
Backblaze cuts B2 download price in half - pbowyer
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-drops-download-price-in-half/
======
AdmiralAsshat
I debated switching to Backblaze after CrashPlan's home plan was removed, but
they don't appear to have an option to let me send them an external HDD to
"seed" the backup, and that's a deal-breaker for me.

I have 4TB of media to backup. My ISP will throttle/penalize me if I
download/upload more than 1 TB per month, assuming I do absolutely nothing
else with my internet connection. Even assuming I devote 80% of bandwidth to
just the backup, it will take me 4-6 months of metered transfers, while paying
for their service, before I actually have a "complete" backup with them.

~~~
jbob2000
I'm curious to know your use case for backing up that much data.

I have this idea in my head that some people are digital pack rats and want to
save every movie and series they pirate off the internet in case the
apocalypse happens and they desperately need to re-watch an episode of
Friends.

Is it uncompressed video? (Why would you back that up to the cloud?) Is it
family media? (How many baby pictures did you take???). I honestly have no
idea how someone collects 4 TB of data that is worthy enough to back up.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
You're right, the private data that I choose to preserve is objectively
worthless. I shall relay your findings to my family.

"Sorry, Mom, I can't help you watch that _Mork and Mindy_ collection on your
bedroom-TV Roku. Someone On the Internet informed me that my digital
collections are not worthy of keeping, and I dutifully deleted them."

"No, sweetie, we absolutely _cannot_ share your childhood with our daughter
and watch my digital rip of Fraggle Rock. Good parents delete their abhorrent
_digital media_ and pay HBO Go $15/month for the privilege of viewing it!"

"What are you _thinking_ , keeping those hundreds of CD's and Vinyl's we
ripped together on your iPhone, Dad? You can chuck all that crap that we
actually own and pay a monthly fee to Spotify for the privilege of streaming
it! Unless, of course, the publisher decides to pull their collection off of
Spotify, for whatever reason."

"Hey, guys, now that we're all moved out of the house, we need to talk about
the Nintendo 64. Mom and Dad bought it for all of us, so I think it's only
fair that we keep the physical console at their place so that no one of us
will have exclusive access to it. As for the games, I think each of us should
be allowed to take the cartridges with us that we individually paid for and/or
receives as gifts. So that'll be me taking Super Mario 64, Majora's Mask,
Super Smash Bros, Star Fox 64, and NBA: Hangtime; Steve takes Goldeneye,
Ocarina of Time, Perfect Dark, and Donkey Kong 64; and Fred takes Mario Party,
Pokemon Stadium, Mario Kart, and Banjo Kazooie. Yeah, I know, I do wish there
were some kind of _legal backup_ method that might let us all enjoy the games
we collectively owned. Oh well. Maybe Nintendo will release an N64 Classic and
we can each pay $80 to play the games we already paid for. Assuming the games
we own appear on the collection."

~~~
derekp7
I think the idea is that if it is possible / easy to re-obtain the media, then
you don't need to back it up (i.e., if it was obtained via bittorrent).

A second classification is data that isn't changing -- you can create a couple
backups of that media, store one in a bank safe deposit box, maybe ship
another backup to a family member across the country.

Then you have recent acquisitions and ongoing projects -- those are what you
would sync daily to an online backup service. So you still have offsite backup
of everything, but by splitting up the categories, you end up not needing to
sync that much online.

------
benchess
Not all bandwidth is created equal. Different providers can have widely
different levels of performance. Higher-priced bandwidth _can_ also be better
bandwidth.

Cloud providers haven't done a great job of explaining this so far, but Google
Cloud's Network Service Tiers product is a good attempt at why they charge
more for bandwidth, and how you can get it for cheaper:
[https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/](https://cloud.google.com/network-
tiers/)

That said, cheap (and presumably slower) bandwidth may be the right target for
B2, given that it's customers are probably using it for backups and private
storage rather than, say, serving a website serving photos to millions of
visitors from around the globe.

So comparing AWS or Google transfer costs directly to B2 isn't necessarily a
fair comparison, depending on your needs.

------
BartBoch
Can HN users share their experience with B2? I wanted to use them as a backup
backup solution since their pricing is close to what getting your own leased
server would be.

Also, are there ready solutions for B2 and incremental backups of Ubuntu
server?

~~~
briffle
duplicati [0] (at least beta 2) can backup to it, however, I use Google cloud
storage with it, since B2 is a single datacenter. I like a bit of extra
paranoia, even if it is backups. I hear they are spinning up a second one, but
not sure how multi-Region storage will work.

[0] [https://www.duplicati.com/](https://www.duplicati.com/)

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> since B2 is a single datacenter

Backblaze now has three datacenters spread about (two in Sacramento area 50
miles apart, and one datacenter in Phoenix). However, if you store exactly one
file in B2, it will land in one of those three datacenters. Very soon we will
allow you to choose which of the three datacenters your one file lands in.

> I like a bit of extra paranoia

So do I, and I would NEVER keep a valuable piece of data in only one
datacenter with only one vendor. My advice to my closest friends is you value
a piece of data highly, you should have three copies with three separate
vendors and technologies. For example, one copy on your local laptop, one copy
in Amazon S3, and one copy in Backblaze B2. You might also make sure the
Amazon S3 is not hosted in the same building as the Backblaze B2.

Since Backblaze B2 does not share a single line of code with Amazon S3 and no
employees and a different billing system, this means a bug or network outage
or malicious employee inside Amazon S3 won't affect your copy in Backblaze B2.
For bonus points, use two different credit cards to pay for it that expire at
different times. If you forget to pay your Amazon S3 bill, they will delete
your data for sure.

~~~
loxias
> > I like a bit of extra paranoia

> ... three separate vendors and technologies ...

> ... does not share a single line of code with ...

> ... use two different credit cards ...

This person legit thinks about failure modes.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> we think about failures ALL the time...

------
piracykills
Great service - combine with restic for secure and cheap backups with
automatic deletion.

I went from only affording to backup the most important files with Tarsnap to
just backing up / with B2. It's the difference between $1/mo and $50/mo.

------
gregf
I use backblaze for my backups with restic and enjoy it, but their service is
just so slow I'm now looking at giving digitalocean a try instead. Transfers
both up and down are painfully slow even on a 1Gbit connection.

~~~
votepaunchy
Where do you connect from? Backblaze only has one datacenter, in Sacramento,
CA [1].

[1] [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-
center/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/)

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> We have 3 data centers located in Sacramento and
Phoenix, hoping to increase that soon!

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tyingq
I would guess this is a reaction to Digital Ocean's object storage, which is
also $0.01 per gb downloaded.

~~~
newsat13
The great thing about DO storage is that it is S3 API compatible. The not-so-
great thing is that DO has serious stability issues. Try deleting 1000 files
and the backend just gets stuck for like 5 minutes :/ Make more than 100 calls
and you get rate limited. DO does not acknowledge how serious the issues are.
Not sure how B2 API performs.

------
rconti
Cool! I'm using them to store my Time Machine backups from my Synology. The
first month I burned through about 3TB of my 1TB with comcast, but that's the
only month I went over my 'cap' (they have 2 months' grace period).

The only problem I have is that my Time Machine backups change too much --
for, say, 400MB of data being backed up in time machine, it seems like the
deltas (and what is synced to backblaze) is something like 4GB. I'm using the
CloudSync functionality from Synology -- I think the issue is with Time
Machine, not with CloudSync, though.

What this means is I'd regularly exceed my data cap if I let me CloudSync run
all the time. As a workaround, I've scheduled it to only run between midnight
and noon on Mondays, which results in syncing less data (apparently the deltas
must contain a lot of duplicate data that doesn't have to be synced up to
BackBlaze when I only do it a few times a week).

Of course, now my problem is I'm afraid that I'm risking the integrity of my
backups because the schedule might cut off my sync in the middle of a run.
Since I leave my home computers off during the day, though, there shouldn't be
new deltas occuring as I'm syncing to backblaze, so once it catches up (and 12
hours is enough to catch up), there is no more activity.

~~~
chrisper
I'd recommend you to look into borg backup for your important data. It has
deduplication and such making the deltas rather small.

------
chx
Plain and simple: you won me. I am hosting (covering the cost out of my own
pocket) a very interesting motley collection of pictures of Hungarian history,
our first sister site is
[http://fortepan.us/about/](http://fortepan.us/about/) you can get a feel what
it's like and I have been carefully watching for affordable professional
backup solutions. Yeah, the unlimited google drive is nice but it's also a
hack and they don't really support this at all.

I had my eyes on B2 because the storage costs were within budget but didn't
switch our backup to it because if we ever needed to download it, well, what
then, it was too expensive.

I will upload our 100k / 2TB or so photos the weekend. Awesome.

Now I am reviewing this... you are now on BunnyCDN level of download pricing.
Are you like a CDN or does every European download need to cross the Atlantic?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Have you considered uploading your corpus to the Internet Archive? If not,
would you like help doing so?

~~~
chx
OMG that would be fantastic! Yes please! chx1975 gmail com finds me. Thanks!

------
post_break
Backblaze still won't let you label a snapshot. It's so frustrating when I've
got say folder A, B, C, and I take a snapshot of each, I have no way to tell
which snapshot is which. And god forbid those folders are 100GB in size. This
is my only gripe with them.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> very interesting! We'll look in to this.

~~~
post_break
Yeah please fix it. We won't use snapshots since they are only labeled with
the time you create them. It's a joke.

------
fokinsean
I'm about to set up a NAS device at home for personal storage am looking at
cloud providers for an offsite backup. I was originally going to send stuff to
AWS glacier since my offsite backup is pretty much only going to be for
disaster recovery (fire/theft etc).

This is my first time seeing Backblaze and it looks appealing, does any one
have any opinions on using it vs glacier/s3?

For context I currently have less than 1TB of data I need to store and I don't
expect to upload more than a few GB per month.

Also would I use B2 or the unlimited personal storage?

------
bluedino
Is this as simple as, "we did market research and we found people wanted to
use the service, but didn't want to pay very much?"

Or, was it, "the performance (or some other factor) isn't worth using the
service at the current price"

I mean, charging 1/9th of the amount that Amazon does sounds incredible. I'm
guessing Amazon has lower costs but it also seems like they're just giving it
away now.

~~~
ryanlol
>I mean, charging 1/9th of the amount that Amazon does sounds incredible. I'm
guessing Amazon has lower costs but it also seems like they're just giving it
away now.

Shop around, bandwidth costs _nothing_. Amazon & Co. simply charge insane
prices. Backblaze will charge you $3285 if you download at 1gbit/s for a month
straight, you can get a gbit line for 10th of that.

~~~
tyingq
This is really the dirty secret for the big 3 cloud providers. Their egress
charges have huge margins. I’m hoping that smaller players like Digital Ocean
reaching up, and better competition across the big 3 starts to push egress
pricing back into a more reasonable level.

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> dirty secret for the big 3 cloud providers. Their egress charges have huge
> margins.

I don't know about the other providers, but Backblaze buys bandwidth at about
2/10ths of 1 cent per GByte right now, and it drops by maybe 10% per year. We
look around hard for inexpensive bandwidth, and then make sure we always have
redundant network providers and redundant paths. That's all blended into the
2/10ths of 1 cent per GByte cost basis.

Part of this is complicated by any "spikiness" in network traffic. Network
providers sell bandwidth based on things like "95% of peak traffic". So the
2/10ths of 1 cent per GByte is based on an assumption that overall the
outbound traffic is perfectly flat. It would be more expensive to Backblaze if
"most days" the outbound traffic was 200 Gbits/sec but once every 7 days it
spiked to 400 Gbits/sec for 25 hours then dropped again. In that case
Backblaze is hit with a bill for 400 Gbits/sec sustained for the entire
billing period (a month), but customers did not use it up in a "flat" fashion
so it eats into our margin.

Luckily, since Backblaze supports hundreds of thousands of different
individual customers, it appears mostly "flat" to us in aggregate. The five
week days tend to be about 10% higher network use than the weekends, but other
than that it is all super flat and regular (so far).

~~~
tyingq
Yes, I wasn't talking about your $0.01/GB egress charges.

Amazon, for example, starts at $0.15/GB. It drops down with more volume, but
it's obviously gouging to a ridiculous level.

~~~
brianwski
> Amazon starts at $0.15/GB and drops with more volume.

Which has ALWAYS baffled me about Amazon's pricing. I would have thought they
price it the REVERSE where it is low price at first, and rises. For example,
start with a "low introductory rate for the first Petabyte" to get small
businesses addicted to Amazon services while Amazon still makes a (solid)
profit, then when the small business grows into a large business that requires
more than a Petabyte of data Amazon would increase the price because: 1)
scaling is hard and does cost money, and 2) a company looks into the future
and says "heck, if we reach a Petabyte we're making so much money we can
AFFORD the higher Amazon rates", and 3) as a company grows quickly they have
so many other problems they won't prioritize getting off Amazon, especially if
Amazon is scaling well for them.

Related side note: scaling really does cost extra money. For our online backup
business, almost no customers have more than 10 million files in any one
"backup" (each backup is "per laptop") so as programmers we can use any data
structure we like to browse those files, a flat list IS FINE. But for B2, a
large customer might have 1 billion files in one "bucket", and so we have to
be a HECK of a lot smarter about how we organize that data so that the
customer can still sign in with a web browser and view them all. For
Backblaze, that meant moving up to a clustered hash database called Cassandra,
and deploying (so far) about 50 1U computers, each with two CPUs, each with
fast SSDs and a layer of complicated code to manage all of it. So the scaling
requirements of the Personal Backup client required 0 extra servers, but at B2
scale it requires an additional $175,000 worth of equipment. Scale costs extra
money.

------
johnflan
Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans?

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> Are Backblaze planning on offering solutions for europeans?

About 15% of our business comes from Europe today, and we collect VAT tax
accurately for all Europeans as required by European law. So if you are
willing to encrypt your data in Europe and send it encrypted WITHOUT the
encryption keys to store it encrypted in B2 (zero knowledge) in the USA, then
Backblaze would love to have your European encrypted data.

If you are asking when Backblaze is going to open a European datacenter where
you can guarantee your encrypted data sits on disks inside of Europe, we are
hoping to open that datacenter in 2018 (this year).

~~~
johnflan
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that announcement.

