I use B2 as the backend for my personal backups using restic (which I would highly recommend <a href="https://github.com/restic/restic">https://github.com/restic/restic</a>). I don't have a ton of data to backup, so even with hourly backups (restic only backs up when there are changes) I have ~100GB and it runs me a whopping $0.60/month. I almost feel guilty when I get the bill. But the minute I need to pick a storage platform in a professional context I know what my first choice will be.<p>(I am _not_ affiliated with Backblaze in anyway. Just a happy user)
We're so lucky that Backblaze creates these reports and shares them openly. That's not normal for companies to do and it's valuable for us consumers to get these insights.<p>Actually I'm referring to their drive stats and not their storage pod stats like in this report.<p>Thank you Backblaze.
Pricing can be funny!<p><pre><code> Total Data Stored Monthly Downloads Cost
1TB 1000TB $119,712/yr
1000TB 1000TB $72,000/yr
</code></pre>
What is the cheapest TDS for a given 1000TB monthly downloads?<p>Seems to be:<p><pre><code> 334TB 1000TB $24,048/yr
</code></pre>
So there are situations where uploading dummy files that pad with zeros will reduce your bill.<p>---<p>Edit: The 334 now seems obvious when you consider:<p>* Egress is $10/TB<p>* Store is $6/TB<p>Free Egress is 3x monthly data store. So egress costs $6/TB when you get it 'free' vs $10/TB, so you need it all free to get the cheapest egress, which means you need 1/3 storage that is egress. Any higher and your wasting money on storage!
I really wished Backblaze B2 worked better to be a real alternative to S3. The pricing is a middle finger to AWS and other providers.<p>However, we were having 1 outage per month with B2, and in the middle of 2023 we decided to go back to AWS and only use S3 for replication.<p>We still monitor both services simultaneously (S3 and B2), and every other month we are still having an episode where the latency rises from 15ms to something like 25 seconds for each write/read operation.
The most interesting thing here is the discussion about using vendor hardware instead of their own bespoke stuff.<p>My takeaway is that it's still essentially impossible to negotiate anywhere close to a fair price with commodity server vendors until you are buying hundreds of machines, and then only if you are capable of demonstrating that you are willing to design and build them yourself. And yet despite this, it's still cheaper than cloud even paying advertised prices.<p>Where do regular people buy servers without insane markup if you need say 10-20? Used to be I could actually buy supermicro barebones, but that ended a really long time ago.
Recently got a Synology and have been considering cloud backup needs. Mine would roughly be a terabyte, and so far my thinking is shaking out as:<p>For incrementally backing up laptop data, the process needs to run on my laptop anyway, so I may as well just use Arq.<p>For NAS data that changes frequently enough to desire incrementals, choose Synology Hyperbackup.<p>For NAS data that doesn't change frequently and can just be sync'd, choose Synology Cloud Sync.<p>For NAS data that you don't need locally and only need to archive, choose Synology Cloud Sync with one-way-sync. (Less hassle than AWS Glacier.)<p>As for the cloud provider itself, I'm think I'll probably go with Wasabi, at $6/TB. I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.<p>Main things giving me pause: minimum block size on Wasabi (I'm sure some of my files are smaller; don't know what sticker shock I'll experience), and unsure why I should consider a command line tool like restic instead of the above.
Backblaze have just given super micro and dell a fantastic customer reference- hoping they got a huge discount in exchange.<p>Dell/Supermicro sales guys: “look even the experts who build their own pods buy our servers”
>>>All 40 of the Dell servers which make up these two Vaults were relocated to the top of 52U racks, and it appears that initially they did not like their new location.<p>Or the way in which they were handled during the relocation?
I love these so I'm really sad to say this: What's missing is an AFR based on deployed time in increments, not total time.<p>For example: there should be a sliding window (or a histogram) relating to AFR after deployment for a time frame.<p>IE: AFR between 0-300 days, AFR between 301-600 days, AFR between 601-900 days (etc).<p>Otherwise we're looking at failures historically for the entire period, which might hide a spat of failures that consistently occur 3 years in, giving a relatively unfair advantage in numbers to newer drives.<p>That said, I really do love these and I hope they continue.
What's my best bet for cost-effective and convenient external local storage? I have a ton of photos and large videos which are consuming tens of GBs on my main computer's hard drive. Just get a cheap thumb flash drive?
If there is one company that could give accurate stats on what drives actually perform better and what drives are the worst and fail more often it is Black Blaze, but yet they don't. What a missed opportunity to provide some insight.
Boooo! No drive manufacturer names and model numbers. This is totally useless data for anyone so it's absolutely pointless to blog about.<p><a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2023/" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...</a> contains the necessary data, but it seems old.<p>I don't know why they're buying COTS server gear because their whole premise was the economy-of-scale of having their own pods made. I don't understand why they don't go to Quanta or Foxxconn to build them whatever they need because Dell is really just a marketing front like CDW that relies heavily on third-party contract designers and major component manufacturing, and then only does final assembly itself.