Backblaze Price Increases

[tomalmy]

@acavender

A question for those who do this:

How do you do this without blowing right past the data cap on your internet service?

My service doesn’t have a data cap. Ziply (was Frontier, was Verizon) FIOS. And before that I had commercial DSL service which also had no data caps.

[WayneG]

@acavender

How do you do this without blowing right past the data cap

I now have the option of paying to remove the cap. But in years past when I had a lot of new data to backup I would set Arq to backup critical data and just enough additional directories so I would not exceed my data cap. Then each month I would add more directories until everything was included in the backup.

[webwalrus]

@WayneG

in years past when I had a lot of new data to backup

This is the real key. Most data isn’t new. If you’re capped and can’t do anything about it, you could set Backblaze to “back up all files less than ______ in size”, get those uploaded, then start bumping up the size limit in the future.

Or you could do the thing where Backblaze ships you a drive and you send it back full of data - https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-backblaze-fireball-program

Unless you have a lot of churn, a cap likely won’t be an issue going forward.

[glenthompson]

@acavender

How do you do this without blowing right past the data cap on your internet service?

While my Cox account has a 1.25tb monthly limit, it apparently isn’t enforced. At worst, they just send you a nastygram telling you’re using too much and to check that you don’t have malware or such. For my initial backup I throttled BackBlaze so it wouldn’t use too much data. Took a couple of months to get everything there. My incremental backup isn’t that large.

[Tony]

The $9 will be subject to VAT in the UK, which will put it up to the same as the price that you are currently paying. The new price just seems to be the old basic price ($7) with the 1 year retention ($2) as the new price and base option. If you were already paying for the 1 year retention, the price doesn’t seem to be changing.

[acavender]

Thanks! Xfinity, unfortunately, does enforce the cap, though the first offense only gets a nastygram rather than an overage charge.

I’ve never actually had any issue with Backblaze itself, since (in my experience, anyway) they do the first backup very gradually, and then everything else is incremental changes.

It was when I tried to set a drive attached to my Mini as a TimeMachine destination for my Air that I ran into trouble.

[WayneG]

Since we are discussing Blackblaze I thought this might be of interest:

Backblaze sees rise in hard drive failure rates

[McTavish]

Inflation!
(And I’m adding this in parentheses to get the minimum 20 characters for Discourse.)