Hey there! Great question. We use our own storage infrastructure called Storage Vaults (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect... we build on top of our Storage Pods (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...). That means we can store a lot of data, at a lower Cost per GB than a lot of folks, and we pass the savings on to our customers. Of course we have some customers that store WAY more than we break-even on, but we also have A LOT more customers with a more manageable data-set.
~7 yrs at CrashPlan. Never backed up more than 30-50GB at a time and it's not gonna dramatically change at all in the near future.
I use it strictly for "personal" and critical data that I cannot recover or get from anywhere else once lost - personal pics, personal videos, my notes - diary, some mails. No, not all mails - most of them are left with Google, MS, on my VPS and if they are gone, I am not gonna miss them terribly. I don't even store my code on CrashPlan servers - for that's there gitlab and bitbucket (mirrored there) and my external hard disk.
In fact I have a ~3GB folder in Dropbox that I have named "Emergency Backup" and if all is lost I might be happy with just that.
It's not that I am being a model "low storage" customer so that CrashPlan can function. But I want to keep my backup habit disciplined (in my own way, of course - many would find my backup strategy as stupid for their own use cases and that's fine).
So please, for the love up proper backup, bring unlimited versioning and file retention for customers like me :-) Or float a cheaper plan where you limit the storage. Or hell, bring something like cold storage and dump my backup there
(I know B2 but that's not what I am looking for; something baked in your main backup service). All I would do is periodically keep checking whether my backup is there or not and I will just leave it be. (Okay, if not really unlimited then something close to it).
We need a CrashPlan alternative. I am willing to stick with and wait for almost a year but after that I would like to move to a better alternative and more trustworthy which you are - except, in all honestly - that glaringly missing (or omitted) critical backup feature. Also, my backup is something I want to pay and let someone else handle in a very solid way.
Here's a discussion I had with Brian few days back and there are some points I have raised. I am not saying they are brilliant ideas, actually that is a wish-list but please have a look if you can - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074647
Thanks I'll take a look. Honest question, if you're not backing up more than 50GB of data, why not just use Backblaze B2 w/ another front-end GUI like ARQ or Cloudberry or Hashbackup? You'd be paying $0.25/month for the storage, much less than with our Computer Backup service, and you can make life-cycle rules that would keep versions for as long as you'd like.
I would rather see them leverage/contribute to existing cross-platform client-side backup software like ZManda[0] making the improvements needed to either make it work directly with B2 or integrate with Amanda.
Keep your focus on the storage angle, there are ways to accomplish this, I use a "glue box" (Synology NAS) to collect the data and fire it off to B2, could easily be a linux machine running b2 cli tools[1].
I run a personal home server that acts as my cloud / NAS. I personally think RAID is overkill for most home users. Instead, I use my 2nd drive to mirror the data. This saves me from fat finger errors and such. I also use BTRFS so I can take snapshots and provide my own file versioning.
For offsite backup, I use a time4vps storage server, but I might transition to B2 in the future. I like what I'm hearing.
Are you able to dedupe common data between customers? I'd assume there's storage savings in storing a chunk of data (multiple copies of course) only once storage-system wide.
