I’ve used BB for years, and appreciate what they do, so much so that I bought stock when they offered their IPO. Over the last few months the stock has lost around 66% of the market value. That lead me to wonder if the business might be in trouble? Any thoughts appreciated.
-Mike
I don’t think I’d be worried yet. Worth noting that stock price has far less to do with the financial health of a company than one would typically think - especially over the very short term, which is the only term for which Backblaze stock has even existed. 
I’m sure it’s a fine investment now. 
I read the latest earnings transcript and I think what they are investing in makes sense and I believe them that they can land these developer partnerships to grow B2 revenue.
That said, the stock could fall a lot further!
I do not recall ever being interested in the share price of any software company whose products I use, or of any manufacturer of any product I buy, for that matter. What’s the point of fretting about these things? I spend my time making sure my data is secure by backing it up to multiple places. That’s something i can control – the stock market is not something I can control.
The market itself has fallen considerably since their IPO.
Saw that too. TBH I never know how to understand those reports, but they are very infrastructure business so their margins are not as high
I’ve seen twelve months of higher than normal earnings disappear since January 1 and currently my “growth curve” looks like a black diamond ski run.
AFAIK Backblaze is continuing to be profitable which may be all they can do for now. Everyone in the market may be in for a bumpy ride for a while.
I am not a guru in stock market. However, I know that share prices variation may not be directly related to the fundamentals of the company. A lot of times, it relates the sentiment of the market or sector and the result compares to the analysts’ expectation (exceed or below)
I looked at the prospectus for the IPO and didn’t think it was a good buy at the time. Figured it would take some time to have consistent profitability. If their long term prospects are good, there will be a good time to buy in.
Morpheus Research, an activist short seller firm, released a report this month outlining many problems with Backblaze’s corporate operations. Executives allegedly planned to “sell 10,000 shares a day,” then pressured employees to certify “inaccurate” financial statements. (…) Morpheus alleges that Blackblaze is “lacking in transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity. (…) Backblaze is not profitable, and the company is losing more money now than when it became publicly traded in November 2021—it reported a loss of $14.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. It’s normal for companies to lose money for years in the hope they will become profitable (…), but Backblaze doesn’t appear to be heading in that direction, especially if the additional reporting from Morpheus Research is correct. If Backblaze suddenly shuts down, customers might lose access to existing backups.”
via https://www.howtogeek.com/your-backblaze-backups-might-be-in-trouble/
Sorry for reviving this old topic, but it does fit this post on How to Geek. Because of potential financial trouble, How to Geek is suggesting that Backblaze customers may want to start looking for alternatives.
I only became a Backblaze user several weeks ago, and I like it. The “unlimited” data option is very nice, but I have been wondering for years how this can work in the long run. I fear that my one-year payment might not get me one year of service… 
There was also an article about that at Ars Technica. Not sure what to make about it
Unfortunately “stuff” happens. I have several years of backups in Backblaze B2 andI have no plan to move to another cloud storage provider at this time. I currently backup locally to an SSD using Time Machine and a second SSD using Arq. And after reading your post I created an encrypted sparsebundle backup of my most important archive files using ChronoSync, and am uploading it to Google Drive.
I will update the sparsebundle if/when I add files to the archive. This situation is one reason we backup locally.
Thanks for the update.
I will continue to use Backblaze.
I don’t want to pay a second service for the time being, but I will switch to wherever else when necessary.
Arq Premium plan continues to serve my cloud backup needs at a reasonable cost and with good support. They charge me when I go over my 1 TB plan size which makes sense to me. How could anyone offer unlimited backups and stay in business?
Backblaze doesn’t break out profitability by product division anymore, but when they did, computer backups were profitable. B2 wasn’t. The cost of revenue largely comes from the B2 side because S3-compatible object storage is intensely competes on price/gb whereas computer backup competes on perceived trust, UI, etc. They consolidate fixed operating costs now, but the R&D is largely for B2, too.
Because “unlimited” is a major selling point to people who don’t need anything close to “unlimited.”
Grab a random non-technical person, and say “you get 500 GB of backups for $___ per month. More costs extra.” The first question they have is, “oh…will the 500 GB be enough for me? Do I need more?” It’s not about the amount; it’s about controlling costs and peace of mind.
The people who have maybe 50 GB of data total more than offset the people that have 10 TB in there. And the people who have 10 TB in Backblaze happily recommend Backblaze to all of their friends and relatives who just need a basic backup solution.
Anecdotally, I found B2 to be horrendously unreliable. Backing up a server with one file per account, and out of a few hundred accounts I would get “no tomes available” out of maybe 2-3% of them - and that’s with the software configured to retry half a dozen times per account.
You’re not alone with that particular issue. It’s not a big deal to code around for their ideal ‘mid-sized’ customer, but small customers grow into future mid-sized.
Hardware might become cheap enough that they’ll improve the initial upload queueing layer.
Nick Heer has written about it
I’ve always used Arq or ChronoSync with B2 and don’t recall ever having a problem. I had to Google “no tomes available”.
Just curious, what were you using to backup to B2?
JetBackup. It’s commercial server backup software. The official line on “no tomes available” is “just try again later.” JetBackup was configured to do that, but there are times that half a dozen retries would all fail.
There’s some anecdata that B2 has more problems at night as well, as that’s when a lot of backups for things like servers are being done.
I wound up switching to Wasabi.