Backblaze has two creative advantages that keep their costs low:

1) they do their own metal fabrication and make their own server chassis
2) they use solely consumer-grade commodity hard drives

As a result, 2TB of data storage for them is $50 with a MTBF of 3 years.  I don't believe they do any mirroring, just parody as well.  So, unlike many other backup providers there is an actual risk that your data could disappear due to multiple drive failures.

However, these guys are the big data of hard drive failures and basically publish who's the best at reliability in the hdd realm (HGST has been king for a while).  They do pretty good work with their arrays.

Also, they've open-sourced their 4U chassis design (it's call the blazepod) and you can build one yourself (stores about 250TB of data when built) for about $300-500 plus the cost of drives.  Seek time is awful, but this is solely a cold-storage solution.

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Anon Anon <lokotejones@gmail.com> wrote:

I am hearing that they throttle the shit out of up and down. Plus some mysterious hidden fee for downloads. Word of mouth from another programmer.


On Oct 25, 2016 2:26 PM, "Tom Roche" <Tom_Roche@pobox.com> wrote:

Stephen Partington[1]
> https://secure.backblaze.com/buy.htm

I'd appreciate someone enlightening me regarding Backblaze's business model. Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but when I see ...

https://secure.backblaze.com/buy.htm
> Unlimited Data for your Mac and PC. [5 $/mo, 50 $/yr.] Prices are per computer.

... my bullshit meter pegs. I'm guessing Backblaze's reasoning/practice is like that pioneered by various ISPs and telcos who promise "unlimited data" transfers to users: if any particular user's data transfers exceed some threshold, throttle their data rate. A data storage provider would modify that to something like, "sure, you can *try* to store more than [threshold quantity] of data here, but your backup transfer rate will go to hell, and restore? fuggedaboudit."

Or am I just ignorant of some great technological advance made, and of the service to humanity provided, by Backblaze?

HTH, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche@pobox.com>

[1]: http://lists.phxlinux.org/lurker/message/20161025.155052.ef4e20fc.en.html
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