They are more than happy to share what they build and we've used their storage pods plans to build 2 for work.
I also really wish they would let customers buy a hard drive with multiple backups on it instead of one hard drive per backup. It would be great to purchase one drive every year with all the backups on it and not have to worry about downloading backups for retention.
> Since the server (and not the Internet connection) was the bottleneck, it wouldn't have helped
As Yev mentioned above, we MASSIVELY sped up restores fairly recently (August 2017). We understood waiting for restores for a few days was an inconvenience for customers and I'm personally very proud of the results. Would LOVE for you to try it again, but I fully understand if you don't want to. Here is the blog post about the faster restores (and faster backups): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access...