[SOLVED] Cloud Backups - Backblaze

[SamStorms]

So I was thinking of getting a cloud backup service, and I tried Backblaze's free trial month. The program they give has quite a small footprint, you basically just install it and forget about it. Anyway, so my trial ran out, but they give 30 days for you to make your decision and they keep whatever you've backed up to their servers for those 30 days. So, I updated my Windows 10 and I have a habit of using Disk Cleanup, and without checking, I just cleaned my disk. To my horror, my Downloads folder had been wiped clean. Because Micro(and)soft thought its a good idea to leave the Downloads folder at checked by default on disk cleanup.

I thought I'd lost my Downloads but then I thought about my Backblaze backup. Lo and behold, it had uploaded my complete Downloads folder, so I selected the folder to be restored, and within minutes it prepared a download for me and everything's back to normal now. This tempted me to pay for the $5/month for Backblaze personal backup plan.

Its $5/month for unlimited space. But only for one machine, for additional machines you pay $5/month/machine. Everything would be backed up, but files are only maintained for 30 days if the computer connects to backblaze's servers. If the computer doesn't connect to backblaze's servers, the files are maintained for a maximum of 6 months.

Also, I know about cloud storage, what I'm looking for is cloud backup, where I don't have to specify directories or anything, it just backs up whatever it finds (mostly). For longer term archiving, Backblaze has B2 storage, which charges you per upload/delete/download per GB. The first 10GB of uploads are free, and 1 GB of downloads per day are free from that platform.

Why I am double minded about all this? Well, they state in their agreement that if you want to stop your subscription (i.e. taking your credit card off of your Backblaze account), you need to delete all the backups in your account before you can do that. Do you or have you guys use(d) any cloud backup services? Any idea about Backblaze? I am thinking about this because I have 4 hard drives and I'm worried (GOD FORBID!) at least one of them would start to fail any time, so I should have a synchronized backup of my stuff.

EDIT: GUYS this is not a sponsored post, I'm genuinely asking if this is worth $5/month or if I can get something else/better than this?

 

[gullfounder]

So I was thinking of getting a cloud backup service, and I tried Backblaze's free trial month. The program they give has quite a small footprint, you basically just install it and forget about it. Anyway, so my trial ran out, but they give 30 days for you to make your decision and they keep whatever you've backed up to their servers for those 30 days. So, I updated my Windows 10 and I have a habit of using Disk Cleanup, and without checking, I just cleaned my disk. To my horror, my Downloads folder had been wiped clean. Because Micro(and)soft thought its a good idea to leave the Downloads folder at checked by default on disk cleanup.

I thought I'd lost my Downloads but then I thought about my Backblaze backup. Lo and behold, it had uploaded my complete Downloads folder, so I selected the folder to be restored, and within minutes it prepared a download for me and everything's back to normal now. This tempted me to pay for the $5/month for Backblaze personal backup plan.

Its $5/month for unlimited space. But only for one machine, for additional machines you pay $5/month/machine. Everything would be backed up, but files are only maintained for 30 days if the computer connects to backblaze's servers. If the computer doesn't connect to backblaze's servers, the files are maintained for a maximum of 6 months.

Also, I know about cloud storage, what I'm looking for is cloud backup, where I don't have to specify directories or anything, it just backs up whatever it finds (mostly). For longer term archiving, Backblaze has B2 storage, which charges you per upload/delete/download per GB. The first 10GB of uploads are free, and 1 GB of downloads per day are free from that platform.

Why I am double minded about all this? Well, they state in their agreement that if you want to stop your subscription (i.e. taking your credit card off of your Backblaze account), you need to delete all the backups in your account before you can do that. Do you or have you guys use(d) any cloud backup services? Any idea about Backblaze? I am thinking about this because I have 4 hard drives and I'm worried (GOD FORBID!) at least one of them would start to fail any time, so I should have a synchronized backup of my stuff.

EDIT: GUYS this is not a sponsored post, I'm genuinely asking if this is worth $5/month or if I can get something else/better than this?

5$ a month and shady Agreement!! Why not try Google Drive? https://one.google.com/about 200pkr per month and 100GB space works similarly and no limit on download/Upload. Also you can look for Google Cloud too much cheaper https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing

 

[SamStorms]

5$ a month and shady Agreement!! Why not try Google Drive? https://one.google.com/about 200pkr per month and 100GB space works similarly and no limit on download/Upload. Also you can look for Google Cloud too much cheaper https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#storage-pricing

Thanks for the suggestions.

While Google drive is a good cloud storage option, I am looking for a cloud backup service, with which I don’t have to worry about what I am backing up and what I’m not. I’m already an iCloud subscriber and sure Google Drive is the same deal (100 PKR for 50GB iCloud storage, 200 PKR for 100GB Google Drive storage), but there are drawbacks, like limited storage, no versioning except on google docs, and the need for manually selecting what to backup and maintaining a separate folder for synchronization.


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[XxRebellionxX]

AWS S3 might be what you are looking for, 1st year is free and depending on your usage, which can be calculated here, you will charged. At my workplace we use AWS S3, so far with the free tier we've been charged around $2/month I think for 500gigs of data. You can use S3 CLI to setup backups without using the web interface

 

[imadsani]

Backblaze gives you the storage you have attached to your computer, remove a drive and the cloud backup would be removed within 30-60 days.

 

[SamStorms]

AWS S3 might be what you are looking for, 1st year is free and depending on your usage, which can be calculated here, you will charged. At my workplace we use AWS S3, so far with the free tier we've been charged around $2/month I think for 500gigs of data. You can use S3 CLI to setup backups without using the web interface

Looks quite complicated. I'll look up stuff to learn this. But I think after the first year its quite expensive (its NOT, read the EDIT below please). And setting up automatic backups for most of my hard drives would be quite tedious work.

EDIT: Okay sorry I was looking at the wrong calculator. Not used to Amazon's interfaces. So it is quite cost effective, but still gotta learn it. Very viable option. Thank you for this.

Backblaze gives you the storage you have attached to your computer, remove a drive and the cloud backup would be removed within 30-60 days.

While that is a drawback I agree, I don't really want my external hard drives backed up, they don't have anything worth backing up. And even if they did, plugging in a hard drive once every 30 days isn't a problem for me really.

 

[SamStorms]

For anyone ending up on this thread, here's what I ended up doing.

I removed my Backblaze Personal Backup license from my Backblaze account, and I subscribed to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Its very much like AWS S3 and Google Cloud. They charge you for storage as you go (they charge as your storage size increases) and its MUCH cheaper than AWS S3 or Google Cloud and others, and much simpler.

They charge $0.005 per GB per month for storage, no charges on uploads, and $0.01 per GB for downloads. They have a calculator here as well: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calculator

I managed to set up Duplicati (open-source client) to back up selected folders on my hard drives every night at 9PM to my Backblaze B2 storage.

There are some downsides to this though. Backblaze doesn't have nearly as many data centers across the world as Google or Amazon, so throughput may vary. Backblaze's API is somewhat obscure and the documentation isn't very good. But Duplicati client works out of the box with B2, so setting up automatic scheduled backups is a breeze.

Also, with Duplicati you don't need to enable versioning of files on Backblaze. Duplicati manages versioning for you, and you can customize how many versions Duplicati will keep a record of. That means, if you delete a file and you've set Duplicati to maintain backups for the previous 60 days, then it will only be deleted from your backup after 60 days. Before 60 days, you can choose any of your previous backups and restore the file. Duplicati uploads files physically only once, but keeps references of those files across backup versions, so your storage space doesn't pile up.

Another downside is, restoring with Duplicati without your local Duplicati database (SQLite) takes exponentially long, as it takes a ton of time to rebuild the Database. So I'd suggest back up your Duplicati Database as well to some place else, so when you need to restore your files, you can restore the database first, point Duplicati to the database and then restore your files as quickly as possible.

I've stored around 65GB till now on Backblaze and I've been charged $0.07/month which is cheap as hell.