For some time, I’ve been using BackBlaze B2 as my primary (though not exclusive) cloud backup solution.  I would love to use TarSnap for everything, but it’s too expensive, though I do keep my top-tier backups ther.

B2 has very straightforward pricing: $.005 per GB per month, and $.01 per GB download.  So for example, let’s say I have 6TB I want to store.  That’s 6 * 1024 * $.005 = $30.72 to store.  Not bad, considering Amazon S3 would be more like $129.  The real kicker is if I ever need to restore that.  Now, to be fair, if I had a true disaster (house burns down or something), I would be thrilled to pay any amount to get back all of my data.  So I really don’t care what the cost is to restore all 6TB, but for the record, it’s $61.44 from B2 and $307.15 from Amazon S3 (first GB of restore egress is free).

Where I do have restores is when I make a junior sysadmin mistake or suddenly something I was told I could delete shouldn’t have been deleted, etc.  In those cases, it’s 5GB here or 10GB there and the price difference isn’t big enough to matter.  BTW, Google would be charging more than 2x Amazon here for network – insane.

There is Amazon Glacier, which would bring this down to $22.12, but while that is a great fit for truly cold storage, not all of my data falls into that category, and the work of sorting it into two separate systems probably exceeds the savings.

I recently noticed that my favorite home NAS provider, Synology, has their own cloud storage offering in their Cloud2 (or C2 for short) linup called C2 Storage.  You plug your Synology into it and pay on a per-TB basis, with all network bandwidth included.  On an annual basis, they’re charging $69.99/TB, which works out to $.0057, or 7 thousands of a cent more expensive than B2.  They do offer hourly backups and customized retention.  I don’t believe B2 does deduplication, so perhaps a TB goes a bit further with C2 than B2.

I find this an intriguing offer since it’s plug-and-play for Synology NAS devices, comes with a 30-day free trial, and has attractive pricing relative to what I’m using now.  It’s a bit chunky in terms of pricing – e.g., 5.1 TB will cost you the same as 5.9 TB.  On the other hand, dedupe might balance some of that out.  Overall, given the free bandwidth, I’m not going to complain, at least not before seeing if it performs well.

Stay tuned!

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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