Weekly Journal 161 - Backups, Cloud

Cloud Backups

Last week I mentioned I was looking to move my cloud backups from AWS to another provider due to costs and the risks of a surprise bill. Both Wasabi and Backblaze B2 are substantially cheaper than AWS S3 and over much simpler billing. I’m trying out Backblaze first as their billing is a little less complicated. Wasabi has a 90-day billing requirement for data that makes estimating costs more difficult, and for personal use I don’t want to have the added complexity. Pricing for more general cloud providers like DigitalOcean and Linode were similar to S3, so in this case I think the cost savings is worth having the additional vendor to manage.

Backblaze is supported by MSP360, my backup software, so it was easy to configure a new storage account for Backblaze and let it push some data. My plan is to let the backups run for a few weeks, perform some integrity tests, and if everything checks out retire my S3 buckets.