Comment by azalemeth
3 days ago
I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1]
This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no restrictions on file type or size" [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse.
Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.
> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses
Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
> And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.
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Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
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>and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And there speaks marketing.
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> Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
So… Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment said. Got it.
In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers. Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as possible.
But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some joker from wallpapering the lecture hall.
It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't cut it.
You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
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I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
> It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm hungry.
It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take on this risk".
Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.
Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which translates to "you had better never take vacation because if you do it will be a major black mark against you."
They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc
so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.
Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
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They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
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It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7.
Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
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Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
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"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"."
The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months.
Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.
Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now.
Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.
I bought a 24TB for £365 last June. It's £905 now.
Is it that bad? When I look at the prices of new drives on amazon I mostly see increases just under 50%. I think used went up more but that's not affecting backblaze as much.
It's pretty bad. The enterprise drives I bought a year ago for under $300 are now either out of stock, or priced above $600 with limited stock.
It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.
What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup please?
Not OP, but this is my script: https://gist.github.com/smj-edison/33229537007a73520a26a14a0...
It's been cobbled together over the years to add things I want, like not backing up on battery, or sending a desktop message on success. When I set it up I couldn't figure out how to set up a timer, so it runs when I wake from suspend. I'd probably use a systemd timer in the future though.
I also should probably snapshot my file system before backing up since I'm running btrfs, but I never figured out how to do that either, and this works, lol.
I use restic as well. My script:
https://forge.taf.codes/taf/snippets/src/branch/main/backups...
Restic + rclone personally, with a wrapper script to glue things together nicely
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rclone on a cron job
Yea, that's pretty shady. Either don't call your service unlimited or bump up the prices so you can survive occasional datahoarder, called them out on it many years ago.
When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually given consideration to the cost of doing business and have priced that in already.
I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite" and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the very least their use should be heavenly regulated.
_Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits.
"But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users"
Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.
Unlimited means without limits or restrictions.
If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.
From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are affecting service reliability for other customers)
Sorry but unlimited has never meant unrestricted. TOCs always have restrictions. If it were unrestricted it would be used for all kinds of illegal stuff they don’t want on their servers, child pr0n and whatnot. They can’t legally offer a service like this without restrictions as they operate within an existing set of laws.
Unlimited however, they can offer. I don’t see how people get into mental block of thinking something is nefarious when a company offers you unlimited hosting or data. Yes, they know it’s impossible if everyone took full advantage of that. They also know most people won’t and so they don’t have to spend time worrying about it. It’s a simple actuarial exercise to work out the pricing that covers the use of your users.
Back in the early 2000s I ran a web hosting service that was predominantly a LAMP stack shared hosting environment. It had several unlimited plans and they were easy to estimate/price. The only times I had an issue of supporting a heavy user, it would turn out they were doing something unrestricted. Back then, it was usually something pron or mp3 related. So the user would get kicked off for that. I didn’t have any issues with supporting the usage load if it was within TOS. The margins were so high it was almost impossible to find a user that could give me any trouble from an economic standpoint.
I actually emailed them years ago about it. Asked them point blank what'd happen if I dumped 20+ TB of encrypted, undeduplicable backups onto their storage servers. They actually replied that there'd be no problem, but I didn't buy it. Not at all surprised to see this now.
Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte
Because approximately no one wants that. Anyone who does already uses S3 etc.
They do, it's called B2 and is another product of them.
I use them for the b2 bucket style storage where this happens. Its expensive per gig compared to the cost of a working personal unlimited desktop account. I like to visit their reddit page occasionally and its a constant stream of desktop client woes and stories of restoring problems and any time b2 is mentioned its like "but muh 50 terabytes" lol
It's cheaper if you have multiple computers with normal amounts of data though. My whole family is on my B2 account (Duplicati backing up eight computers each to a separate bucket), and it's $10/month.