"Uh, what?? Air isn't an MLM, it's just the thing we breath. We all need it to live."

"Huh, I guess air is an MLM after all. Wild."

https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq

If your storage was fairly consistent, not tiny, and you intended to pull it regularly, Wasabi would come out on top. B2's egress change probably shifted the scales to favor B2 for those cases.

I know nobody who use them, so it all balances itself.

If they don’t have enterprises and people storing large amounts of data...

R2 was slower than B2, in my tests. I think it's slightly more expensive, too, but not much IIRC.

Can you elaborate on this? They mount in a standard rack and it looks like they have a backplane connected to a commodity motherboard. I'd think if you wanted it to be a JBOD you could replace the motherboard with an external SAS connector. Based on your nick I'm sure you've thought this through so I'm curious.

The only thing I see is that it looks like you have to slide the whole unit out to swap a drive, but that seems like an inconvenience rather than a show stopper.

I also think about all those cafés with free WiFi, where you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in the background. I benefit, but the café doesn’t.

$99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze.

Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a product. These people are not turning around and signing contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many.

So it could be that people are just using it below its limits, or it could be that it’s subsidized by other parts of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant—you want to be able to explain this product as a profitable product, as some viable sales channel, or as marketing.

My recommendation is to buy storage products where the company is making money off you, or nearly.

No - no exceptions.

We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests.

I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.

If it was aligned with economies of scale, customers would get more storage for the same price every year.

We don't hear about cloud prices coming down that often.

How do you test your backups? You do test your backups, right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily run into a situation where you need to retrieve files beyond the 30 day window.

For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.

On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will always charge more an more for it because customers have not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how profitable it is on the other end.

On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to any cloud you wish.

And Warren Buffet would use many frontmen to slowly buy shares without triggering a buying frenzy. You can’t just buy or sell 3% of a company without causing drama.

I vaguely remembered they announced it, but didn't find it on a quick search, thought maybe I was wrong.

XFS or ext2 (or 3 or 4 wo journal), without LVM or mdraid.

There's no point to adding RAID at the hardware or OS level for object storage boxes when redundancy exists at the application level. A drive with too many errors will be marked "dead" and just spun down and ignored.

Metadata servers OTOH tend to be engineered to be much more reliable beasts.

Very interesting. Could you name a few, am curious. I would be happy if erasure codes are actually being used commercially.

What I find interesting is the interaction of compression and durability -- if you lose a few compressed bytes to reconstruction error, you lose a little more than a few. Seems right up rate-distortion alley.

"The developers at Klara Inc. have been outstanding in helping Wasabi resolve ZFS issues and improve performance. Their understanding of ZFS internals is unmatched anywhere in the industry" - Jeff Flowers, CTO, Wasabi Technologies

https://klarasystems.com/

You could also search the OpenZFS repository for commits with the word Wasabi in them.

Wasabi only allows as much egress as the amount of data you're storing and I don't think you can even pay for more: https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq#free-egress-policy.

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wasabi/jobs/4615087008

If they're going to compress/decompress, ideally you'd want them to have that at the point of ingestion, then encrypted, and then store that on the target drive.

That way you can put very strong controls (audit, architecture, software etc) around your encryption and decryption, and be at reduced risk from someone getting access to storage servers.