On a side note, I'm a very happy Backblaze customer and the same time curse Dropbox for not offering a 100GB $5/mn plan. Backblaze pricing is very customer friendly.
As far as pricing goes, $5 per month for 100GB seems steep. SpiderOak offers 400GB for less than that and so does Nordlocker (though Nord has its own problems). On the other hand, iDrive has been offering a whopping 5 terabytes for a whole year for just $3.98 in a deal I saw just a few days ago.
Overall, zero knowledge backup is the best route, Backblaze plays at that, on the other hand I wouldn't touch any backup offering by Google with a 10 meter cattle prod. Grotesque that they reserve the right to snoop right through your files unless you first encrypt them externally via third party apps.
You are not forced to backup your entire hard-drive. There is a 3rd party program called: rclone
That program let's you choose which files/directories get copied over to BackBlaze. We have 150+TB (+10TB/week) stored at BackBlaze and I use rclone exclusively to upload our content for backup.
Note, it's a CLI program that works on Linux/BSD. I'm not aware of any other platforms that it works on.
Idk about on first run, but I'm pretty sure you can pick and choose which drives it scans, including boot drive, and set up excludes as needed (handy to avoid backing up .git or node_modules)
I was thinking about B2.
Unfortunately services where you can backup whatever files for fixed price attract "data hoarders" - people who are storing data just for the sake of storing it.
This is not accurate, please see my response to helloworld11
At some point, I'd imagine it's an optimization problem between (cost of failure) vs (liquidation value) vs (revenue per GB), where running them all the way into the dirt doesn't make sense. Or maybe it does?
But this is a SaaS, working with recurring revenue.
Some metrics to consider are:
- Cost of Customer Acquisition
- Lifetime Value
They could spend 200$ to get an average customer, but they will renew their subscription for an average of 5 years and generate over 2000$ in revenue during that time.
As long as you keep track of these metrics you know you're in a good direction or digging yourself a hole.
Besides other costs R&D, Admin, Marketing and Sales can be scaled up and down as needed, and become a smaller part of the costs as the company grows.
2) I agree: Their incredibly hard drive reliability reports are like catnip! Here is a sample post if others don't know about these reports: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...
1) 2.5kWh per month of drive-on power. Datacenter grade power: 30-40c/kWh normalized =~ $1.00 in power per drive. 2) 60 drives per 4U space. 10 storage pods per 1 rack. 600 drives per rack. full rack in a colocation facility: $250-$500 =~ $0.40-0.80 in physical space.
Total cost per year to keep that drive up is, very ballpark, $16-22. The cost of running the drive is minimal vs the initial cost of $500 for the drive and storage server/rack/installation/network equipment etc. Network costs to transfer data from/to that drive are obviously nontrivial but again, the majority of the hurdle is outlay for capital.
If you consider they bought & added, net of depreciation, about $16M of assets to their balance sheet in 2020, the loss of 6M doesn't seem terrible. Using the bean counter approach - no new marketing, no spending on growth, no unnecessary R&D - they could have cleared about $20-25M of ebit in 2020.
Deciding to use your gross profit to fuel further growth (especially considering they're compounding it at a healthy rate and doing so without giving up equity or interest) is a wise move. If anything, it probably would have made sense to take some debt or finance more of the hardware purchases early on (as I see they are doing now at some scale as of 2020) in order to put those proceeds towards customer growth.
The only thing I see which is a marginal concern with these numbers is that it's difficult to see the split between marketing spend on b2 customers and backup customers (They spent $8M in 2019 on sales and marketing to generate 42k new customers, and $11.9M in 2020 to add 40k). It is very possible and likely that those marketing dollars went towards new enterprise customers (on b2 storage vs backup) and the revenue-per-customer number increasing during that timeframe seems to support that. Are blog posts calculated in the sales/marketing spend? Seems lots of the customers came from the organic content play.
Very cool to see the company who's free blog post about which harddrives are most reliable (when some had >5% annual failure rate and others <1% for the same price) nearly 10 years ago come around to s1.