Yup. Just like every other cloud company: hook people cheap, get them super dependent, and then go public telling investors they'll make a goldmine when you jack prices.

The extra fun bit is that just exfiltration will cost you.

Don't even need to go public! Take $1 billion in VC cash to build an app that can't possibly make that much revenue then lock people in with long term contracts.

We use multiple great SaaS tools that in the last two years have removed DIY 'tiers' or 'plans' billing you can do online and forced us to sign yearly contracts, deal with pushy sales reps, and changed to opaque and stupid complicated pricing.

Oracle behavior! we have no choice but to bend over.

They are great tools which is why they can do this ;)

Fortunately you likely don't have to pay for that for personal accounts. B2 - sure. Backups? Just make a new one and leave the BB account running for a couple of months - for most people keeping backups beyond 2 months is just not useful.

They've already put prices up once, but are still supremely affordable for a "fire and forget" backup service.

Sure, you can probably do it cheaper with your "friend with a hard drive" solution, but there's zero redundancy there, you'll need to replace the hard drive when it eventually goes bad etc. etc.

For some people that's a tradeoff worth making, but for me, a few extra $ a month for peace of mind is worth it.

Tried rsync.net?

They were talking about switching if they got more expensive and rsync.net is already a lot more expensive unless you have very little data (<300GB).

rsync.net is a very different product though.

I recently evaluated a bunch of cloud storage/backup services. rsync.net is a ssh-accessible ZFS filesystem (including support for zfs send/recv) in the cloud, B2 is object storage.

rsync.net has a cheaper version aimed at people doing borg backups. Unfortunately it's still 3x the cost of B2 for 1TB of data.

I currently use B2 for my offsite backups, only around 1.5TB, using rclone. Works well and costs just under $7/mo.

I looked at rsync.net and really liked the idea, but costing 5x as much just doesn't justify the features.

Where do they offer the 3x cost solution? Cheapest pricing I can find is 2.5cents/GiB/mo (the 5x price).

You need to look at their pages for specific tools, e.g. for Borg Backup: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html (starts from 1.5 Cents Per GB / Month)

It's not just that. It's also that I don't really trust anything centralized anymore, and internet speeds are such that homegrown solutions are becoming more and more attractive. Another benefit is that I'll also be able to easily backup my Linux machines, which BB currently does not support. At the moment I just periodically copy data to windows on cron so that it's backed up - not ideal to say the least.

I back things up to Backblaze B2 from Linux using borg. It works really well and it's incredibly cheap. I'm paying less than $1/month to keep about 155GB of data there. About half the data is from Borg backups, the other is rcloned copies of my music files.

What's your process for backing up to B2 using borg?

I'm currently doing borg backups to a local server, then using restic to back up my borg backups to B2. My reason for using restic over rclone is so that if the local backup is corrupted I've got history on the remote to fall back to.

I'm hoping to find a less cumbersome way to do this.

Why not just use restic directly to back up?

That was my plan, but restic doesn't do compression so that would increase costs and backup time.

Some use-cases, like photo libraries, won't benefit much from compression, so I may use restic directly for those.

Rclone only uploads/overrides the remote if the meta-data (size/date/etc) shows a difference. Most disk corruption doesn't change these so it still works as a corruption backup.

I'm worried, in part, about files getting deleted. If I delete or otherwise lose my repository, rclone will helpfully delete it on the other side. Some amount of deletion is expected, like when borg prunes the old stuff out, so having rclone not delete anything might not be an option either.

I'm sure there are ways to manage this though, I just haven't figured them out yet.

Ah, looking more close, I'm just using rclone to put the backups on B2. So first I do a backup to a local drive, then I run `borg with-local ... rclone sync ...`.

Ah, ok. That's basically what I'm doing, except I'm using restic instead of rclone.

I've done borg for local backups for a while and figured I could just replace it with restic, then I discovered that restic doesn't do compression so I just pointed that at the borg repositories.

I'll probably use restic directly for things that don't benefit from compression and continue to use borg for things that do.

I'm open to better options though, layering two tools that basically do the same thing seems like a bit of a hack job.

What would happen if your backup harddrive at your friends' place was stolen / destroyed / went bad?

I'd have to send him another hard drive, obviously.

25 dollars per TiB/mo? LOL.

Try backupsy. Good prices.