Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze on the Computer Backup client and wrote the code that uploads data, so I'm biased.

> My 40TB of data would take over 6 years of continuous uploading to even get it in to the cloud.

I can hit about 500 Mbits/sec upload speeds from my home using Backblaze Computer Backup, which uploads about 5.4 TBytes per day. I think you could upload your 40 TBytes of data in 7.4 days, which is INSIDE of the 14 day free trial we provide for you to give this a shot without even putting a credit card on the product so there is literally no way Backblaze can POSSIBLY bill you or trick you. I think you should give it a shot. I'm also continuing to work on performance, and I think I can saturate a 1 Gbit network connection soon with some minor adjustments that I plan on making which might lower that to 3.6 days to get your 40 TBytes uploaded.

> But that wouldn't be possible anyway because I would hit my bandwidth cap.

There are a couple of different solutions to that particular problem. One of which is to pay for unlimited bandwidth for 1 month, and return your connection to the lower cost option you have after 1 month. Another solution some customers use is carry their computer to a work place with a faster internet connection (or a friend's home with a better internet connection than yours) and leave it there uploading at maximum rate until it is fully backed up, then bring it back to your house for the "incrementals" after that (whatever changes). Backblaze Backup doesn't make a full copy each time, it only uploads things that have changed.

I fully understand you might be in a location and situation where this may not be possible. But what is happening right now is in many locations across the United States they are offering full 1 Gbit connections and it really isn't outrageous prices. Again, maybe not in your area YET, but it is rolling out to more and more locations. When it comes to your home, keep Backblaze in mind.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so you should double check anything I say.

> how do they know it's copyrighted? Or know what it is period?

Backblaze has two different product lines: 1) Computer Backup, and 2) Backblaze B2 which is "object storage" much like Amazon S3.

We have one Terms of Service that applies to everything, so it isn't complicated and you can find it in one location. INSIDE the Terms of Service there are little blurbs that apply to different products. And these two product lines are both stored on the same type of storage, but they are PROFOUNDLY different products. The Computer Backup product is encrypted on your client computer, we can't read it, we don't want to read it, and you cannot share files from one of our backups (because again, they are encrypted, and you need your username/password/2factor to download the files), and is a mirror of what is on your local computer, and we've never taken down a single file for copyright issues in our 15 years of operation from "Computer Backup".

On the other hand we have B2 (the other product line), and in some configurations of B2 the content is literally publicly served as a website, and you can get 10 GBytes free, and we WILL take down content that is not encrypted, being served to others, and is infringing on copyrights. Look, if you want to host illegal content to millions of people, go do it from some other hosting provider. You have to understand the US government will come and arrest every person at Backblaze if we try to fight your battle for you, and we'll lose anyway, which won't help you serve up your illegal content to millions of people. But if you encrypt the Swedish movies before you upload them to B2, and put them in a "private" bucket that does not serve it to millions of people, we don't know what is inside of it and we do not want to know.

We have one Terms of Service, and at very most inside of that you need to read little sections on each product line to gain more insight.

Wow, my comment formatted TERRIBLY. Let me do nothing but format that again.

> Can you use tape for Chia?

When Chia asks you to prove you still have the "plot", you have to fetch data from a random location in your plot (each plot is 100 GBytes) and return the result within a small fixed amount of time. I do not believe tape will work.

> It's way way cheaper than disk at scale.

I might be biased because I work at Backblaze, but have you double checked that recently? Especially compared with Backblaze B2 prices? We believe it's about equal or even a bit more expensive to use tape nowadays if you include all of the cost of owning and operating the tape machines, and repairing them, staffing them, etc. But I haven't really stayed abreast of any new tape developments (like more dense tapes) so don't beat me up if I'm wrong. :-)

> Can you use tape for Chia? When Chia asks you to prove you still have the "plot", you have to fetch data from a random location in your plot (each plot is 100 GBytes) and return the result within a small fixed amount of time. I do not believe tape will work. > It's way way cheaper than disk at scale. I might be biased because I work at Backblaze, but have you double checked that recently? Especially compared with Backblaze B2 prices? We believe it's about equal or even a bit more expensive to use tape nowadays if you include all of the cost of owning and operating the tape machines, and repairing them, staffing them, etc. But I haven't really stayed abreast of any new tape developments (like more dense tapes) so don't beat me up if I'm wrong. :-)

> I have drives up to 25 years old.... I definitely don't think these issues will affect Backblaze

For pure cost reasons, we (Backblaze) tend to migrate off of the smaller drives after about 5 years anyway. Right now as we speak we are planning on moving data off of 4 TByte drives to 12 TByte drives.

The rough rule of thumb is that it is worth us moving to more dense drives when we can get than factor of three density increase. Basically any drive takes the same amount of electricity (and physical rental space) as any other drive, so when we can "shrink" the footprint to 1/3 the former footprint, we save 2/3 on space rental and 2/3 on the electricity so it is worth doing.

Now, if hard drives stop increasing in density, or take 8 years to increase by a factor of three, then we will need to re-evaluate based on failure rates and the like. But for now, we retire old equipment for cost reasons before it fails, so all the drives have enough longevity for us.

> I do think for the average consumer or the more neglectful business, that we will see far more issues related to data corruption and loss during the transition from hard disks to SSDs.

I've spent 12 years in the "backup business", and I agree. :-) I would have hoped that with all the great services like Google Photos and Apple iCloud backups and everything else available that consumers wouldn't be losing data, but we continue to hear horror stories every day about data loss from people. Combine that pretty much every single last family photo on earth has become digital just in the last 10 years. I mean, it used to require a house fire to lose your family photos, but now you can drop your phone in a sink and lose every photo you ever took of your children.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> if you are using large numbers of HDD forget about quiet. Stick it somewhere you don't have to hear it.

Here is an amusing Backblaze startup story.... Backblaze's original office was in my living room of my dive one bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, California. I mostly work on the client, but the guy building the original storage pods would power up the early pod prototypes in my living room on Friday and then GO HOME FOR THE WEEKEND. The 45 drives (often in an open enclosure) and fans would SCREAM in my living room all weekend long, it was super annoying. So I bought a plastic "tuff shed", put it on my back patio, and drilled a hole and strung power and ethernet out to my patio, and moved the prototype pods out there. Here are two pictures of that setup:

https://i.imgur.com/awTcR2t.jp...
https://i.imgur.com/gg49XhE.jp...

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> if a consumer-grade drive can survive in non-ideal situations then it will be an excellent choice for normal (consumer) conditions.

I think it's funny people think we (Backblaze) abuse the consumer drives. When I open my home gaming box, it is filled with dust bunnies. Our datacenters have filtered air and no carpets, and we walk across sticky fly paper mats as we enter. When we open a storage pod after 3 years, it is absolutely dust free inside!

We also don't run drive intensive applications. Our backup service you basically write the data ONCE, then leave it alone for years, and possibly read it back once to do a restore. (Well, we actually walk the drives from time to time recalculating all the checksums to make sure there is no bit-rot to repair from parity.)

The one thing we do differently than consumers is we leave the drive "powered up" for 5 years continuously. Internally we debate a lot whether this PRESERVES the drives or HURTS THEM, we honestly don't know. There is some evidence that heating drives up, then cooling them off by powering them down, then heating them up again is a lot worse for the hard drive than just leaving it in a very nice, constant temperature for 5 years.

But if a consumer at home leaves their hard drive powered up, I claim Backblaze is WAY NICER to the drives than a consumer. No dog hair or carpet fibers clogging up the cooling systems, we don't bump the table holding the drive with a chair every time we sit down. The cat isn't sleeping on the computer vents to keep warm. :-)

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I used to wonder why Backblaze relied so heavily on Seagate ... when you look at the bigger picture, absolute reliability is less important

Exactly. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss.

So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives).

With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> Backblaze probably does not [use SSDs]

For the big raw storage, you are correct. The hard drives still save us a ton of money over SSDs. However, we have quite a few SSDs in our billing servers, monitoring servers, front end caching servers, and in our large Cassandra clusters (used for resolving the "friendly" file names to raw hex storage ids/locations in our B2 service).

I don't know that we have a large enough sample size of any one model to be statistically significant. I wish some open source project would startup where you ran a TINY little app on any computer you own that reported home once per day to a global database of drives so the world could get all this info collected and reported.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze

> I for one wish there were more manufacturers, period.

Internally, everybody at Backblaze very much agrees with you. It is scary to us to be down to only two or three suppliers.

The good news is that within a few years, SSDs will be a viable alternative to hard drives for big data storage, and there seem to be more SSD manufacturers than hard drive manufacturers.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> this is available only in US and not other countries such as AUS?

Backblaze ships USB restores anywhere in the world. Finland, Australia, France, UK, we ship to these places literally every day! We absorb all the cost of shipping to free you from worrying about it.

> the return shipping cost will be expensive

You can return by the slowest boat shipping you like, and remember you are returning a small form factor 2.5" drive or even a USB thumb drive. I think you can put a thumb drive in a normal envelope with 49 cent stamp on it inside the USA and it will come back to us. But yes, you would have to check what it costs from Australia.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I have a Synology NAS.... because S3 is so cheap for me, but if you have a lot of data, Glacier is definitely preferred

Synology NAS supports Backblaze B2 in much the same way it supports Amazon S3 except Backblaze is less than 1/4 the price.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> There really don't seem to be any alternatives that support Linux.

Duplicity runs on Linux (ships built into Ubuntu and Debian) and people seem to like it and you can point it at Backblaze B2 storage which is very low cost (usually lower than $5/month). If you need a GUI, Deja Dup is getting rave reviews and it is a GUI on top of Duplicity.

> I want to be able to send ZFS snapshots, encrypted, to a remote location.

This is a REALLY common request and there are TONS of solutions. I think most of them were originally crafted to send your ZFS snapshots to Amazon S3 and/or Microsoft Azure, but now they work for Backblaze B2 also (and it is a LOT cheaper on Backblaze B2). If you look through the "integrations" list on this page you can choose your favorite: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i...

If you don't have any favorites, one of the Backblaze IT people here uses "Duplicity Linux" to do EXACTLY what you describe. I'm not that familiar with Duplicity but their website claims they ship as a native part of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. More info here: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I also tried the free tests of Backblaze and IIRC, they allowed only one machine

Backblaze has evolved quite a bit in the last couple years, I don't know when you last tried it. First of all, you can backup several computers under one email address in Backblaze. Second of all, Backblaze recently released "Groups" which is where one IT admin can administrate and monitor backups of hundreds of different users each with one or more computers.

For Backblaze Groups, there are two security models (both valid depending on your situation): 1) where the group administrator can prepare restores on behalf of the group members, or 2) the group members have absolute privacy yet the group administrator can monitor the backups and make sure they are healthy and up to date and get alerts if one client has not backed up recently, etc.