[HN Gopher] Backblaze: Mounting Losses, Lawsuits, Sham Accountin...
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Backblaze: Mounting Losses, Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, Insider
Selling
Author : PaywallBuster
Score : 222 points
Date : 2025-04-26 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.morpheus-research.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.morpheus-research.com)
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| tl;dr
|
| this is activist short seller report/investigation, some of the
| points made:
|
| - never been profitable
|
| - execs selling aggressively
|
| - loosing customers to Wasabi
|
| - accused of cooking the books
|
| - being sued by former execs for anti whistleblower/wrongful
| termination
|
| - execs leaving
| ryao wrote:
| Wasabi uses ZFS while backblaze does not. I wonder if this in
| any way contributed to the cost differences.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Wasabi also has a minimum storage requirement of 90 days
| mkj wrote:
| Wasabi doesn't seem to be a public company, so are they
| profitable?
| perrygeo wrote:
| I suspect it does. When I was evaluating Wasabi years ago,
| the sales engineers were very interested in knowing what
| specific kind of data we had and how compressible it was. So
| my guess (pure speculation) at the time was they use ZFS
| compression internally but charge customers for the
| uncompressed size.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| most of the files that matter, the big ones, are already
| compressed/high entropy - images, videos, ...
| Twirrim wrote:
| If they care about compression at the ZFS level, that means
| your file is going to be visible to anyone able to log in
| to the server, because they're relying on (at best)
| encryption at rest. That's not a great security model for a
| storage service. You don't want anyone to be able to log in
| to a server and see your actual files unencrypted.
|
| If they're going to compress/decompress, ideally you'd want
| them to have that at the point of ingestion, then
| encrypted, and then store that on the target drive.
|
| That way you can put very strong controls (audit,
| architecture, software etc) around your encryption and
| decryption, and be at reduced risk from someone getting
| access to storage servers.
| ksec wrote:
| >Wasabi uses ZFS
|
| Can't seems to find anything specific about Wasabi uses ZFS
| on Google. And Wasabi doesn't change you on egress. So I
| guess they are similar in terms of pricing.
|
| Although B2 seems to be way more popular on HN. I rarely see
| Wasabi here.
| rustc wrote:
| > And Wasabi doesn't change you on egress.
|
| Wasabi only allows as much egress as the amount of data
| you're storing and I don't think you can even pay for more:
| https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq#free-egress-policy.
| j45 wrote:
| You can put something like cloudflare in front of it fro
| free.
|
| There's a number of CDNS that participate in zero egress.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Book price is $6.99/TB for Wasabi vs $6/TB for Backblaze.
| Wasabi charges 90 days minimum for storage, and egress
| bandwidth is limited (honor system) to your total monthly
| data storage amount.
| thayne wrote:
| Wasabi also requires you to pay for a minimum of 1TB,
| whereas B2 charges per GB. That doesn't really matter for
| a company using a ton of storage, but it does for my
| personal use case of a few tens of GB.
| trollied wrote:
| Backblaze don't charge egress if you put it behind
| Cloudflare (even the free tier).
| alabastervlog wrote:
| You won't, however, be able to serve most e.g. media
| files or binaries this way, nor serve to clients like
| mobile apps, while staying within the bounds of
| Cloudflare's terms for their free and "self-serve" tier
| paid accounts.
|
| (Unless something's changed since the last time I
| checked)
| Sytten wrote:
| I dont think that would be right otherwise they R2
| offering would be kinda useless. I feel the restriction
| was on video/streaming.
|
| EDIT: OP is correct for CDN but if you use R2 even as a
| transparent copy from another S3 like provider it is
| allowed [1]
|
| [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Circumstantial, but they want software engineers
| specifically with knowledge of ZFS:
|
| https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wasabi/jobs/4615087008
| ryao wrote:
| There is the testimonial on Klara Systems' website:
|
| "The developers at Klara Inc. have been outstanding in
| helping Wasabi resolve ZFS issues and improve performance.
| Their understanding of ZFS internals is unmatched anywhere
| in the industry" - Jeff Flowers, CTO, Wasabi Technologies
|
| https://klarasystems.com/
|
| You could also search the OpenZFS repository for commits
| with the word Wasabi in them.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Backblaze uses erasure encoding, which is currently the best
| and most efficient way to do storage. It's how every major
| object storage platform works.
|
| The very quick high level explanation is that in storage you
| talk about "stretch factor". For every byte of file, how many
| bytes do you have to store to get the desired durability. If
| your approach to durability is you make 3 copies, that's a 3x
| stretch factor. Assuming you're smart, you'll have these
| spread across different servers, or at least different hard
| disks, so you'd be able to tolerate the loss of 2 servers.
|
| With erasure encoding you apply a mathematical transformation
| to the incoming object and shard it up. Out of those shards
| you need to retrieve a certain number to be able to reproduce
| the original object. The number of shards you produce and how
| many you need to recreate the original are configurable.
| Let's say it shards to 12, and you need 9 to recreate. The
| amount of storage that takes up is the ratio 9:12, so that's
| a 1.3x. For every byte that comes in, you need to store just
| 1.3x bytes.
|
| As before you'd scatter them across 12 shards and only
| needing any 9 means you can tolerate losing 3 hard disks
| (servers?) and still be able to retrieve the original object.
| That's better durability despite taking up 2.7x less storage.
|
| The drawback is that to retrieve the object, you have to
| fetch shards from 9 different locations and apply the
| transformation to recreate the original object, which adds a
| small bit of latency, but it's largely negligible these days.
| The cost of extra servers for your retrieval layer is
| significantly less than a storage server, and you wouldn't
| need anywhere near the same number as you'd otherwise need
| for storage.
|
| The underlying file system doesn't really have any
| appreciable impact under those circumstances. I'd argue ZFS
| is probably even worse, because you're spending more
| resources on overhead. You want something as fast and
| lightweight as possible. Your fixity checks will catch any
| degradation in shards, and recreating shards in the case of
| failure is pretty cheap.
| srean wrote:
| > It's how every major object storage platform works.
|
| Very interesting. Could you name a few, am curious. I would
| be happy if erasure codes are actually being used
| commercially.
|
| What I find interesting is the interaction of compression
| and durability -- if you lose a few compressed bytes to
| reconstruction error, you lose a little more than a few.
| Seems right up rate-distortion alley.
| pas wrote:
| Ceph has a very stable EC feature. And lot of companies
| use Ceph as a storage backend. Unfortunately I cannot
| find any straightforward statement about a commercial
| offering, but I would bet that DreamHost's DreamObjects
| does use it.
|
| While it's not "commercial", but CERN uses it and many
| other institutions.
|
| https://indico.cern.ch/event/941278/contributions/4104604
| /at... --- 50PB
|
| ...
|
| ah, okay, finally an AWS S3 presentation that mentions EC
| :)
|
| https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/Summits/reinvent2022/STG2
| 03_...
| Twirrim wrote:
| That I know of (and is public so I'm not breaching any
| NDA) AWS S3[1], Azure[2], GCP[3], Backblaze[4],
| Facebook's storage layer uses it[5][6], and Oracle
| Cloud's Object Storage Platform[7].
|
| The economies of scale mean that you really have to have
| something like erasure encoding in place to operate at
| large scale. The biggest single cost for cloud providers
| is the per-rack operational costs, so keeping the number
| of racks down is critical.
|
| [1]https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/Summits/reinvent2022/S
| TG203_...
|
| [2]https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc12/a
| tc12-f...
|
| [3]https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/availability-
| durabilit...
|
| [4]https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/
|
| [5]https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotstorage13/worksho
| p-prog...
|
| [6]https://research.facebook.com/publications/a-hitchhike
| rs-gui... they even do some interesting things with
| erasure encoding and HDFS
|
| [7] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-
| infrastructure/post/first-pri...
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| More or less.
|
| XFS or ext2 (or 3 or 4 wo journal), without LVM or mdraid.
|
| There's no point to adding RAID at the hardware or OS level
| for object storage boxes when redundancy exists at the
| application level. A drive with too many errors will be
| marked "dead" and just spun down and ignored.
|
| Metadata servers OTOH tend to be engineered to be much more
| reliable beasts.
| cj wrote:
| From the article (TLDR: the author has a financial interest in
| seeing their stock decline)
|
| > Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we believe the
| evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze
| (NASDAQ: BLZE). Morpheus Research holds short positions in BLZE,
| and Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by
| others. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all
| readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full
| disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| And contrary to popular opinion, Taleb thinks that you should
| put more weight on such opinions, because they have skin in the
| game and are willing to back their beliefs with money. Short
| selling is not risk free, if they are wrong, they will get
| burned.
| hobs wrote:
| I mean, just read the article - if half the stuff stated is
| true its pretty bad, though its interesting how much of the
| drama is centered around 2022.
| tw04 wrote:
| If half the stuff stated is not true, he'll assuredly be
| facing a lawsuit.
| jillyboel wrote:
| And writing articles like this makes it more likely they
| become right
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Well yeah, when people find out that someone is stealing
| from them, they tend to not want to do business.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| That is how short selling works. Do lots of research, find
| some fatal flaw in a business model that everyone else has
| missed, and put money on the position. The final step is
| you have to advertise your findings, otherwise you are
| sitting on secret knowledge which the market will not price
| appropriately.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sure, but I'd more worried that the founders and management
| seem like they are short. The CEO left, announced a big stock
| sale, cancelled it, then dumped a bunch coincidentally when the
| CFO left (but before disclosure). Then the company hired an MLM
| CFO.
|
| Oh, and the finance employees refused to sign off on the books
| and a few are suing the company.
|
| It sucks, but Backblaze is cooked.
| cj wrote:
| Sure, I agree.
|
| But this is a hit piece. For any hit piece, I think it's
| important for readers to know the motivations of the author,
| regardless of the validity of the claims.
| gruez wrote:
| That's basically how every short report works. Finding
| corporate malfeasance and writing a report costs money, and
| Backblaze isn't famous enough that journalists from the new
| york times or propublica would go after them. So the only
| people with incentive to expose such corporate malfeasance are
| short sellers.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| I would have appreciated seeing this at the top of the article.
| lud_lite wrote:
| As a customer do I need to worry? It is my favourite cheapo
| backup.
| klodolph wrote:
| I recommend worrying about any service where you don't pay a
| fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I
| recommend worrying about Backblaze and I've recommended
| worrying about it for a while.
|
| Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business
| models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other
| part of the business, but I think it's just a matter of time
| before the business model changes. At the end of the day,
| there's a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in
| line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty
| good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything
| less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion.
|
| From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a
| vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major
| cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge
| the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough).
| None of them offer unlimited data... or at least, not any more
| (most of them _used_ to, but those parts of the business always
| get shut down).
| lud_lite wrote:
| Thanks! I suspect that for my use case (actual backup no meed
| for cloud access) s3 glacier is statistically cheaper.
| gruez wrote:
| >actual backup no meed for cloud access
|
| How do you test your backups? You do test your backups,
| right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but
| that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily
| run into a situation where you need to retrieve files
| beyond the 30 day window.
| mingus88 wrote:
| If you regularly test your backups, glacier gets a lot
| more expensive due to egress fees
|
| And it's such a good thing to remind people of. You don't
| manage a backup service. Nobody cares about backups.
|
| People care about restores.
| klodolph wrote:
| Glacier egress is less than it used to be, and you can
| use a combination of glacier + other storage classes
| using lifecycle rules.
|
| I would personally be fine running tests on data that is
| recently backed up and only testing the data in glacier
| once or twice. Think about why you test backups in the
| first place--the main errors you're trying to catch are
| problems like misconfiguration, backups not getting
| scheduled or not running, or not having access to your
| encryption keys. You can put your most recent backup in
| "infrequent access" and let older objects age out to
| glacier with lifecycle rules.
|
| Glacier used to have really expensive retrieval costs.
| That's now called "glacier deep archive" and as far as I
| know, major use cases are things like corporate
| recordkeeping / compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). The
| costumers for deep archive should be sophisticated
| customers.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| What do you recommend as an alternative? I use it as a
| cheaper replacement to S3
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I backup to Amazon Glacier S3 Deep Archive backed buckets.
| The price is only a little higher for a few TB than other
| providers, though egress fees in case of restore are a lot
| higher. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make as I'd have
| two have two separate local NAS replicas corrupt or die
| before I need to rely on the Deep Archive.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| For raw backup, I use GCP. Pricing is similar to AWS and
| the deep storage is easier to use.
|
| For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive
| because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With
| Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the
| Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.
| billfor wrote:
| IDrive.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Huh? b2 absolutely scales with usage. Here is their pricing
| page: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage
| gruez wrote:
| >These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what
| market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market
| rates should be viewed with suspicion.
|
| Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS?
| The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter
| probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders
| backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing
| money overall.
| mingus88 wrote:
| According to the article they _are_ losing money overall,
| every quarter since the IPo
| gruez wrote:
| I meant the unit economics of their backup product, not
| the company as a whole. They made $69M in _gross_ profit
| in 2024, with a gross margin of 55%. That turns into a
| lost only after subtracting R &D ($42M), sales and
| marketing ($44M), and G&A ($29M). Of course, those
| expenses can't be ignored in the context of a company
| that's set out to make money, but at least they're not
| selling $10 worth of storage for $5, like the OP implied.
| klodolph wrote:
| https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/pricing
|
| $99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The
| context here is someone talking about personal backups, not
| Backblaze's broader offerings. We know the market rates for
| cloud storage, more or less, since they've converged
| somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to
| calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to
| save money at Backblaze.
|
| Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to
| attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a
| product. These people are not turning around and signing
| contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many.
|
| So it could be that people are just using it below its
| limits, or it could be that it's subsidized by other parts
| of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant--you want to be
| able to explain this product as a profitable product, as
| some viable sales channel, or as marketing.
|
| My recommendation is to buy storage products where the
| company is making money off you, or nearly.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The backup plan has no API access (you need to use B2
| which is usage-billed), it's for a single machine, and
| external drive data is lost after 30 days from last scan
| which makes it very inconvenient for anything other
| than.. backing up a computer's hard drive. Nothing
| indicates misuse of this plan is causing elevated
| operating costs for them.
| klodolph wrote:
| I'm aware. That isn't relevant to my analysis.
| immibis wrote:
| I believe they're public about the fact they have some
| users who back up hundreds of TBs and they're still
| willing to just deal with it to keep the flat price
| structure.
| gruez wrote:
| >$99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell.
| The context here is someone talking about personal
| backups, not Backblaze's broader offerings. We know the
| market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since
| they've converged somewhat, across the industry. This
| makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns
| would lead someone to save money at Backblaze.
|
| So do the calculations? As I mentioned in another
| comment, their unit economics are sound, with them making
| more than 50% gross margin.
|
| >So it could be that people are just using it below its
| limits
|
| That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains
| operate on the assumption that most users won't use their
| services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip
| and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone
| one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad
| idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd
| actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.
| klodolph wrote:
| > So do the calculations?
|
| Is this some kind of personal challenge? It's
| _arithmetic_ for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125
| /Gb-mo, ingress basically free,
| $99/yr/(12mo/yrx$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb. Reasonable to
| ignore egress for backups--you may want to account for
| it, but it's reasonable to ignore it. Do your own
| calculations if you have different assumptions.
|
| That's not hard. The numbers don't have to be exact.
|
| Maybe I just think it's easy because I've run numbers
| like these for a living. Given X different storage
| configurations, under which conditions is configuration 1
| cheaper than configurations 2 and 3?
|
| > That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym
| chains operate on the assumption that most users won't
| use their services. There's no way that planet fitness
| can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if
| everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean
| it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership
| (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of
| going under.
|
| The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My
| cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move
| my data to a different provider, depending on how much
| data and what kind of rate limits. We've seen this
| before. People with data stuck in an "unlimited" storage
| service that's shutting down, trying to transfer it but
| getting their egress throttled.
|
| The economics of gyms are different because the cost is
| not only the membership, but also the time it takes you
| to get to the gym. Cloud services are a much more
| efficient market, which means the margins are much lower.
| gruez wrote:
| >Is this some kind of personal challenge? It's arithmetic
| for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo,
| ingress basically free, $99/yr/(12mo/yrx$0.0125/Gb-
| mo)=660 Gb.
|
| This includes AWS's margin, which could be quite
| handsome. Bandwidth costs for the top 3 hyperscalers have
| converged to around 9 cents per GB, but nobody seriously
| thinks that's anywhere close to to the actual cost of
| bandwidth, or that hetzner/ovh is going to go under
| because they're offering 1TB ($90) of bandwdith for their
| $5/month VPS.
|
| Even taking the 660GB figure at face value, that's
| plausibly within the range of what I'd expect the average
| person to have backed up, especially when you consider
| that the pricing is per machine, and the standard
| desktop/laptop comes with around 500 GB of storage.
|
| You've also failed to address my point about their gross
| margins. The reliability of their books have been
| questioned, but even the short report didn't accuse them
| of cooking that metric.
|
| >The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My
| cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move
| my data to a different provider, depending on how much
| data and what kind of rate limits. We've seen this
| before. People with data stuck in an "unlimited" storage
| service that's shutting down, trying to transfer it but
| getting their egress throttled.
|
| It's a _backup_ service. It 's not even trying to compare
| itself with the likes of dropbox or onedrive. You should
| have at the very least a second copy locally.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'd make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and
| whatever the AWS one is. The hyperscalers are able to get
| prices way cheaper with economies of scale and price models
| in a sustainable way.
|
| When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for
| exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because
| of the IOPS needs of exchange. So "free", (low iops)
| SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that
| "free" capacity.
| rsync wrote:
| "I'd make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and
| whatever the AWS one is."
|
| No - no exceptions.
|
| We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that
| providers (especially providers of critical services) have
| financial interests that align with our own interests.
|
| I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they
| have to burn - if it makes financial sense to _keep you
| from storing your backups_ you need to go elsewhere.
| immibis wrote:
| On the other hand why should you not extract value from
| someone who is giving you free value?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Unless you uuencode your photos and chisel them into
| stone tablets, stored in your personal salt mine, you're
| not serious about backups.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You're missing the point. Those companies are providing
| extremely profitable services, of which data storage is a
| part. Office and Workspace are lines of business with
| 50-60% margins.
|
| Non-nerds are going to screw up backups without good UI.
| If you want to pay by the drink, like I said, use the
| hyperscalers.
| j45 wrote:
| The economies of scale go into profit for them while still
| incrementally increasing costs for clients.
|
| If it was aligned with economies of scale, customers would
| get more storage for the same price every year.
|
| We don't hear about cloud prices coming down that often.
| rsync wrote:
| "I recommend worrying about any service where you don't pay a
| fee that scales with usage."
|
| This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to
| develop.
|
| Your provider _especially your backups provider_ needs to
| have interests that are aligned with your interests.
|
| The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to
| _keep you from using their product_ and to use as little of
| their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of
| incentives.
|
| On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed)
| "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every
| quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic
| "losing money but making up for it on volume".
|
| Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time.
|
| The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD
| enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire
| sale :(
| klodolph wrote:
| > Your provider especially your backups provider needs to
| have interests that are aligned with your interests.
|
| I also think about all those cafes with free WiFi, where
| you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours
| while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in
| the background. I benefit, but the cafe doesn't.
| immibis wrote:
| You should worry they'll increase the price and worry they'll
| delete your data if you don't pay the higher price. It's not
| necessary to worry they'll go out of business just because
| they are charging a fixed price. They'll raise the price long
| before going out of business.
| j45 wrote:
| Having your own NAS in the mix more and more is
| unavoidable.
|
| On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will
| always charge more an more for it because customers have
| not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how
| profitable it is on the other end.
|
| On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a
| simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to
| any cloud you wish.
| j45 wrote:
| Storage is a fixed fee (space on a hard drive). It make money
| every month when it sits there and is used.
|
| Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you
| purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until
| the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB
| can be calculated.
|
| Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can
| have the opposite problem.
|
| I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself,
| and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| If it's your only backup, yes, you definitely should.
| lud_lite wrote:
| It's one of two backups. The software is great. Dropbox level
| of just works. iDrive by comparison is cheaper but always
| errors and files it couldn't touch.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about
| symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup
| symlinks either for that matter...
| mingus88 wrote:
| I use restic with b2 as a backend
|
| It's not the same service as backblaze's client but it
| does everything I need, with dedupe
| rsync wrote:
| "Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about
| symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't
| backup symlinks either for that matter..."
|
| Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that
| gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything
| you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open
| standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and
| such ?
|
| If only ...
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| tarsnap, mega ;)
| rsync wrote:
| The world would be a better place if more people used
| tarsnap...
| lud_lite wrote:
| It is expensive. If we do a monthly test restore like
| someone suggested then 1TB costs $6000/y. No restores is
| $3000/y. s3 regular is 10% of that.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| They're not at risk of going bankrupt. This is more about
| confidence in the company to go anywhere that would help the
| share price.
|
| The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the
| exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be
| buying shares expecting the price to rise.
| stego-tech wrote:
| If the service isn't making money consistently, I would worry
| about its long-term viability. This is basic commoditized
| storage they're managing to screw up making a profit on, not
| some super-niche or brand-new product line.
|
| It's bits in a barn, and they're not making rent. That's
| worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them,
| especially in light of this research.
| Havoc wrote:
| sigh...literally just recommended it to a family member as the
| simple option
| nodesocket wrote:
| You should not stop recommending Backblaze due to a short
| seller's opinion piece. What are their motivations?
| EasyMark wrote:
| do some research, this article smells of hit piece, especially
| since the author is set to make money off of bad publicity for
| the company.
| sjml wrote:
| Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as I
| can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just
| straight storage? For me, a lot of the benefit of Backblaze comes
| from a (mostly) good client solution that handles the automated
| backup. The backup history upsell is also great for someone (like
| me) whose travel patterns often mean going months without
| reliable internet.
|
| I know I could use some open source stuff to get similar
| functionality, but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup
| as I would rolling my own crypto. Does Wasabi have some client
| solution that I'm missing?
| tw04 wrote:
| You're missing the point. Enterprise customers where they would
| presumably see the bulk of their profits is what they're losing
| to wasabi. Commercial "unlimited backups" is not a wildly
| profitable business which is why basically every other
| competitor in the space either failed or intentionally exited
| the market segment.
| sjml wrote:
| Ah, got it; that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
| gruez wrote:
| >Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as
| I can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just
| straight storage?
|
| That's addressed in the article:
|
| >Since 2021, Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage segment revenue
| growth has outpaced its legacy Computer Backup segment. In Q4
| 2024, the company announced that its B2 Cloud Storage segment
| generated $17.1 million in revenue, surpassing its Computer
| Backup revenue of $16.7 million.
|
| Even if Wasabi isn't a straight replacement for Backblaze's
| entire business, it's a replacement for its biggest and fastest
| growing segment.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| how in the world do they only make $17.1 in _revenue_ ,
| everyone I know is on BackBlaze, even if they're only used by
| techy people I'm surprised they're not making $100m+/quarter.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| They're cheap (the reason many people use them), and the
| number of people we know that use them is ridiculously
| outsized compared to the general population, because we
| know people in the tech sphere.
| gruez wrote:
| Anecdotally most people, even "techy people" don't do
| actual backups. At best, they have icloud/google backup
| turned on for their phone, and upload important files are
| on dropbox/onedrive.
| conradfr wrote:
| Maybe you know their entire customers base.
|
| I know nobody who use them, so it all balances itself.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I mean, my B2 monthly bill is like 17 cents.
|
| If they don't have enterprises and people storing large
| amounts of data...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Turns out big enterprise was right in not adopting such a
| small player lol.
| j45 wrote:
| Appreciate the intro to Wasabi, happy to learn about others
| too while evaluating backblaze.
| esperent wrote:
| By coincidence I just spent several hours today comparing
| exactly these two services (Wasabi vs B2) and even though I am
| familiar with Backblaze and have used it before, I went with
| Wasabi. It's basically the same price, has more regions, a very
| simple interface, and rather than having to manage both hot and
| cold storage Wasabi is cheap enough to just throw everything
| into hot.
|
| The only downside I found is that they limit free egress to
| 100% of your storage (so if you store 1tb, you get 1tb egress).
| In practice I don't think this will be an issue for my use
| case.
|
| So I'm an example of a person who this morning had almost never
| heard of Wasabi, knows Backlaze well, and after an hour or two
| of research I have completely switched over.
| mdasen wrote:
| Isn't B2 cheaper than Wasabi? B2 is $6/TB while Wasabi is
| $6.99/TB. Why would you have to manage hot and cold storage
| with B2?
|
| Wasabi also treats every object as having a minimum 90-day
| storage period. So if you upload something and delete it,
| it's still considered "stored" for billing purposes for that
| 90-day minimum.
|
| B2 also gives you 3x storage as free transfer compared to 1x
| for Wasabi.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't go with Wasabi, but the
| reasoning you've articulated doesn't seem to track.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Additionally, Wasabi bills you for a minimum of 1TB of
| active storage, which is $6.99/month. For my modest backup
| needs it is way cheaper to use any service that bills per
| GB.
|
| https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq
| dehrmann wrote:
| > but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would
| rolling my own crypto
|
| Is there a Restic frontend for Windows that you'd be
| comfortable setting up a family member with?
| rdtsc wrote:
| > While Budman claimed that he wanted to avoid any appearance of
| trying to "time the market," he appears to have done so nearly
| perfectly, as Backblaze's shares crashed by as much as 26%
| intraday following the announcement and have continued to slide
| ever since.[5]
|
| Doesn't that seem like insider trading? I guess he can claim he
| didn't know so and so was going to quit.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It almost certainly is. Canceling the planned sale makes it
| look even worse.
|
| But... are there securities laws in this era where policy
| decisions are timed to pump/dump the lowest?
| hinkley wrote:
| Not to say he's innocent, but insiders can also trigger market
| crashes just by selling their stock. There are public records
| of substantial holdings by company insiders and while I don't
| think they're made available immediately, they are updated
| periodically and people can and do read into it.
|
| That's part of why they usually deputize a brokerage to
| periodically sell a fraction of their holdings at intervals.
|
| It's been a long while since I paid any attention to this but I
| do believe I saw at least a couple of instances of an insider
| triggering weakness in their stock just by increasing the rate
| of sale of their holdings.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Yeah it would have to be something like that. It seems a too
| obvious of a move, so I figured he might have had a solid
| loophole.
| hinkley wrote:
| To wit: Bill Gates did a bunch of press before starting his
| foundation to make it clear that him selling MS shares was
| not about concerns over MS's future but that he needed a
| shitload of money for other pursuits.
|
| And Warren Buffet would use many frontmen to slowly buy
| shares without triggering a buying frenzy. You can't just
| buy or sell 3% of a company without causing drama.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Totally an aside but is Morpheus what happened to the Hindenburg
| Research guys after the founder of that stepped away? The site is
| eerily similar and the timing makes sense. I loved reading
| Hindenburg's research.
| sndean wrote:
| I think so, or at least they have Hindenburg alumni working for
| them: https://x.com/NateHindenburg/status/1900596203156304371
| guerrilla wrote:
| Well if they go out of business where the hell am I going to get
| my hard drive statistics from? ;D
| tgtweak wrote:
| Did they cook the books on those too?
|
| honestly I participated in the IPO then sold when it was up a
| bit - I had faith in their fundamentals as a business but they
| did not seem mature as a public company.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't know what the incentive would be for doing that.
| Could they use it to drive prices on HDDs lower somehow? I
| vaguely recall them being activist as far as quality.
| avsteele wrote:
| Very happy with their B2 storage. Easy to use, works well, prices
| fine. I use it as a backup target for several of my Synology
| NAS's. I hope they stay in business
| nikisweeting wrote:
| None of this really shook my faith in Backblaze being able to
| recover until I got to this part:
|
| > Instead, Backblaze's new CFO, Marc Suidan, joined from
| Beachbody (NYSE: BODI), a multi-level marketing company
|
| eek
| hiyer wrote:
| Beachbody isn't an MLM. They sell workout programs (used to be
| dvds but have now moved to a subscription model). From personal
| experience, I can say that at least one of their programs -
| Tony Horton's P90X - is very good.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I know nothing about them so not saying you're wrong but the
| statement "X is not an MLM" is normally a positive indication
| that X is an MLM.
|
| And then promoting them also gives strong mlm vibes.
|
| So I would bet more money on them being an mlm after reading
| your comment than before
| slenk wrote:
| BODI was an MLM that had to stop being an MLM and are
| hemorrhaging money
| ellen364 wrote:
| Under that rule of thumb, anything accused of being an MLM
| will seem like an MLM, even if the accusation is absurd.
|
| "Uh, what?? Air isn't an MLM, it's just the thing we
| breath. We all need it to live."
|
| "Huh, I guess air is an MLM after all. Wild."
| hinkley wrote:
| Conversely, "they're not an MLM, they sell a product." Is
| a bullshit, non-defense statement. MLMs always have a
| product. That's what keeps them from being Ponzi schemes.
| derefr wrote:
| A finer distinction might be between MLMs (where the
| _multi-level_ part is very literal -- everyone is being
| garnished by their upline and profiting from their
| downline), vs. flat marketing organizations that just
| give (centralized, corporate, one-time) recruitment
| bonuses to their salespeople.
|
| Vector Marketing, for example -- the company that sells
| Cutco knives door-to-door -- might be _incredibly scummy_
| , sure. Their entire business model is to
|
| 1. talk college students into thinking they can make a
| continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets
| (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping
| into each college student's family and friends -- who are
| only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even
| are], because it's their family/friend asking);
|
| 2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the
| company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in
| sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);
|
| 3. and also forcing those college students to recruit
| other college students on campus.
|
| But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining
| _Vector Marketing 's_ pockets directly -- without any
| revenue structure involving making more money as you
| recruit others whose sales "become your sales" -- it's
| _not_ Multi Level Marketing.
|
| It's just sleazy.
|
| (And yes, this _is_ just me taking this opportunity to
| rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife
| set laying around, from when my college roommate attended
| a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a
| set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think
| of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful
| tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a
| shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not
| knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't
| want to support a company that _thinks it 's a good idea_
| to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
| lolinder wrote:
| They have been historically [0], it looks like they only
| changed their model last October [1], a few months _after_
| Marc Suidan switched to Backblaze.
|
| TFA even specifies this:
|
| > Instead they hired Marc Suidan who joined from Beachbody
| (NYSE: BODI) - a publicly traded health and fitness company
| where he was CFO between May 2022 and August 2024 when the
| company was operating as a "multi-level marketing" company.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2011/01/31/beachbody-grows-
| exponentiall...
|
| [1] https://nypost.com/2024/10/01/business/beachbody-lays-
| off-th...
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| My roommate freshman year of college was hocking P90X boxes
| and trying to get a "downstream" going. Quacks like a duck to
| me.
| slenk wrote:
| They WERE an MLM until they stopped being able to make money.
| There are good YouTubers out there dedicating time to getting
| people out of MLMs (some are basically cults). 99% of people
| in MLMs lose money.
|
| If you think he is a good CFO I think you drank the coolaid.
|
| https://marencrowley.com/podcast/the-demise-of-the-
| beachbody...
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Morpheus Research should look at Fastly next.
| erichocean wrote:
| Short-seller writes disparaging article to move market, news at
| 11.
|
| (At least they disclose it at the bottom, but it should be in the
| title.)
| memset wrote:
| Who are the players in the "s3 compatible but cheaper than AWS"
| space?
|
| - Wasabi
|
| - idrive
|
| Who else?
| thomasjudge wrote:
| How about S3 Glacier?
| manquer wrote:
| Almost every cloud provider outside of Azure and GCP have an s3
| compatible offering . S3 API is de-facto standard for object
| storage tooling
|
| Cloudflare, scaleway, hetzner, OVH, Oracle, minio and dozens of
| others all have s3 compatible object stores
|
| Most of them expect AWS have at least inter cloud transfer free
| (or discount Azure and GCP) being part of bandwidth
| alliance(BWA).
|
| AWS S3 pricing is designed to keep you in the ecosystem , not
| be the cheapest, so tend to be costliest not cheapest unless
| your workload is archival.
|
| For almost all non archival workloads egress costs will be on
| par or much higher than storage costs and AWS[1] charges a lot
| for any bandwidth.
|
| AWS also makes migration really expensive so if you started
| with them, you are likely stuck as you would have to pay up to
| 10-12 months of cost to migrate out if you are on anything but
| the standard tier (cheaper the tiers higher the retrieval
| costs)
|
| [1] All tier one providers have 10-20x b/w costs compared to
| tier two , however Azure and GCP discount for inter cloud
| transfers AWS does not
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
| memset wrote:
| Understood. Are there lesser-known providers that I could
| consider for hobby projects?
| j45 wrote:
| Wasabi seems reasonable.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Wasabi a more known brand than Backblaze in the storage space?
| Doubt!
| mdasen wrote:
| It might depend on who you are. I think Backblaze is well known
| on here because they've been around for longer and their hard
| drive stats posts are well liked.
|
| If you're a less technical CTO, Wasabi seems to do a lot more
| traditional marketing on things like sports games:
| https://ibb.co/21qNkM9b (NBA, NHL, Premier League soccer). I'm
| not saying that makes them better, but a lot of people with
| purchasing power are going to be seeing Wasabi around.
|
| Wasabi has also been pushing value-add services on top of their
| storage with Wasabi AiR (https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-
| storage/wasabi-air). It's basically an AI-powered database of
| your content. If you're running a place generating lots of
| content, having a system automatically tag and make searchable
| all those images and videos is a really nice value-add. Being
| able to search for a video clip containing a specific person in
| your library junk pile of video can be nicely useful for a lot
| of organizations.
|
| It could just be that different people get their brand
| awareness from different places.
| sndean wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a decent Backblaze alternative in case
| things really go south? Not so much for storage but for the
| automated computer backups that I have Backblaze doing. I'm okay
| paying more than Backblaze's $9/month.
| wmf wrote:
| I haven't tried it but Arq has a good reputation.
| ryao wrote:
| I have no experience with them but I have heard good things
| about rsync.net. They use ZFS.
| bartvbl wrote:
| I use Jottacloud, which is quite similar in many respects.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| Much data, medium risk tolerance: Mega
|
| Small data, or low risk tolerance: Tarsnap
| Fizzadar wrote:
| Moved to wasabi from their s3-like b2 product because it was so
| utterly unreliable. Pretty wild list of things if true.
| aghilmort wrote:
| ugh backblaze was great alt to S3 the heroku of storage for a
| while, used them often few years ago
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