of disk space"
This is in contrast to other cloud storage services which might (for example) allow you to save space on your phone by uploading your old photos to the cloud and deleting the local copies.
Yep. The nice thing about it is you just run it, log in, and it'll quietly keep an incremental copy of everything on any drive you tell it to back up without you having to think about it. You don't have to know what the heck an r-sink is, it Just Works (in the way most Just Works things do). The catch is they aren't going to back up a drive they haven't seen in 30 days, or 6 months if the licensed system is offline for more than that long.
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...
If I really need a long-term cold backup, it costs about half as much yearly (with a half terabyte SSD) to copy the whole thing over to a B2 bucket and get rid of the live backup. That's what I'd do if I were going to Mars.
Thanks for the clarification!
Backblaze does actually have caps, even though they don't publish them and they throttle even though they say they don't.
If they do, it's so high as to not matter for any reasonable use and quite a few unreasonable ones.
In 2018 they published a graph showing a user with a backup over 400TB. If they have space limits, they must be pretty high!
It sounds like there's no cap. Do you have a source to the contrary?
Are you referring to Cloudflare's R2 storage? If so, I'm not sure that's completely comparable as Backblaze has a huge focus on backup systems, not just cloud storage.
[Edit: didn't realize Backblaze has cloud storage, I still think of them as the cloud backup company.]
Backblaze offers "B2" storage, which is also API compatible with S3 (and cheaper, no ingress/egress, etc). I think their focus is more long term storage (slow, infrequent access but cheap per unit).
Backblaze B2 charges egress (at 1 cent/gb) with the exception of egress to bandwidth alliance members, B2 storage served via cloudflare is interesting because it means no egress charges, but unless you're just using it to serve normal webpages you're probably breaking cloudflares TOS.
I had a chat with Cloudflare about this, and you can use it for hosting downloadable files or really anything you want for personal or commercial. I had used it as the backend for my photo app with 10s of gigs of downloads per month (not a lot, but enough to prove it was free and CF was fine with it).
B2 definitely has egress charges, unless you are going to one of their partners.
B2 also has a 1GB/day free egress allowance, which is what HashBackup uses to keep remote backup space optimized at no cost (I'm the author).
To be honest, I'm a Cloudflare fan.
But I think the niche between them is totally different.