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Absolutely agree with you - I think CrashPlan/BackBlaze are acting entirely reasonably when they delete old hard drives, particularly if they give a bit of grace after sending the email that they are about to nuke them.

It's that just for some of us, who like to archive something like a 100 GB Hard Drive onto Amazon Glacier, for $0.007/GB/Month. (Roughly $0.70/month + $5 upload fees for a 100 GB Hard Drive Archive) - and just leave it there, presumably for decades, are better served by Arq + Glacier than we are by CrashPlan/BackBlaze - they are entirely different tools for different purposes.

On the Flip Side, backing up users two 5+ Terabyte Hard Drives on S3 with Arq gets a little pricey... How crashplan/backblaze manage to do it for $5 is beyond me. Presumably it's because most its users are sending in < 100 Gigabytes (after deduping)



Yev from Backblaze here -> Absolutely. They key difference is backup vs. archive. Backblaze was designed as a backup solution, it's intended to be a 1:1 copy of your user data, and if your data set changes we change it on our end as well, with a 30-day history for accidental deletes. We need to reclaim that space to keep costs down, and we're not intended nor designed to be an archive (keeping data forever).

Backblaze B2 is designed differently and can be used as an archival system. The philosophies are different, but one of the reasons that we created it was to give folks the option of making actual archives they could keep in the cloud.

We hit the $5/month price-point by having our own server design, and by reclaiming space on occasion when data sets are removed. On the B2 side, since you're paying per GB, we can afford to keep that data for longer stretches. Hopefully Arq will integrate with B2 in the future and you'd be able to use their system to pick and choose what you want archived and have B2 as a possible repository.


Thanks for the clarification.

These pages make it clear how it works and it seems reasonable:

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665398-Backi...

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664898-What-...


I think your comparison is out of date [1], AWS S3 infrequent access has $0.0125 per GB now not $0.022+ that you have listed. Of course yours is still much better with $0.005 per GB.

Also, it does not look like you have any kind of consumer offering for it, as I have to contact sales to get anything at all. So there's really no point for Arq to even try adding support. I like your prices though.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html


We don't write out the infrequent access pricing as it's not what we're competing with, also why we don't price out Nearline or Glacier, it's not at 1:1 for what we're trying to offer. The consumer offering is available from the docs: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/. You can use the web interface if you want, or tie in with CLIs/APIs. The sales channel is primarily for people that want to integrate it in to the apps that they are building. Hope that clears some things up!


”On the Flip Side, backing up users two 5+ Terabyte Hard Drives on S3 with Arq gets a little pricey”

I send my Arq backups to Amazon Cloud Drive using the ”unlimited” plan. It costs $59.99/year. So far I have only backed up < 100 GiB however, so I don’t know how well it handles backups that are multiple TiB.

[Edited to correct confusing typo.]


Well, I am fairly certain that Amazon S3 will handle multi-terabyte backups, mostly because their pricing tiers are for 1 TB, 50TB, 500 TB, 1 Petabyte, 4 Petabytes, and 10 Petabytes - and they make more money the more you store. Performance (at least in Singapore) is also pretty awesome if you have a gigabit connection.

I'll be interested in hearing of any experiences (particularly around performance) of someone attempting to backup on the order of 10 TBytes on the Amazon Cloud Drive. My guess is that if more than very few people do this, then either (A) Amazon puts an end to "unlimited" (and yes, I appreciated the scare quotes), or, (B) They rate limit uploads after a certain size to the point at which it just frustrates people.

For some of us, dealing with a vendor who finds greater usage on your part to be a desirable behavior, such that they actually give you price breaks the more you use, creates a business relationship that is worth more than the several hundred dollars/year you'll end up saving. (Of course, this is coming from the guy who has a $36/year AWS bill, $24 of which is S3 storage)

(Side note - When talking about Storage, it's very rare to use GiB/TiB - Data rates and Storage are almost always GB or TB).




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