Backblaze Raises Its Fully Refundable Price for Restoration Drives

Originally published at: Backblaze Raises Its Fully Refundable Price for Restoration Drives - TidBITS

Online backup service Backblaze will soon increase the fee it charges to restore data by shipping you a USB hard drive from $189 to $279. However, the change is largely moot since the company refunds the full amount when you return the drive.

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Thanks Adam for more fully explaining the Backblaze missive concerning the physical backup cost increase. I have experience requesting a backup drive containing 1TB+ of data that included 40k photos. The service was easy to accomplish, fast, and accurate. Returned the drive and only incurred cost to ship USPS. I spend 3 months a year in Europe and Backblaze has indicated they would ship a drive to me there. I also travel with a fast 4TB drive for physical backup weekly.

I too am glad for the explanation because my first thought when reading the headline was “yeah I bet because everyone just keeps it. Anything worth sending a drive for is worth the $189 in hardware alone.”

One question is why they’re not increasing the drive sizes available?

Given they’ve only offered a single 8TB option seemingly since 2008 and at least some serious and/or data-hoarders store more than this (especially since it’s been the same for 16-years now) – what happens if you have more than this to restore, can they send you 2/3/4/etc 8TB drives?

(EDIT: You can order more than one 8TB drive, as needed: “If your restore data is larger than 8 TB, you can order multiple USB restores, each with a portion of the total data.” But still wonder why just 8TB available, when could charge a bit more for larger ones…maybe they bulk-buy these or something?)

Also a little surprised it’s only shipping from a single US destination, no separate option for even Europe where they have their only non-US data centre. Guessing here it’s due to costs/complexity, and/or the cost of shipping globally from the US vs. across Europe or elsewhere are negligible. But in this day and age it’s a bit weird if you’re storing the data in centres in Europe:

Backblaze currently has data centers in Sacramento, California; Stockton, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Reston, Virginia; and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Still, a great service though.