I’m sure outliers are part of the problem but Backblaze is probably facing higher costs in a lot of areas. Cooling their primary data centers in CA and AZ has to be getting more expensive. And inflation in the US is expected to hit 5.5% this year.
Right now the least expensive pay as you go plan that I’ve found is Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive at $1/GB/Month. And that comes with a 1 or 2 downloads per year notation. If unlimited backups disappear we are going to have to get creative.
Thanks for the heads up. I’m glad I decided to get rid of one of my Mac and replace it with a Linux PC, as that means one less Backblaze license.
I’m going to continue to reduce the number of subscriptions I have to cut costs. It’s something I do annually to cancel anything I don’t really need.
Backblaze has come in handy a few times , nothing fatal. Just a file or two that for some reason wasn’t in my time machine backup.
I just finished my first upload to Backblaze. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d be more than happy to pay a little more for this service, probably more than a little more. Data security products and services are not where I go with the lowest price.
As a potentially-dumb question, how does changing your OS remove your need for backups?
I’m actually wondering how much of a problem outliers actually are. Yes, outliers create costs for Backblaze - but they also theoretically create good PR and recommendations for non-outliers to use the service.
Plus the “unlimited” is a huge selling point, even for people that would never use it. End users don’t like having to think about these things, so “unlimited” just sounds good to many of them. And that seems to be true whether or not there are actually limits. 
Backblaze isn’t available for Linux, so by swapping a Mac for a Linux system, he’d need one less license.
Hmmm, I think that’s $1 per TB, not GB.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a new Amazon S3 storage class that provides secure and durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is accessed once or twice in a year. From just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or about $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data off-site. To learn more about S3 Glacier Deep Archive, visit Amazon S3 FAQs. Amazon S3 Glacier FAQs | Amazon Web Services
You are correct. Apparently I can do math, but I cannot type 
By that logic though it seems like he didn’t need any licenses in the first place. Cloud backup is a completely optional service, and could be discontinued without switching from a Mac to a Linux PC.
AFAIK there’s no free & unlimited cloud backup service for Linux. And any local file backup solution would be available for either platform.
Hence my question. 
I don’t think it really means that you can’t download from it more often - but access is slow (“within 12 hours”) AND restoring from Glacier is pricey.
I was not aware of this Deep Archive option. Apparently, it is the only option that is affordable if you have a huge amount of data (apart from “all you can eat” solutions that are on the way out IMHO).
Synology even has an app for that:
Interesting!
I have 3.2 TB of data. About 600 GB are important to me (personal data, photos, personal home videos and stuff like that) and worthy of being backed up to the cloud on a daily basis. I am using Synology C2. I am fine with its price given my storage needs. And the ease of use is just great. My NAS does everything that is necessary and I have used the versioning system more than once.
Apart from the cloud backup there is a weekly local backup of all my data. Those backup drives are being rotated and stored off-site. That is enough for me. So, if I need to restore my data, I am able to restore my important data using an external drive without the need to recover several TBs from the cloud. The data that is not being backed up to the cloud is stuff like media files (movies, TV series, app downloads and so on).
If you are a Backblaze user, you probably should consider just being happy about the price increase. If they do not find a model that is sustainable, they will eventually be on the way out. 
To be honest, I do not consider any cheap backup service to be sustainable in the long run if it is cheaper than the big guys like Amazon or other big tech companies. Running data centers, storing and moving data across the internet costs money. There is no “all you can eat” for a company running its business. It’s like the real life: eventually, you will not be able to swallow what you have eaten…
I think you are correct. I wasn’t sure so I used “notation” rather than “restriction”. I started using Amazon S3 Glacier years ago, but S3 Glacier Deep Archive is new to me.
S3 Glacier was the least expensive place I found to store files that I would only access if I lost my computers as well as my local and Backblaze B2 backups.
Excellent. Local backups stored offsite is a tried and true system that I used for many years to protect my company’s data.
That’s what I landed on too.
FWIW, here’s Amazon’s pricing:
You can see that regular S3 is more expensive to store (second tab, “Requests & data retrievals”), but retrieval requests are free, retrieval is instant, and it doesn’t incur extra costs. Glacier Deep Archive retrieval takes a long time (12 hours) and incurs fees per-file (second-to-last column) and by volume (last column).
And that’s in addition to Amazon’s outgoing bandwidth cost. If you mosey on over to the third tab, “Data transfer”, you’ll discover that getting your data out of S3 - no matter what tier you’re on - costs about $90 / terabyte.
So it’s still useful “oh crap” protection, but if your 8TB drive crashed ($8/month storage on Glacier Deep Archive) and you had to get everything back you’d be shelling out about $720 just for retrieval by my calculations. Glacier adds $2.50 per terabyte plus individual file costs (likely $30-$40 by the time all is said and done). And you can buy a lot of local storage and redundancy for that $750 or so.
I was also a long time Backblaze customer. But having a NAS which needs to be backed up and Macs from my family I switched to using Wasabi (S3 Storage, 0,0059 USD / GB / Month).
Backing up the 3 Macs using Arq-Backup with nearly 250 GB each is ca. 4,4 USD / Month.
Backing up the NAS using Hyperbackup is more expensive but also has more data.
I choose Wasabi instead of Backblaze B2 because of the speed when using a S3 bucket in Amsterdam accessed from Germany.
Also to mention is the possibility to setup Object-Locks, means created files can not be changed or deleted for a certain time, which helps against ransomware.
Nethertheless the 7 USD Price is a good deal for individuals and unlimited data.
I was paying Crashplan $10 per month to back up the NAS where I’d stored my household’s digital media library (the heart of which is our vast and painstakingly digitized library of CDs). The combination of Crashplan and the NAS was just a hot mess, so I ditched the NAS, moved the media library to a thunderbolt connected BOD (box of disks), switched to Backblaze to back it all up, and have never looked back. I didn’t need the NAS to do what I wanted to do with the media library, and I didn’t really need a RAID to keep it backed up and safe. (In addition to the cloud backup, it’s backed up on another external hard drive tucked away in a closet.) I have no problem with this price increase, and probably not with the next one, either.
It removes the need for Blackblaze.
Right, but not the need for backups. If you didn’t care about not having backups, that would remove the need for Backblaze on the Mac too.
So what are you doing instead for backups?
I still do backups. But not with Backblaze.
Did you find a different cloud service? Or does Linux have some really good backup software for a local solution?