This is HUGE. Backblaze offers competitive storage to Amazon S3

Sometime ago I wrote about my backup woes. I have used backblaze and crashplan simultaneously for backups of my PC and Crashplan for my Mac/Linux. While I could have easily created my own backup with Amazon S3 or Google Drive or One drive et al, a cost analysis shows that Backblaze was the MOST cost effective.

Today I for news from Backblaze (and they don’t pay me, its the other way around) that they are offering Storage as a Service similar to S3. As in , it’s not a Drive in itself but its similar to S3.

Comparison:

here is a comparison on Backblaze site https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html

This is incredible and it is huge. What does it mean? Is Backblaze a real competitor to S3?

For now Backblaze is known to have terrible connectivity. Its alright for slow backups that take 1 year for 4TB but S3 is great due to it’s regional support. S3 is also proven. There is no doubt there will be downward pressure on providers as more “proper”competition comes into play. Right now B2 service from backblaze isnt directly comparable to Drive services since it still needs to be built on top of B2. In comparison to S3 it’s a great product. If you are looking to put up files via CDN then Backblaze might just do the trick.

How to migrate?

There is no migration tool like we had for Dreamhost DreamObjects (which suffers a lot of downtime just like their hosting) which made the job easier. However you might be pleased to know that you can possibly translate your S3 code to B2. It seems to me that they might be using Ceph in which case you could use your Code as is. The API however seems to use a different methods.

I am yet to test it but it’s worth a shot to put up a test project if you have time. I have just been burned too many times by these “me too S3” services that I don’t want to waste time on these. It’s wait and watch for now.

possible pitfalls:

On beta.3ezy.net I used ACL extensively to control access to files for individual users. It fine grained and recursive permission code was not easy to write but knowing S3 it worked quite well. It will not be possible to do so on B2 yet.

If I do have a working test code with B2 i will post back with my findings.