[HLUG] Herefordshire Digest, Vol 2123, Issue 1

[Kevin Dontenville]

You are a bit limited in access to Backblaze as it all looks like a front end control and limited public API - shame it is not offering simple storage either block or webdav or similar. Rclone will help get it in there but it may not be that fast with large data transfers, personally not played with Backblaze due to the limitations. 

Also when you say encrypted backups do you mean the endpoint holds an encrypted data set that is unreadable to the host or do you mean they encrypt the files for you? I would presume the former but that will likely lose you some efficiency in deltas. 

My other worry is I have not seen any of these low cost providers saying much about their technologies and that may mean they are hoping to escape real costs by feeding on the presumption of reduced costs of storage devices to meet growth. Not yet convinced that will really work with the numbers I have seen to date, especially as reliability on increasingly dense storage media is working against them with transit and redundancy. 

If all you want is a tertiary way of holding additional data copies at very low cost and the data is either not intrinsically valuable or vulnerable then these can help. Caution comes back when they get built in to assumptions and strategy starts to depend on them as planks of data protection, security or safety. 

As a personal stash of photos and docs etc also stored elsewhere then it can be a real boon ;-) 

K