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.
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.