> Instead, Backblaze’s new CFO, Marc Suidan, joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI), a multi-level marketing company
eek
I guess they could go door-to-door selling backup or maybe hold Backblaze parties…
TFA even specifies this:
> Instead they hired Marc Suidan who joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI) - a publicly traded health and fitness company where he was CFO between May 2022 and August 2024 when the company was operating as a “multi-level marketing” company.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2011/01/31/beachbody-grows-exponentiall...
[1] https://nypost.com/2024/10/01/business/beachbody-lays-off-th...
If you think he is a good CFO I think you drank the coolaid.
https://marencrowley.com/podcast/the-demise-of-the-beachbody...
And then promoting them also gives strong mlm vibes.
So I would bet more money on them being an mlm after reading your comment than before
I know I could use some open source stuff to get similar functionality, but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would rolling my own crypto. Does Wasabi have some client solution that I'm missing?
The only downside I found is that they limit free egress to 100% of your storage (so if you store 1tb, you get 1tb egress). In practice I don't think this will be an issue for my use case.
So I'm an example of a person who this morning had almost never heard of Wasabi, knows Backlaze well, and after an hour or two of research I have completely switched over.
Wasabi also treats every object as having a minimum 90-day storage period. So if you upload something and delete it, it's still considered "stored" for billing purposes for that 90-day minimum.
B2 also gives you 3x storage as free transfer compared to 1x for Wasabi.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go with Wasabi, but the reasoning you've articulated doesn't seem to track.
That's addressed in the article:
>Since 2021, Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage segment revenue growth has outpaced its legacy Computer Backup segment. In Q4 2024, the company announced that its B2 Cloud Storage segment generated $17.1 million in revenue, surpassing its Computer Backup revenue of $16.7 million.
Even if Wasabi isn't a straight replacement for Backblaze's entire business, it's a replacement for its biggest and fastest growing segment.
I ended up rolling my own solution with rclone and testing b2 and r3, going with b2 because of the price and speed.
Is there a Restic frontend for Windows that you'd be comfortable setting up a family member with?
That's where Wasabi is taking customers
Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other part of the business, but I think it’s just a matter of time before the business model changes. At the end of the day, there’s a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion.
From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough). None of them offer unlimited data… or at least, not any more (most of them used to, but those parts of the business always get shut down).
This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop.
Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests.
The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives.
On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume".
Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time.
The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS? The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing money overall.
When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because of the IOPS needs of exchange. So “free”, (low iops) SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that “free” capacity.
Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB can be calculated.
Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can have the opposite problem.
I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself, and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.
The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be buying shares expecting the price to rise.
It’s bits in a barn, and they’re not making rent. That’s worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them, especially in light of this research.
Financial statements indicate they selling services at 50% margin, but all the extra sales/admin/R&D add up to a loss
They could cut all of that I guess, it's not like object storage need a lot of innovation and they've already stopped making their own storage servers and
https://hindenburgresearch.com/gratitude/
Funny, I wrote this without seeing what the full URL was (I’m on my phone) so the use of the word “gracious” preceded me knowing the path was /gratitude
honestly I participated in the IPO then sold when it was up a bit - I had faith in their fundamentals as a business but they did not seem mature as a public company.
Doesn’t that seem like insider trading? I guess he can claim he didn’t know so and so was going to quit.
That’s part of why they usually deputize a brokerage to periodically sell a fraction of their holdings at intervals.
It’s been a long while since I paid any attention to this but I do believe I saw at least a couple of instances of an insider triggering weakness in their stock just by increasing the rate of sale of their holdings.
But… are there securities laws in this era where policy decisions are timed to pump/dump the lowest?
If you're a less technical CTO, Wasabi seems to do a lot more traditional marketing on things like sports games: https://ibb.co/21qNkM9b (NBA, NHL, Premier League soccer). I'm not saying that makes them better, but a lot of people with purchasing power are going to be seeing Wasabi around.
Wasabi has also been pushing value-add services on top of their storage with Wasabi AiR (https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/wasabi-air). It's basically an AI-powered database of your content. If you're running a place generating lots of content, having a system automatically tag and make searchable all those images and videos is a really nice value-add. Being able to search for a video clip containing a specific person in your library junk pile of video can be nicely useful for a lot of organizations.
It could just be that different people get their brand awareness from different places.
Small data, or low risk tolerance: Tarsnap
We replaced with Borg.
- Wasabi
- idrive
Who else?
Cloudflare, scaleway, hetzner, OVH, Oracle, minio and dozens of others all have s3 compatible object stores
Most of them expect AWS have at least inter cloud transfer free (or discount Azure and GCP) being part of bandwidth alliance(BWA).
AWS S3 pricing is designed to keep you in the ecosystem , not be the cheapest, so tend to be costliest not cheapest unless your workload is archival.
For almost all non archival workloads egress costs will be on par or much higher than storage costs and AWS[1] charges a lot for any bandwidth.
AWS also makes migration really expensive so if you started with them, you are likely stuck as you would have to pay up to 10-12 months of cost to migrate out if you are on anything but the standard tier (cheaper the tiers higher the retrieval costs)
[1] All tier one providers have 10-20x b/w costs compared to tier two , however Azure and GCP discount for inter cloud transfers AWS does not
It’s only Azure that isn’t on the S3 API train.
Although I appreciate that they included this, I can't help but feel it would have been more apparent if this statement had been included before the bullet points of the article. By the point I saw that statement, I had already formed an opinion on Backblaze. Although I am not saying Morpheus has done anything inherently dishonest, I do think the placement was intentional, and that it would have served the readership better if it had been the first thing that readers see.
> Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE). Morpheus Research holds short positions in BLZE, and Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by others. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
Oh, and the finance employees refused to sign off on the books and a few are suing the company.
It sucks, but Backblaze is cooked.
But this is a hit piece. For any hit piece, I think it’s important for readers to know the motivations of the author, regardless of the validity of the claims.
(At least they disclose it at the bottom, but it should be in the title.)
this is activist short seller report/investigation, some of the points made:
- never been profitable
- execs selling aggressively
- loosing customers to Wasabi
- accused of cooking the books
- being sued by former execs for anti whistleblower/wrongful termination
- execs leaving
The very quick high level explanation is that in storage you talk about "stretch factor". For every byte of file, how many bytes do you have to store to get the desired durability. If your approach to durability is you make 3 copies, that's a 3x stretch factor. Assuming you're smart, you'll have these spread across different servers, or at least different hard disks, so you'd be able to tolerate the loss of 2 servers.
With erasure encoding you apply a mathematical transformation to the incoming object and shard it up. Out of those shards you need to retrieve a certain number to be able to reproduce the original object. The number of shards you produce and how many you need to recreate the original are configurable. Let's say it shards to 12, and you need 9 to recreate. The amount of storage that takes up is the ratio 9:12, so that's a 1.3x. For every byte that comes in, you need to store just 1.3x bytes.
As before you'd scatter them across 12 shards and only needing any 9 means you can tolerate losing 3 hard disks (servers?) and still be able to retrieve the original object. That's better durability despite taking up 2.7x less storage.
The drawback is that to retrieve the object, you have to fetch shards from 9 different locations and apply the transformation to recreate the original object, which adds a small bit of latency, but it's largely negligible these days. The cost of extra servers for your retrieval layer is significantly less than a storage server, and you wouldn't need anywhere near the same number as you'd otherwise need for storage.
The underlying file system doesn't really have any appreciable impact under those circumstances. I'd argue ZFS is probably even worse, because you're spending more resources on overhead. You want something as fast and lightweight as possible. Your fixity checks will catch any degradation in shards, and recreating shards in the case of failure is pretty cheap.
Can't seems to find anything specific about Wasabi uses ZFS on Google. And Wasabi doesn't change you on egress. So I guess they are similar in terms of pricing.
Although B2 seems to be way more popular on HN. I rarely see Wasabi here.
