Took a quick look at the API. For context, I was involved in the early days of Google Cloud Storage.<p>It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API -- at least for common object/bucket create/delete. This will require more code to be written and it will be harder to adapt client libraries.<p>The API documentation is here: <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/</a><p>Other notes:<p>* The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL followed by doing the actual upload.<p>* They <i>require</i> a SHA1 hash when uploading objects. This is probably overkill over a cheaper CRC. In addition, it means that users have to make 2 passes to upload -- first to compute the hash and then another to upload. This can slow uploads of large objects dramatically. A better method is to allow users to omit the hash and return it in the upload response. Then compare that response with a hash computed while uploading. In the rare case that the object was corrupted in transit, delete/retry. GCS docs here: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#checksum-validation" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#che...</a>
Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most <i>useful</i> announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead "<i>we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z</i>" -- nice job.
In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth.<p>There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled. I don't know how many users they have to tell you how much bandwidth they're actually handling, but can they handle people using B2 as a distribution point for large files for customers? For example, I have a huge S3/CF monthly bill from customers downloading ~400MiB ISO images tens thousands of times a month. Amazon CloudFront is ~$0.085/GB for the first TB, while BackBlaze B2 is an incredible $0.05/GB - but at what performance? Will my technical support representatives be getting angry phone calls about halting download speeds or do they have the capacity for something like this?<p>Hosting the world's data is no tiny task, I hope they're ready for it and I do, truly, wish them all the luck. I've been a BackBlaze customer for a few years now (at least 5 or 6, I imagine) as a tertiary or quaternary backup (haven't had to restore... yet), and B2 looks and sounds promising, but as far as technical details go, this post is nothing.<p>EDIT: In response to the reply below, I believe it's throttled by default in the client, though that can be turned off in the application settings. Also, you've replied to my claims of throttling but have ignored my question regarding backbone capacity and network readiness...
I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2.<p>Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/</a><p>Gleb
Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual.<p>Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though, so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup scheme is, for example (though it seems pretty simple - <a href="https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt</a>). I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure. It's probably good enough for my use, given that I'm not storing state secrets or anything, but it's still a little unsettling to 'lose control' of one's data.<p>From Backblaze's point of view, I guess this is either smart (diversifying themselves–people can use other backup software if they like, and Backblaze still profits) or less smart (turning themselves into a commodity), but it seems like their software is still first rate, so I guess it'll work for them.
For context, OVH offers object storage with 3x replication for $.01/GB [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml" rel="nofollow">https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml</a>
The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.
Fair warning: Backblaze has a habit of making major changes silently (without any indication to the user), and their customer support is TERRIBLE. I was a customer for several years and never had a positive interaction with their support staff. The final straw was losing several files last year after they changed their backup method without notifying users, a method that contradicted their documentation. I got full IDGAF treatment from their support. That's right - a backup solution failed to backup, then support basically shrugged and said "your loss, too bad, so sad" when I contacted them <i>even though they admitted it was their fault.</i><p>Buyer beware when it comes to Backblaze.
Reading the API, it seems that I need to precalculate a SHA-1 before uploading? This makes it impossible to stream data to b2 from another source, I'll need to store it first then send to b2.
Finally some more reasonable prices in this space.<p>Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.
The price is being heralded as the thing to get excited about, but I'm also very concerned about the security and availability of my data. I suppose those details are somewhere, but they're not in this article which is quite lengthy.<p>I would like to know more of the implementation of this and more information on policies to protect access to my data. And I would like to know where the data is stored. I suppose I got read the manual, but maybe some info tidbits could be included in the announcement.
You should allows period (.) in your signup form email field. I know you can just remove the period and the email will still get delivered to my gmail, but plenty of people likely don't know this.
One feature that I'd love to see: the ability to update part of a file (e.g. replace bytes 512-1023 with new content of the same length) and/or append to an existing file! For whatever reason, these cloud storage products are always implemented as either block-based (so you can replace parts of the file) or as file-based (so you can create a hierarchy of files with names and metadata). Why can't I have my cake and eat it??
I couldn't tell from the docs, but is it possible (or will it be possible) to generate a single use download URL to return to clients? I wouldn't want to have to pay double for outbound traffic going from B2 -> my server -> client.
Real attention to detail in this announcement. I signed up right away.<p>If there's attention to detail with one thing, odds are you'll find it in other places, too.
cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99:
0 results.<p>Only on <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html</a> it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit more specific.
Nine months ago, I said the following. It feels good to predict things before they happen:<p><i>Backblaze should expand their service to a cheaper cloud storage service similar to Amazon S3. They already have the infrastructure and the know-how.</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119</a>
Just yesterday I was discussing with a friend that I'd like to use Backblaze as backend for our zero-knowledge backup at <a href="https://cloudfleet.io" rel="nofollow">https://cloudfleet.io</a> and that I'll ask them for a metered pricing model when we're big enough.<p>And voilá ... here it is.
Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.
Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets? Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket?<p>Just curious as to why I would migrate from S3 for FE assets to Backblaze.
Are there any plans to add application hosting along with this offering? Specifically, it could be useful to have a shim application that has direct access to the data without traversing the Internet, to minimize what needs to be transferred. For example, if used for a backup application, each day's incremental delta may be in one archive, but a periodic operation would be to move files from one archive to another. Or a full system restore may be pulling some data out of multiple archives, and a "shim" app (running within Backblaze's data center) would eliminate unnecessary transfers out.
What provider does Backblaze use for SMS verification? I'm using a Twilio number and it seems that the two disagree with each other. (It might be due to short-code use, but I'm not sure what their outbound number is.)
Good lord, that's affordable! I cannot <i>wait</i> until someone writes a Duplicity[1] backend for this... :-D<p>1 <a href="http://duplicity.nongnu.org/" rel="nofollow">http://duplicity.nongnu.org/</a>
Looks like you still don't accept customers from Montenegro. "For security reasons, we are blocking your country's IP address." Why?
This is a really cool service, I can already think of a few cool uses for this. I once participated in a project (movie to gif library), and one of the biggest constraints was the cost of cloud storage - hopefully more competition in this space can drive prices down to where they become even more negligible.
Please tell me you're working on a PowerShell module. Microsoft is pushing PowerShell HARD (because it's awesome) and admins that do use it know its power and want ALL their vendors to use it.<p>You can open yourself up to a large number of customers by making it easy to get started via PowerShell.
Congratulations on the launch! And I am also happy to announce, that the official command line tool, b2, is already ported to FreeBSD: <a href="http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/</a>
For me, the signup page loaded once but now I get redirected to a 404 page at <a href="http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html</a> when trying to load the signup page.
This is awesome! I've been waiting for this for awhile.<p>I saw the comment about getting drives shipped to you, which is pretty neat, but what about the other way? I have about 50 TB of data we'd like to store, but only 5mbps upstream. Can we ship drives to you?
I didn't see this - are data centres available in different regions? Or is this a US-centric offering?<p>I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were <i>very</i> slow.
Great stuff.<p>What's the setup for file permissions? Can I have multiple people writing to the same bucket? Can I restrict deletion & write rules?
I asked Arq support if / when it would support B2 and got this reply:<p>Hi Robert,<p>I don’t know whether or not Arq will be integrated with B2.<p>- Stefan
> Downloads are just $0.05/GB<p>Can anyone compare that to other similar providers? While the storage is cheap, it seems more useful for cold storage.