Folks, for what it’s worth I would like to offer a different perspective. I’ve been a BB users since the day they offered the service. It has been reliable, inexpensive, responsive and in general a good Mac citizen.
How investors - and particularly stock bears (those that typically short-sell companies) view BB is wholly different than how users do or should view them.
I’m on the board of a multi-billion-dollar public company and can tell you that short sellers have one interest and one interest only: seeing the price of the stock drop so that they can make money.
If you are a happy BB user, as I am, then continue using it until such time that there is reason to feel otherwise. Short sellers and the stock market have little relevance in day-to-day life to how the product functions or works for you.
Based on their bios I’d say the Directors appear to be reasonably qualified. One never knows the relationship with the Chairman and CEO (Gleb Budman) but it’s likely that he has/had some personal relationship with them prior to nominating them to join the Board. It’s not unusual for the CEO to also be Chairman (the same individual holds both titles at the company on whose Board I sit, too) especially in the early stages.
In short, nothing looks out of the ordinary on the surface.
Almost a year later, so far this turned out to be a nothing-burger. Backblaze earnings and revenues exceeded expectations for Q2, Q3 and Q4 since this report, for example.
just got billed by backblaze for the next year. fees tripled from $65 to $189. suddenly it doesn’t seem good value for money. tried to check crashplan pricing but i’m neither an smb nor an enterprise.
methinks i should just abandon remote backup, as risky as that may be.
also, there are indications that my minimac woes may be related to the backblaze daemon running on the box, although that may be the other way around.
I use Arq. (https://www.arqbackup.com/) I rent space from them for $60/year/1TB, but you don’t have to use their storage. (From their website: Price increasing to $69.99 Sept 1, 2026 (first price increase in over 10 years))
They’ll store whatever you tell them to store and if you go over the 1TB limit, they’ll start charging you a per GB rate rather than not creating the backup. I’ve also set the app to eliminate older storage if my data begins to reach the limit. Completely satisfied with the service which runs silently on a schedule of my making.
Arq’s site says they charge “Additional TBs of storage $.00599/GB per month”, which is pretty low. I wonder what the catch is.
Cloud storage prices are hard to compare. The price per unit doesn’t say if they’re using 1024 as the multiplier, or 1000. I’ve even seen combinations of 1024 & 1000 in the same calculation.
And the devil is in the details. Do they charge for API calls? Egress?
When I started with Arq in 2018 after CrashPlan ended, the Wasabi Unlimited Egress plan was $4.99 per TB/month, with a 90 day min storage charge for objects. The price has increased several times since then; this month it increased to $7.99.
I think it is still less than Amazon S3. But it looks to be a lot more than Arq.
$65 seems too low and $189 seems too high based on this page, for one computer.
Have you asked them why it has gone up? Is it possible you started a new backup, perhaps unintentionally as I did once when changing computers….so being charged for more than one machine.
I doubt that there’s a catch. They either get a deal on a large purchase of space (and API calls), or they average out that most of their customers don’t use a full 1 TB of storage for the base price and are able to leverage savings for everyone else. Or a combination of the two.
I’m still backing up using ARQ to B2 and some to AWS Glacier but I should really switch to their prepaid plan, because I’m still well under 1 TB.
It’s consistent with the base price–it’s a shade over $6 per month per TB (1024GB) so works out to $70/year for the first TB and $73/year for each additional full TB (but billed by the GB).
I transitioned from Wasabi to IDrive e2. Wasabi’s other hidden fee turns out to be the entirely expected minimum charge, even with no data stored. Cancel as soon as you no longer need the account.
IDrive performance is acceptable, though not as high as S3 or Wasabi. Also, they don’t claim to do any kind of data integrity. This is fine for a bit of extra redundancy, IMO. Arq should already be periodically checking the repository, and you can always force it by clearing caches.
I bought the 1 TB plan on a yearly basis, and now store 1.3 TB of space; the overage charge is still less than the 2 TB plan. If I were being sensible, I’d probably just use Arq’s own vendor storage, which would be very ironic, in addition to probably being the easiest option as well as having the fewest caveats. I don’t see any alternative to Arq, the software, that I would use, certainly nothing requiring no extra effort and scripting to make as bombproof as Arq is. At least the flexibility to migrate between providers is paying off.
Same for me. I’m still using B2 (and some AWS Glacier storage) but less than 1 TB, and I would probably save a lot of money. A project for me for the fall, perhaps.
The license for Arq using the built-in storage is $10 more per year than I am paying now for Arq with bring-your-own storage, and I pay more than $10 a year for B2.
Ok, but as I said, in my specify case, where I am storing about 600 GB on B2 from Arq, and Arq provides up to 1 TB of storage for the base price, that’s a moot point - I won’t need to use it.
That said, as I retain backups for up to 18 months, I would probably keep the B2 storage for about a year, meaning short-term it would cost me about $10 more for that one year.