Do you know any service cheaper than Backblaze?

flatbield
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The other cheaper way is just 3 USB drives and rotate 1 off site. Should probably do that anyway. If USB is too slow or small then hot mount SATA slots, drives. and drive storage boxes. Presumably SATA drives in hot mount slots are what Backblaze uses anyway.

thejevans
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Depending on the type of data, Tarsnap may be what you want https://www.tarsnap.com/

flatbield
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I am confused. How is $250 per TB/month cheap. Backblaze B2 is about $5TB/mo.

thejevans
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Tarsnap charges you for the compressed, deduplicated storage used, so if you’re mostly backing up documents and working files, the amount of storage used is way lower than the raw uncompressed storage. This includes deduplication at a block level.

If you use Backblaze B2 with Restic, you can get the same functionality at a much lower price, but requires more setup.

flatbield
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Thanks. That is what it seemed like to me. $245 for the software and $5 for the storage per month. Which of course is a bit nuts.

Block level deduplication does seem interesting. My experience file level dedup is not that effective though of course incrementals are. Compression is not either but easy to do. Lot of document formats are already compressed too. Cross system dedup could be large savings also.

Zagorath
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How many home users are backing up multiple terabytes of documents, though? I’d expect the vast majority of backed up data to be images and video in most cases.

flatbield
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Storj is the other one. No personal experience with it. Also of course Drive e2, and wasabi which others have mentioned. Not sure any of the 4 low cost providers are that different in price though your specific use patterns will matter.

Personally I have been trying Backblaze B2 recently.

chameleon
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Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They’ve kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it’s still there in the background and it’s still the main reward system for node operators.

There’s some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they’ve made sure one node leaving doesn’t cause data loss, but I’d still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that’s not gonna get your data back.

flatbield
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I have the same concern about them. Seems to me that one wants data in a professional and planned data center and based on contractual relationships.

Maybe MEGA? Really depends on your use-case

MEGA deletes your data if you don’t access it for a year

S3 compatible? Wasabi is $.99/TB more, but has no egress or API fees whatsoever. So depending on use, it can be cheaper. For archiving purposes, Amazon Deep Glacier is a lot cheaper for storage (but expensive for retrieval).

Non-S3? Take a look at Hetzner Storage Box.

lemmyng
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Note that Wasabi has no egress fees, but has a transfer limit - essentially the contract stipulates that your monthly egress will be less than the amount of storage you pay for.

Are you doing personal file storage, or is this for backups from a server? If it’s the latter case, and if your use case would benefit from deduplication, you could just stay on Backblaze and use something like Duplicacy (available as a free CLI app or paid web UI) to deduplicate and encrypt your files. This is the approach that I use for my homelab. The only issue you run into is that, in the case of Duplicacy, you have to use the CLI or web UI to restore your files (and god help you if you lose your keys).

flatbield
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By the way, some of the mentioned services are annual and block pricing. Those plans, the per TB cost depends on where you are in their brackets. Backblaze is pay as you go which is more flexible and you do not pay for more then you use.

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