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Comment by luke0016 | Hacker News Reader

> Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB/Mo (vs. $0.021/GB/Mo for S3). No reasonable person will have hardware at home that can compete with those prices.

I don't get this. Suppose I have 1TB of data that I want to back up. That's $5/mo with Backblaze. I can get an external 1TB drive for ~$60. Some even have 3-5 year warranties. $60 buys me one year with Backblaze. There's a good chance the hard drive will last much longer.

An external drive also gives me the benefit of higher data transfer rates. I could even splurge and for another $50-60 buy a small fireproof safe to store it in. Then I'm pushing two years with Backblaze. The external drive approach also has the side benefit of not having to trust a third party (yeah, I know, encryption). It seems like a much better deal to me. Does this mean that I am an unreasonable person?

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Your external drive may fail or be destroyed in a number of ways -- protection against this is a portion of what you're paying for.

Well, I did suggest a safe. But sure, there are other ways it could be destroyed. As for failure, presumably it's already a back up, so assuming the source didn't simultaneously fail, I can just replace the external drive.

If this makes you queasy, you could always buy a second drive. Two 1TB drives and a fireproof safe, that's equivalent to three years with Backblaze. Still seems pretty reasonable to me.

Or spend five minutes uploading to the cloud and be done with it.

This is such a ridiculous premise that wastes tens of hours (at least) just to save $10 that I'm pretty convinced you're trolling.

I'm not sure how you come up with $10. Drives regularly last 5+ years. A single 1TB drive at $60 saves me $240 over Backblaze if it lasts 5 years. Throw in the safe, and I still save $180. Two drives and a safe? Still saving $120. I have drives that have gone well beyond 5 years too - so the longer they last, the more you save.

And, what kind of connection do you have that allows you to upload 1TB in 5 minutes? That's spectacular. An ideal gigabit connection is going to take you a good two hours. Even that would be pretty amazing.

One thing to consider as well is that when you get to a certain level of storage, you need a dedicated box (so there is more hardware cost).

I have 50tb of storage in my home server. The electricity cost for this box is about $35 a month.

In my case it is so much strorage that it saves money, but if you have less storage and still need a dedicated box, it would be less so.

A minor point: a fire-proof safe is not absolutely heat-proof. Put one in a fire, and it will heat up inside. Better ones also tend to release water vapour into the safe itself when heated (as a mechanism for keeping the internal temperature down and providing a positive pressure for keeping smoke, fire, and particulate out), which isn't great for hard drives either. I wouldn't rely on an on-premisis safe to prove any data integrity guarantees against anything but petty theft.

There are two major issues here:

1. In your setup, you don't have offsite backup which opens the door for all kinds of potential data loss scenarios.

2. Backblaze's software continuously backs up over the internet, which is not trivial to do with free software.

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