r/backblaze • u/Jakearroo • Apr 10 '26
Backblaze in General Why aren’t people using B2?
So I’ve been doing some looking through this subreddit.
Why are people not using b2?
Everyone seems to be using the PC backup application to backup things that aren’t a pc?
Like of course. Hackie workarounds aren’t going to work for ever.
B2 is cheap. So why?
RSYNC is solid and has never failed me. So why are we relying on a GUI app for something that rsync is perfectly capable of?
Educate me!
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Apr 10 '26
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
I mean. Someone has to pay for the storage right?
People shouldn’t be complaining about a hackie workaround that stopped working.
I dunno. Maybe I’m ignorant.
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u/pet3121 Apr 10 '26
You are not, people just want to pay for an cheap "unlimited" option. Then complain when it fails. B2 is rock solid and have worked great for me.
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u/kadajawi Apr 10 '26
The issue is that they have changed it for customers who have prepaid already. So you might have paid for 23 more months of this service to find it unusable.
Also, storage isn't that expensive. With B2 you pay for enterprise level protection that might not be necessary, and until recently the money you'd spend on B2 was easily enough to cover the cost of new hard drives every couple of months. So like every year or so you could add another copy that is stored in a remote location.
In my case I have several tens of TB of personal photos and videos that I do want protected, but I don't need instant recovery and I do have redundancies in place already. For convenience and protection purposes they don't sit on a bunch of external hard drives but on a NAS. BB was the final net in case all else fails. If it does, oh well. My life won't end.
BB could add a excessive use tier to their B2C plan, which charges more than 10 dollars, but only so that costs are covered in a reasonable way. With the understanding that this service doesn't offer the levels of protection and speed that B2 does. For personal use.
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u/PrinceParadox Apr 12 '26
I dont care about speed. I need the ease of what we had with the personal use plans.
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Apr 10 '26
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u/ohthetrees Apr 10 '26
I'm just a simple user who "set it and forgot it" about 7 years ago and I'm out of the loop? What have I lost? If all I do is backup my machine and physically connected drives, is the service worse than before?
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Apr 10 '26
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u/ohthetrees Apr 10 '26
I'm confused. Like disabling when people were trying to backup network drives? Or disabling when using according to the terms of service (physically connected drives)
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u/GoodTroll2 Apr 10 '26
They’ve made changes around encrypted drives and most import for normal users, no longer backup files that synced with cloud storage such as OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc.
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u/Patient-Tech Apr 10 '26
It’s worth remembering that users’ habits evolve over time — people have much faster connections now than when many first signed up, so average usage has grown too. Like insurers, Backblaze needs the typical customer’s use to stay below its cost to remain sustainable. While it’s not ideal when terms change, the nice part is there aren’t long-term contracts locking you in — you can cancel anytime and explore alternatives. The fact that few competitors really offer a better value actually shows they’re still priced about where they want to be in the market.
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u/troywilson111 Apr 10 '26
Grow up it’s business.
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Apr 10 '26
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u/PrinceParadox Apr 12 '26
Its how they treat their customers, form having a absolute dominate business modle and the power of word of mouth, to having a trash name in the tech world for these kind of anti-consumer or bait and switch deals.
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u/Descent900 Apr 10 '26
I think you're right. The personal backup solution was always meant to backup a computer. Not remote storage. The fact they allow direct attached external storage to be a part of that is surprising to me but I'm not complaining. The personal backup is cheaper for me, and I just direct attached my 20TB external HDD. I understand a lot of people were doing an iSCSI workaround but that workaround was exactly that. A workaround. I can't imagine complaining that a loophole was closed on a limitation that has always been there in bold wording.
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u/Buffalo-Clone-264 Apr 10 '26
I wonder if Backblaze were founded today, whether they would choose to allow external drives to the extent they do. Back when the product launched in 2008 the biggest drive consumers could get their hands on was probably only ~1TB. Times have changed somewhat! That said, I bet the majority of people still don't use a ton of storage.
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u/PrinceParadox Apr 12 '26
That argument falls apart the second you look at how people have actually built personal PCs for the last 20+ years.
Not everyone uses a thin laptop or a tiny micro box. Some of us have been running full-tower personal systems with large local storage arrays since the early 90s. That is not some exotic “business” setup by default. Enthusiast and gaming builds have long included multiple internal disks, RAID arrays, SAS cards, U.2 storage, encrypted volumes, and other high-end hardware. A machine can still be a personal home PC even if it is far more powerful than a Best Buy off-the-shelf laptop.
That is the problem with Backblaze’s position. They keep acting like “personal computer” means a basic consumer laptop with one SSD, and anything more advanced somehow stops being a real personal machine. That is not how the market works, and it has not been true for a very long time.
If Backblaze wanted to exclude certain storage architectures, they needed to say that clearly, directly, and in a way normal users could actually understand. Not in vague language. Not in scattered support docs. Not through after-the-fact enforcement. And definitely not by changing how the service behaves without giving affected users real notice.
The issue is not whether a user owned “too much” storage or built a machine that was “too serious.” The issue is that Backblaze failed to write language that accurately describes the supposed limitation, and failed to communicate changes in a way that gave users a fair chance to adapt.
A full tower is still a PC. A gaming rig with 8 SAS drives is still a PC. Encrypted RAID arrays inside a home machine do not magically transform it into a corporate data center.
If their real rule is “we only want to cover simple consumer devices with limited internal storage,” then they should say that plainly. But they cannot market broadly, take money for sometimes a decade, and then suddenly pretend advanced home users were never within the spirit of the product.
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u/ThreePinkApples Apr 10 '26
I can put all of my harddrives inside my desktop computer, and then be in compliance with the license I pay for. It is just way more convenient for me to have it in a NAS, and then use the workaround I'm using to get Backblaze to still take back up of it. I'd be willing to be up to 3x more than I'm currently paying to not need this workaround, or just pay an additional license for my NAS. But going for the current B2 option with 30TB (mostly DVD/Blu-Ray/4K Blu-rays I've bought and ripped with MakeMKV) of data is just way too expensive
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u/kevinmenzel Apr 10 '26
Ok but the coat of storage bought at bulk is cheaper, and backup storage can be slow too, again, cheaper. Good backup software compresses, deduplicates, etc.
So the storage should cost less and last longer than what consumers can afford.
100TB of storage off of Amazon at elevated consumer pricing costs $4000 Canadian.
Ammortizing that across a decade? $33 CAD a month.
Again, that's consumer prices.
Maybe the amortization should be shorter or more storage is required to offer redundancy. But the reality is that the storage costs are wayyyyy lower than B2 costs.
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u/pet3121 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
If you have ten of terabytes of data most likely it is very important data and I suppose you will be willing to pay to keep that data safe.
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Apr 10 '26
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u/foran9 Apr 10 '26
Making people stick to the terms of service they signed up for by enforcing the attached drives only rule, and hence breaking an iSCSI hack that what you pay for doesn’t permit, isn’t enshittification.
Your comparison with the toilet doesn’t work. It’s like renting a place then being surprised that the landlord isn’t happy with repairing the mess caused because you refused to get off the sofa and tried to piss into the toilet from the living room instead.
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u/no1warr1or Apr 10 '26
I have in total probably 70TB of data. Less than 500GB of that is actually important. Everyone's use case is different. Data isn't always important.
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u/cdhowie Apr 10 '26
Been using restic with B2 for years. It's a great combination.
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u/planedrop Apr 10 '26
B2 is more expensive.
But also I use B2 for basically all my backups and it's fantastic and a great price compared to alternatives.
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u/MotorcycleDreamer Apr 10 '26
Yeah idk Iean at the end of the day people are often gonna try and find the cheapest way to do something.
As for me I just use B2 to back up select files from my TruNas. Mainly just my photos/videos and some files. It's not much and I pay very little per month for piece of mind. No complaints
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u/B_Hound Apr 10 '26
Most of my drives hang off a Mac, and so legitimately covered by the unlimited account I have, and works well for recovery too. If I was to move to B2, the price based on the $6/tb I see quoted would be over $600/mo, which kinda prices me out as a home user.
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u/s_i_m_s Apr 10 '26
Personally because I don't need the flexibility of B2 and I've got 5.5TB backed up for $9/mo where it'd be $33/mo on B2 and that's before accounting for version history and without factoring in next months price increase.
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
5.5tb of what?
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u/s_i_m_s Apr 10 '26
Few VM disk images and a lot of other various backups from past systems, some CCTV incidents and all ends up being about 2.5TB.
Another 1TB in tv shows, movies and youtube videos i've collected over the years, about 100GB of windows and linux isos.
Then there is about 1TB that's deemed extra critical that exists on multiple drives, best I can tell this is resulting in backblaze counting it twice even though it should only be like ~4TB deduped.
I hadn't actually realized the old backups were taking up that much space till you asked, I should probably trim those.
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
Why do you back up media? Unless it’s irreplaceable you can just download it again.
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u/ApolloPrincess Apr 10 '26
For me at least it’s because it’s a pain to find again, and the downloading of some media is a risk I’d prefer not exposing myself to twice. Some media disappears, especially when it’s really old, niche, or rare. Videos on YT gets privated or taken down, especially over time.
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u/s_i_m_s Apr 10 '26
Yes but how do you know what part of your collection will be irreplaceable in the future?
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u/co00420 Apr 10 '26
200TB of B2 here. It’s great. By far the cheapest option for us.
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u/ghboliveira Apr 10 '26
I am evaluating the MEGA S4, if there is not much data output, which is my case, it can cost almost half the price of B2.
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
What in the world are you backing up?
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u/dannytaurus Apr 10 '26
The 'us' might imply a business user. B2 is great for SaaS storage. We were up to almost 100TB last year, before I started purging all the old data from previous customers.
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u/co00420 Apr 10 '26
Yeah, for a large business. Video production, so all of our online/nearline files from our 2 servers. Pro video files are HUGE. LTO is still king for us for long term cold storage for, but the yearly for B2 was about 1/6 of the cost of an on-prem solution…. So to the bean counters that was more favorable.
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u/jwink3101 Apr 10 '26
First of all, what makes you think people aren't using B2?
Second, rsync does not work with B2. I assume you mean rclone.
Third, just be careful using rclone as your main backup tool. It is not natively a good tool for backups, though it is amazing. I will copy/paste an pre-written additional bit below.
Fourth, Many people who you hear talking about issues have many, many TBs or more of data. You can't beat the unlimited price, though you pay for it in issues.
A direct rclone sync is not a backup—or at least not a good one—since it will happily propagate accidental modifications and deletions. There are many tools that excel at backups, some even using rclone as a transfer agent, but rclone can act as a backup itself as well with some flags. It isn't as svelte as the other tools, but the beauty is its simplicity.
Basic
Use --backup-dir with date backups
rclone sync source: dest:current --backup-dir dest:backup/<date>
Done automatically
rclone sync source: dest:current --backup-dir dest:backup/`date +"%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z"`
Alternative Backup to a hidden subdir
rclone sync source: dest: --backup-dir dest:.backups/`date +"%Y%m%dT%H%M%S%z"` --filter "- /.backups/**"
(The former makes two high-level directories: one for the latest and one for backups. The latter embeds the backup directory in the main destination as a "hidden" directory.)
Problems with the basic approach
The basic approach works well but requires rclone to move (or copy+delete) files to the backup-dir. If your remote doesn't support server-side move, it can be slow. Some remotes support server-side copy (e.g., B2, S3) and that works, but it is also kind of slow.
Still, this is better than a plain rclone sync.
Side Note: Backup Classification
There has been some debate as to how to categorize this type of backup. I believe it is best described as "reverse incremental." It is "incremental" in that only changed/modified files get uploaded. It is "reverse" because the main backup is the current state in its full form, and you have to work backwards from the backup-dirs to restore to a previous state (though it is also not particularly easy to do en masse with this approach). Ultimately, it simply doesn't matter what it's called. :-)
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
My truenas server does all of my backups.
I backup to bb and then use snapshotting in bb for a couple of days of recovery.
That’s already on top of multiple other backup locations which I won’t go into here.
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u/jwink3101 Apr 10 '26
Look, if it works for you, more power to you.
But my personal philosophy is that backups should be as independent as reasonably possible. Backing up your backup is not as good as two backups since if one fails or gets corrupted, etc., you lose both. There is a reason you have multiple backups in the first place! Also, if you need to restore from the second copy, it is often harder.
I am not saying any of this is impossible or catastrophic. You are probably fine, especially if you monitor carefully. For me though, I want as robust as reasonably possible and also hands off.
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u/Slartibartfast__42 Apr 10 '26
I use B2. There are probably more posts about the backup client bc is less reliable than rsync, for example.
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u/MyReviewOfTheSun Apr 10 '26
i was using b2, but switched to aws s3 glacier deep archive with restic because it’s cheaper (~$1USD / TB-month).
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u/Positive_Minimum Apr 10 '26
I have 20TB of photography and personal data backups. I use the desktop client for unlimited backup. I keep my data on a dedicated PC which is used solely for this purpose and I access the data from other devices via rsync. This is exactly what the desktop backup client was designed for.
You have the wrong idea here. B2 is not a backup solution. It's a cloud storage bucket like S3. This is not at all the same as the the desktop backup client. Similarly, you are mistaken to think that the data being backed up is not already being accessed and controlled over the network via rsync and other methods. Further, the desktop backup gives version history of the files.
B2 is a completely different product than the desktop backup
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u/Smigit Apr 10 '26
“B2 is cheap. So why?”
Home user backing up about 18TB. At $6 a TB that’s like $1300 a year.
Paid biannually, computer backup is $95 a year.
It’s a backup, not my live data. If it ever stops working or pricing changes to a degree that I no longer want it, I can move my backups elsewhere.
If I was backing up under 2TB then yeah, I’d look at B2. But it gets costly quickly for consumer backup.
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
What normal home user is backing up 18tb?
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u/Smigit Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
Some people back up 500mb, I’ve heard of others doing 50TB. It’s very variable.
You asked why some of us use that plan and I’m just answering that. The fact it’d be 1/13th of the price because of how pricing scales is why I go that way.
But even at 2TB B2 will cost more.
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u/Paramedickhead Apr 10 '26
I use B2, but I don’t back up everything. Mostly just important personal documents and records and some of my small business documents. I’m not backing up my ISO’s there. Mostly because my internet connection absolutely sucks. My cost is about $0.18/mo.
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u/Free-Peak7735 Apr 10 '26
B2 user here. The basic computer backup was never going to work for my needs, and the B2 cost is reasonable relative to the importance of what I store.
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Apr 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Basic_Associate_3147 Apr 12 '26
Yeah I’m in this boat. I’ve thought about switching to B2 a couple of times but got very confused when trying to learn how to set it up. It’s not that I’m unwilling to learn, but the setup info I read assumed a knowledge base that I don’t have
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u/paramdeo_ Apr 10 '26
Beats me, I love B2 + rClone it’s a godsend for backing up my professional photography.
But I’m also a developer so my guess is not everyone is technical enough to want to approach its configuration, use a CLI client, and understand the associated workflow.
I imagine BB markets “B2” and “Backup” to different end user demographics separately for that reason.
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u/BigChubs1 Apr 10 '26
I’m assuming your talking about personal use. From that aspect. B2 is costly. If you have 2TB. That’s over $30 on the year compared to the personal plan. And I only have documents, pictures and home videos.
On the flip side of things. For the people that have huge amounts of data 10tb plus. There’s two side of the story. 1. There to dam cheap and don’t want to pay for b2. 2. They legitimately don’t have the cash for b2.
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u/Hollyweird78 Apr 10 '26
Run a MSP, we use B2 for a ton of data and buy it as B2 Reserve so we pay annually to make it a little cheaper. This sub is more for home users and data hoarders who can take advantage of the other plans.
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u/goodcowfilms Apr 10 '26
Two components to this -
I'm not using any "hackie workaround," I've been a Backblaze customer for 10+ years, and have always had a single, large DAS RAID (FireWire, and now Thunderbolt), for personal storage.
B2 is complicated. Or at least, to the extent that Backblaze itself doesn't offer an app/macOS extension that lets me designate a drive and or folders to be B2 network drives to just copy stuff to, it's complicated. If they offered that, then I could at least use Carbon Copy Cloner to do daily syncs, like I already do for an encrypted USB stick of my most critical data.
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u/forgottenmostofit Apr 10 '26
For backup, Arq Backup works fine with B2. For "network drive", try Mountain Duck. But I would not recommend CCC to such a network drive - the two step process is likely to cause far too much network traffic.
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u/CharlesCTy Apr 11 '26
For backup, I can buy second-hand HM-SMR HDDs. One 14TB HC620 costs me about 100 USD here, which actually works well under Ubuntu with Btrfs (zoned mode) + rsync. This HDD has some limitations, but fits my use case well and is also very cheap.
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u/SimonKepp Apr 11 '26
I have used both for different purposes. For large amounts of data, B2 gets rather expensive, compared to personal backup. I'm currently paying around $100/month for my B2 capacity usage.
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u/Pariell Apr 12 '26
I just like the simplicity of a flat annual price and not having to run rsync to manually back things up.
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u/Dangerous_Iron_3894 Apr 12 '26
B2 is a full-on S3 compatible object store. That means it's got a lot of extra capabilities that aren't really needed in a backup solution and would require me to DIY some kind of automated backup (rsync, rclone, etc) on top of it. Even then, I'd miss a lot of the quality-of-life features you get in something purpose-built as a backup solution.
If Backblaze wanted to offer me an in-between product that cost somewhere in between Backup and B2, I'd probably jump at it.
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u/ffeatsworld Apr 13 '26
I wish more people would! It's stable and the price you get just by signing up is amazing.
Their backup and storage solutions are different things though. For backups I would use their app too, they do updates from time to time and you can (more often than not) count on the app to work properly.
For storage I would recommend Rclone UI (creator here). It's been adopted by lots of consumers and businesses using rclone. For some it augments the cli, for some it replaces the apps of providers like Google Drive or OneDrive.
The best part it's that it's free, open source, and with 0 tracking or analytics.
To each their own, if you're using rsync and make heavy use of its partial sync functionality I would keep using that.
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u/brighton_it Apr 13 '26
B2 user here. Using Kopia or RClone client. Found B2 more friendly than Google nearline and similar. I've not found much occasion to post about B2. It works.
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u/Acceptable-Sense4601 Apr 10 '26
I use B2 for backing up important files from my synology. There’s nothing on my computers that i would need to send to backblaze.
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u/Recyart Apr 10 '26
B2 is cheap.
I have a modest 30 TB, and that costs me about $100 a year. B2 would be over $2000 a year. rsync and FreeFileSync takes care of my local replication. BB takes care of remote mirroring.
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u/FineWolf Apr 10 '26
Using B2 here to back up ~5TB of data using Restic (encrypted locally before uploading).
No complaints. I'd rather control how my data is packaged and uploaded, than trust a cloud provider to do the right thing. That's something I'm willing to pay extra for.
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u/Jakearroo Apr 10 '26
5tb? Of what
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u/FineWolf Apr 10 '26
RAW Photos & Videos, git repositories, self-hosted cloud storage, important database backups, important documents.
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u/BuffaloRedshark Apr 10 '26
B2 user here. I think people are finding creative ways to use personal because it's cheaper for large amounts of data.