

But there is no "6 months" choice in Personal Backup. With Personal Backup, you get 30 days by default, and can choose 1 year or "forever" by paying more. With B2, you can choose to retain ANY programmable version history you want. You can see some of those here for Linux, make sure you scroll down and look for penguin icons:
Backblaze unlimited linux software#
You can use over 100 different software 3rd party integrations to perform the backup. First of all, you can script it in any language you want. Now contrast that with B2!! B2 is amazing. It is a terrible mis-match of customer to product. Backblaze Personal Backup is meant for customers who don't know how much data they have, and don't want to spend any time finding out. Linux customers LIKE playing with software, peeking under the hood. Linux customers want to configure their backup, they want to select each and every file to be backed up. If the personal backup product supported Linux, those customers would IMMEDIATELY be unhappy with the lack of powerful scripting ability. They even had to pick a Linux distribution, which is a whole other feat of technical expertise.
Backblaze unlimited linux professional#
Linux customers all know how much data they have, because it takes an IT professional to keep Linux running. We reply, "Doesn't matter, it's a fixed $7/month." They ask "what if I take one more photo?" We reply, "Doesn't matter, it's a fixed $7/month". Sometimes they say, "I have an external drive, but I don't know how much data is on it". This is really really important, and a lot of the world's largest dataset customers think we priced Personal Backup as "fixed price" for unlimited to attract them!! Nope, we priced it as a fixed price so that when a person who has NO IDEA how much data they have asks the price we can answer them. Ok, so we priced it as a "fixed price" to attract the computer inexperienced people, we didn't intend to attract the world's largest dataset customers, that was just a side effect. The product was designed to attempt to require no configuration at all. And that's Ok, they are welcome to use the Personal Backup service, but we need to maintain that very delicate average to support those big customers.įinally, one thing a lot of customers don't quite grasp is that Backblaze Personal Backup's target audience was not computer professionals.

They paid $7/month, and we lost around $7,995/month on that one account. If you scroll all the way to the right, at the time that histogram was produced the largest Personal Backup customer stored 1,600 TBytes. Something like 95% of Personal Backup customers store less than 1 TByte - and every single one of them would SAVE MONEY by switching to Backblaze B2. If you are curious, here is a histogram of the backup sizes of Backblaze Personal Backup customers from 7 months ago: You will have to zoom in to see any details. It costs Backblaze half of 1 penny per GByte per month to store data. Oh, Backblaze Personal Backup and Backblaze B2 have about the same "margin" give or take. I'm not exactly sure the break even point at this moment, probably around 1.3 TBytes? Maybe? Meaning we lose money on any customer with more than 1.3 TBytes, and we make that up by overcharging customers with less than 1.3 TBytes. Data is data.įor Backblaze Personal Backup, that balance must be maintained or we SAIL out of business (or at least shut down that half of the product offering). Security camera footage, hosted website, personal storage, video recordings of church services, business, consumer, Windows, Linux - we don't care. Your statement is TOTALLY CORRECT for B2 - data is data, we don't care what you store, we don't care who you are, we don't care about ANYTHING because we charge per GByte stored. Eventually we got tired of saying "no" to certain types of customers, and built Backblaze B2 for "everybody, priced completely fair". That balance requires us to say "no" to certain customers, and consider each change to the product with agonizing debate internally. On Backblaze Personal Backup (our first product line, now 15 years old) we depend HEAVILY on the overall average amount of data customers store, which is a delicate and stressful balance for us. Our business is really strange, in that we have two pricing structures for two different product lines. So I'm biased and you should keep me honest.ĭata is data, why do they differentiate it? Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze (mostly on the "Windows" specific client that runs on Personal Backup customer's laptops).
