A recent, and I’d say pretty damning, report on the financial stability of Backblaze (and thus my off-site backups) has got me looking at alternatives. I know that after the big loss in data that I had a couple of years ago has me religiously checking and testing backups, I’m still nervous about blowing up my monthly bills in off-site backup costs. While B2 has done well with me, I can’t ignore potential issues with the company running those backup services. I have ~5tb of data to back up, and I will not lose them again.

This also should be a warning sign that I need to diversify my off-site replications. To that end, I’m going to give Amazon Glacier (deep storage) a spin. It seems like a pretty good deal, as the prices are sub-cent per GB and while the access/retrieval times aren’t amazing, they are however, cheap and resilient. At $0.00099 per GB, I’m looking at roughly $5 a month to store my backups. Yes, that may grow over time, but I can look at pruning it once it gets to be too much. The other nice thing is that my Synology NAS already has an app to automate backing up to Glacier.

I looked at Tarsnap and Rsync, but both would be signifigantly more costly to off-site my backups to. While I would probably like their service better, I can’t justify the extra monthly cost.

I won’t get rid of Backblaze just yet, but I want to hedge my bets here.