How is Backblaze able to be so much cheaper than the other, larger competitors? I assume Amazon/Google/Microsoft has squeezed every last cent from suppliers and also has highly cost-optimized staffing costs.

Yev here -> great question! We are a bootstrapped company and we focus on inexpensive storage (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). Because we've built a robust system that doesn't use a ton of expensive components we can provide hot cloud storage (B2 Cloud Storage) and computer backup at an affordable rate while still making decent margins. To learn more about our business and decision making, we have a pretty cool series of entrepreneurship blog posts that might be interesting to some: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/entrepreneurship/

Reading about b2 pricing it says, you get "10GB of free storage, unlimited free uploads, and 1GB of downloads each day". Doesn't that amount to essentially free backups for (reasonable) personal use? Or am I missing something?

You aren't missing anything. I use B2 along with Restic to backup my Linux machines since their standard backup solution doesn't support Linux. It costs me around $1/month to backup my primary desktop and two laptops.

They had a blog post about doing this a while back, so they are definitely aware of the use case: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backing-linux-backblaze-b2-du...

I still use their standard backup service for my family's Windows machines since its more "batteries included".

I think even casual users tend to have more than 10GB of data these days.

I don't. Although I can easily fill up a terabyte drive, little of that is my own personal files that I need to keep if the drive blows up. Most of my stuff is source code, documents/notes and some photos (with photos being the only thing that takes up significant space). Almost everything else I can re-download or rebuild from the original source as and when I need it.

In total, sure, but at least for myself the really important stuff would fit in 10MB and I think I could fit all of the medium importance stuff in 1GB. The remaining terabytes are nice-to-have but I wouldn't be too upset if I lost it.

I'm over the 10GB free limit. It costs me about $1.50 a month to backup "irreplacable" data from my NAS.

Is there any consensus among Backblaze employees (or even just your personal opinion if applicable) for what brand/series of drives to use for home NAS devices?

I ask because the online favorite appears to be WD Reds, which you have phased out since 2018.

Yev here - it's interesting, we don't really chat about that often - what I would do is get the least expensive drive that has the most capacity and make sure the NAS is backed up somewhere in case of failure or theft. Personally I think the Toshiba drives are pretty good, but Seagates are affordable and do a good job. Plus there's always HGST which are rock-solid, but tend to run a bit more expensive.

Thank you Yev. I'm wondering about the bandwidth, especially internationally. Do you have any numbers on that? Say split by Europe/US/Other.

We do have a datacenter in the EU (Amsterdam) - and if you set up your account there you'll be able to transfer data to it. That's a popular destination for folks living closely to it, but even before that one went "live" we had lots of people using the our West Coast Data Centers without much issue. If you have a ton of data you can take a look at the Fireball (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball...) which allows you to rapidly ingest data to us.

What are you using as TCP congestion controller? BBR should provide better utilization on long pipes (e.g. transoceanic transfers if stuff isn't geo-replicated). Totally anecdotal, but it helped me FTPing data from the US to europe.

Yev here -> This question's beyond me, lemme see if I can get a dev on the line :D

*Edit - sounds like BBR is used in some of the environment!

(I need to quickly ship a 50mb file to 50,000 clients worldwide.)

Hey Michael, I host RAW photos I want to share inside B2 (48mb each), and then put CloudFlare in front of it using their tutorial [1]. It gets edge caching, and achieves 200-500mbps. Its great, and I have absolutely no complaints.

1: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...

@mherrmann - Only about 10-20GB, so not the TB levels you are dealing with, but backblaze isn't actually doing the transfer, it is CloudFlare.

@toomuchtodo - Yes, and on top of that, both B2 and CloudFlare are completely free since I'm under the 10gb storage limit (for now), and i'm a personal user of CloudFlare(for now).

Is your outbound data free because of the bandwidth alliance deal Cloudflare has with Backblaze?

Thank you; and how much data are you transferring each month?