They were out touring with an artist in some remote country, I think it was Kazakhstan, when the artists macbook suffered hard drive failure. Everything was backed up on backblaze, but the internet connections they had available was simply too unreliable to get the backup down. They contacted backblaze and for a price that was high (but not insane for a company) backblaze actually flew a guy with a physical hard drive to their location.
Saved ~5 gigs from being canceled, and my friend has been a die hard backblaze evangelist ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela_70th_Birthday_T...
According to this BB blog post[0] certain functions are unavailable ("making a new purchase, installing new trials, signing in to your account, creating new accounts, enabling B2, and creating a master Key"), and two B2 API calls (b2_create_bucket, b2_delete_bucket).
If these are the only disrupted features, then impact depends on the details of the use case (perhaps get object and friends have to be on demand but other changes can be async).
Now, why these specifics are in their blog post and not in the Scheduled Maintenance page itself, that is a fair question, because it leaves room for doubt that only this exact set of functions are affected each and every window.
[0] https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/227807447-Backb...
If it wasn't for the content and that they needed it ASAP I think regular air cargo would've sufficed.
>” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”
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.
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.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074289
>Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised something like $150 million which comes with "pressure to grow fast or die". Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006216
> Yev here -> we HAVE to be cash-flow positive since we're not VC-funded. When we started the company it was bootstrapped, so "making enough money to survive" has always been a part of the equation!
That last comment was from 2019, yet according to the S-1, they were actually unprofitable. What's going on here? Were they profitable before, then suddenly taking on a massive loss? Their loss in 2020 was huge compared to the one in 2019.
The extra fun bit is that just exfiltration will cost you.
Sure, you can probably do it cheaper with your "friend with a hard drive" solution, but there's zero redundancy there, you'll need to replace the hard drive when it eventually goes bad etc. etc.
For some people that's a tradeoff worth making, but for me, a few extra $ a month for peace of mind is worth it.
The original backblaze was literally Time Machine in the cloud.
Smart move IMO.
What's even revenue to say in the face of growth.
Also, congrats Backblaze! The next adventure begins :)
Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine?
0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
1 - https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665478-Why-d...
Think about it: if you have a backups stored with them via their proprietary backup client, you have to stick with them or lose all your backup revisions; there's no way to move revision history.
That's why they charged below their own rates, they knew people would be trapped.
Backblaze backup plan pricing is about to skyrocket.
Also consider that many other users may be using far less than what $60 could buy for Backblaze.
Even if Backblaze is suffering a huge loss on account of your usage, the fact that you commented here about it and indicated that there haven’t been any repercussions is a marketing message for the company treating paying customers in a decent way.
I’m sure people on r/datahoarders (Reddit) would already know of use cases like yours or may be thrilled to know of it.
If it were me, I'd continue offering the $6/mo unlimited plan, throttle upload bandwidth for personal backups larger than a TB, and offer a high-performance option for $6/mo/TB with no throttle that also supports Linux, network drives, and anything else you want to backup. That's still a 20% premium over B2, and they have control over the client behavior which is also an advantage.
edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D
For example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/g26lgt/max_capac...
https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/arnlyr/10tb_on_b...
I can't find the link.
p.s. "Right now we have computer-wide deduplication, but not farm-wide or account-wide!" 4 year ago http://disq.us/p/1q3efbb
The main issue is that if you haven't tried to be profitable, how do you know for sure you're spending the money wisely?
What if the whole point of the personal plan is "hopefully they can be encouraged to spend +$x with us"?
As a public company there's no chance backblaze will let this dude keep ripping them off.
Their software is just not good, I would say it's even bad. It just didn't work for me.
Something poorly written that they just didn't bother to improve. I guess because most of their customers can't tell the difference anyway whether it's working or not.
Is there any application, preferably for Windows, that can handle this for me? Synchronise files with a cloud system, but encrypting/decrypting them transparently as they are uploaded/downloaded.
It can apparently run via WSL. The main selling point is that it's made by colin percival[1], so if you really care about the security of your backups, you can't get any better.
Additionally, it's fairly reasonably priced. When s3 dropped their prices so that tarsnap became cheaper to run, he passed that on directly to customers[2]
[0] https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Percival
[2] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-02-tarsnap-price-cut...
It’s like orders of magnitude more expensive than S3 and b2.
As others mention a lot of closed source tools offer local encryption, including Backblaze (although I believe they need your key in order to do restores, which might or might not defeat the purpose depending on your use case).
I was searching for something the could replace Backblaze on Linux for me, and Vorta+BorgBase was even better than that.
Encrypted and compressed by default, deduplicated, life-long (if desired) and diffable history, every snapshot can be mounted locally, alerts on missing backups, just a breeze to use, and works for my personal machines just like my VPS.
I use the macOS version and it's excellent.
Long time customer of their backup product, and I'm considering B2 for an upcoming project as a result. They seem to be good at doing what they do, which is always great to see :) Especially great to see an IPO from a company that isn't exploiting privacy, or gig workers, and instead simply providing a great service.
Am I reading this right that they only had 53 million USD in Revenue in 2020?
That's a tiny fraction of, say, Dropbox's revenue. I would have expected them to be in the 30-50% range of Dropbox on size.
And with 164 employees to boot, that's only $323,000 revenue per employee. I wonder what the compensation is like there.
Not sure what the long term strategy is, but I hope going public doesn’t kill them — seems like a nice little business that could just coast for years.
Why am I forced, because if I don't back up my phone using iCloud, then I need to back it up using iTunes, or not at all. That they have made copying photos off the iPhone terrible and iTunes terrible, is a good tactic to make me use iCloud.
For now I am holding out, sticking with backblaze (I love the do-nothing and it's backed up workflow) and probably will go the iTunes YUK route for backing up.
Yes, it does seem just like that and I believe we are witnessing an entity (backblaze, in this case) trying to switch from one zone of attraction:
Nice little business that throws off a ton of cash and grows organically but doesn't make anyone a billionaire ...
... to another zone of attraction ...
Scaled up enterprise that requires a sales and marketing effort (and accompanying infra) capable of revenue generation that matches the demands of an IPO and public shareholders ... and could possibly make someone a billionaire.
There's a big, deadly valley between those two zones of attraction and you have to push very hard to make that change. Very unlikely any kind of corporate culture or "human touches" survive that movement.
" ... seems like a nice little business ..."
Sometimes that's enough for people. Sometimes it's not.
Sometimes you paint yourself into a corner where the (IPO) is the only choice one has.
I wish them the best.
But yeah I tend to agree: why do they have such a large footprint?
I think brand awareness of Backblaze is insular - I remember Carbonite had the strategy of advertising on right-wing radio in the 00's which seems to have worked for them.
I had to buy a separate product MSP360, and then even then configuring that to work with Backblaze wasn't easy (at all). I got stuck and gave up.
Hope they smooth out the kinks.
I'm not sure, sorry
If I were to start over, I would likely choose kopia, which does everything restic does and more (better performance, compression, GUI, etc.), and seems to provide a better out-of-the-box experience. That said, I haven't tried it out yet.
I even do this with Microsoft SQL Server using iSCSI.
What does this even mean? And how is their business even remotely competitive with the big 3? Bit pushing is a volume game, and it doesn't seem like they have much of it.
What I like about Backblaze B2 is that is has simple, no gimmick pricing, unlike almost every other cloud storage company. It doesn't have delete penalties, where they charge for storage you've deleted. It doesn't have minimum file sizes, where they charge for storage you aren't actually using. It doesn't have a minimum payment every month.
For backups, their business is very competitive with the big 3, especially considering that they will mail a physical drive to you with your data.
90% gross retention is really good, even if 110% NRR is bottom quartile for public SaaS. Wouldn't be surprised if they become profitable soon.
I would agree that B2 is their high growth area, but I do not think Cloudflare directly opposes B2.
I don't think they're targeting Backblaze, but their position as the foremost middleman of the Internet means they're going to hurt direct competitors and partners pretty much any time they launch a product, until they're out of partners that host "cloud services". Which is a position Cloudflare put themselves in entirely on purpose.
[Edit: didn't realize Backblaze has cloud storage, I still think of them as the cloud backup company.]
But I think the niche between them is totally different.
