Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/

by Hamuko • 3 years ago

23 13 3 years ago

smcleod6• 3 years ago

Backblaze has been good but me and several others I know are moving away due to not having a Linux client and being licensed per machine rather than per storage or user. It’s 2023 and we have lots of devices and a lot of people have a small home server they want to backup or just run Linux on their machines.

somsak2• 3 years ago

"A lot of people" don't have a Linux computer, and especially not a home server.

smcleod6• 3 years ago

Perhaps wherever you live that's not the case, but it's certainly is in Australia and New Zealand.

Statista shows 47% identifying as professionals in the field of software development use Linux-based operating systems.

Probably around 80% of the engineers I know in Melbourne Australia run macOS, with somewhere between 15-19% of remaining 20% running Linux (I think I've seen a dev running windows recently but I can't remember where).

berbec• 3 years ago

If you can mount your NAS as an iSCSI volume, you're golden.

https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/9chhz6/backblaze...

smcleod6• 3 years ago

Unfortunately macOS no longer has an iSCSI initiator.

someplaceguy2• 3 years ago

I backup my Linux systems to Backblaze using restic on a daily basis and I pay per storage used (and some cents for number of operations).

It's nice because I get zstd compression, smart deduplication, encryption, snapshots, multiple sets of backups to the same repo, daily random verification of backup data, etc.

I also do the exact same backups every day to (admittedly, underpowered) dedicated servers using borg but the restic backups always complete much faster.

And it's also pretty damn cheap.

Never had a problem, highly recommended, five stars***** (no affiliation).

smcleod6• 3 years ago

That sounds like you're not using backblaze backup - you might be using backblaze b2 storage? (s3 compatible object storage).

If so, how much (in your currency) does it cost you to backup say 3TB with daily (x7), weekly (x4), monthly (x12) snapshots available for a year?

Using their own calculator and assuming in a year you have a total of 10TB stored (3TB of "active" data and the rest point-in time) they estimate B2 to cost a whopping $1110AUD/yr.

mike503• 3 years ago

Was very sad to see the monthly cost rise from $5 to $9 over the history of the product. Same product, no real changes (I guess adding in more historical versioning, which was an additional cost, but now might be baked in)

Disk prices (which I would assume are their biggest vector to scale) has dramatically decreased since then.

I know there are other factors but it seems like nearly doubling the cost while cutting everything that is unlimited (except one product tier) and pushing everything else to consumption based - is a bit weird.

Their client seems super fast and efficient. I do enjoy that. But it too has had some odd limitations and for the most part I haven't had any changes to what I need from it from any perspective since it's been $5/mo. Certainly not with this new bump.

atYevP• 3 years ago

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

Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

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