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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?




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