BackBlaze B2 Cloud Storage anyone?

[Karl Kim]

Anyone using BackBlaze B2 cloud storage for online media storage? Other price competitive products you're using? I'm not a post professional (yet) but seem to need to backup/store 60-80 TB per year. I have no investment in LTO so looking at cloud to start offsite storage.

 

[Alex Kiritz]

10TB Easystores are going for $200 right now. Depending on your internet and bank access, keeping hard drives in a safety deposit box might be easier. It definitely would be cheaper.

 

[Karl Kim]

Thanks for the reply.
Everything is on hard drives now. Lifespan is a concern, especially older drives (some are over 12 yrs old- Firewire, esata, and yeah, sometimes I wonder why I feel compelled to save the data). At this time, 2019, just not planning to add LTO. I'm not a post house nor full time post professional.
I also store 35mm and 16mm but that's another story...

 

[Bob Zelin]

Personally, I don't get cloud site backups for video professionals, that have countless terabytes of data storage. I build a 100 TB QNAP server for a client in Washington DC, and they wanted to start using Backblaze B2 to back it up. I said "ok" (what did I know).
So Backblaze mailed them a "box" and said "back it up to this, and send it back to us". The "box" turned out to be an off the shelf Synology. So when you want to backup 100 Gigs of data - no problem. But when you want to backup a ton of data, companies like
Backblaze literally mail you a network attached storage system, tell you to back it up onto their box (in the Backblaze case - it was a Synology) - and mail it back to them, and they will transfer the data to their cloud site. This translates to they transfer the small NAS onto their massive servers, which you can access over the internet (but God help you if you have to download 30 TB of data !). Amazon S3 does the same thing - they mail you a "Snowball" which is a 50 TB drive with a 10G network connection, you backup your data to it, mail it back to Amazon, and they transfer the data onto their servers, back at Amazon (not over the internet).

SO - I told my client "why would you do this - why not just go out any buy your own Synology - the exact same box - and keep it in your home (because it's small)." Anyway - he wound up buying an identical QNAP, we backed up the 100 TB in the office, he brought home the second QNAP, and now he does incremental backups every weekend over the internet (about 100 - 200 Gigs). Because you can't transfer 100 TB of data over the internet. I don't care how fast your ISP connection is.
And if his office ever burned down, or got burglarized, he would simply grab his backup system, and go back to work the next day.

I think that "one day" when companies like Google, Amazon and Apple wind up buying out the cable companies, they will invest the infrastructure money to have real 10G connections for businesses, and THEN you can use a "cloud site" for this type of backup.
Until then - maybe its ok for QuickBooks, etc. but not for video pro's.

Bob Zelin

 

[DJ Meyer]

Because you can't transfer 100 TB of data over the internet. I don't care how fast your ISP connection is.

I back up multi-terabyte shoots to cloud storage several times a week. Not sure what the fuss is about.

 

[andrewhake]

I back up multi-terabyte shoots to cloud storage several times a week. Not sure what the fuss is about.

I have many TBs backed up to Backblaze's standard consumer cloud backup service as well. 1Gb upload speed works wonders. Of course you want a local copy/backup of the data as well.

 

[Misha Engel]

It all comes down to your internet upload speed and the cost of the internet connection.
A 10 gb/s consumer internet connection in Sweden is only $40/month.

For us it was cheaper to run a redundant server in an other free standing building 500 meters away.

 

[Karl Kim]

Yes, in the process of setting up a 10g NAS, but the question is mid term backup offsite.

 

[Misha Engel]

Yes, in the process of setting up a 10g NAS, but the question is mid term backup offsite.

Most cloud storage providers are pretty much okay (incl. BlackBlaze).
It's more a question of your internet speed, is it state of the art Swedish 10 gb/s $40/month consumer internet or is it Ajit Pai driven prehistoric slow expensive internet.

 

[Karl Kim]

Most cloud storage providers are pretty much okay (incl. BlackBlaze).
It's more a question of your internet speed, is it state of the art Swedish 10 gb/s $40/month consumer internet or is it Ajit Pai driven prehistoric slow expensive internet.

Upload speed is 910 Mbps, according to Verizon Fios speed test.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Upload speed is 910 Mbps, according to Verizon Fios speed test.

To be fair there is more to it than raw upload speed. Some cloud providers have limited ingest speeds even if you've got a firehose connection.

But it is indeed viable as a third tier backup option with adequate testing.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I back up multi-terabyte shoots to cloud storage several times a week. Not sure what the fuss is about.

And what sort of internet connection do you have and time and all that? A great many of us can't get much better than a few Mbps upload speeds, no matter how much we're willing to pay. That said, I'm unaware of any cloud backup service that's worth anywhere near what they charge if you're managing anything over 20TB...

There are some 5 and 10 Gbit connectivity options within a 30 minute drive from me, but I don't know of any that offer better than 1Gbit upload speed. Not only that, but Amazon and BackBlaze and most others usually have their own limits on upload/ingest speeds. Last I checked, Amazon was 900Mbps maximum with no guarantees of what it would sustain. And it varies greatly by country and region. Which also is why there are third party services out there which work as the middle man to get your data uploaded faster! You want to start your archive with more than 10TB of stored data, they send you a drive to fill and send back. ...Assuming you had a fast enough connection to saturate Amazon's intake and sustain it at a very respectable 750Mbps, that's 15.4 days at full speed with no interruptions or errors to upload 100TB of data. Fuck that. Or you can pay someone else more money to upload or deliver them the data and then they will upload to Amazon at whatever their claimed speed is (some claiming 900~950Mbps).

 

[Bob Zelin]

which is why I said to simply get your own Network Attached Storage device, and let people remote into it. You own it.

Again - you are at the mercy of your connection, and your client's / freelancers connection.

Bob Zelin

 

[Misha Engel]

which is why I said to simply get your own Network Attached Storage device, and let people remote into it. You own it.

Again - you are at the mercy of your connection, and your client's / freelancers connection.

Bob Zelin

That is old school Bob, people want the cloud these days. We just installed two ZFS raidz3, 500 TB, storage servers on seperate locations connected via a 2x40Gb/s ethernet connection (fiber) for redundancy.
I took me some time to convince our general manager why this is a better solution than the cloud (Price, security and speed), at the end money talked it my prefered way.

And some users have remote access.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Anyone try Google G Suite Business? Apparently if you do 5 users at $10/mo ($50/mo) you have unlimited storage.

 

[Chad Lancaster]

Anyone try Google G Suite Business? Apparently if you do 5 users at $10/mo ($50/mo) you have unlimited storage.

Linus tech tips did a video about it a couple months ago

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Linus tech tips did a video about it a couple months ago

Just watched. According to them you can upload 150TB before they throttle you. Seems like a reasonable ADDITIONAL backup for current or important projects/files.
750GB upload limit per day, per user.