Backblaze Cloud Backup Gets First-Ever Price Hike to $6 Per Month
Price increases for cloud services are common. There’s inflation, rising management costs, and so on. It’s understandable, but you might be locked in with these companies without any good way to move your data. It’s almost like holding your files for ransom. Backblaze, one of the most popular computer backup services, has announced its first ever price hike. Put down your pitchforks — it’s only going up by a buck from $5 to $6 per month.
Backblaze differs from cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox. Those are like online hard drives where you can keep whatever files you want. Backblaze, however, is exclusively for backup. The desktop client copies your files to the Backblaze cloud so they can be recovered in the event of hardware damage or loss. It offers various recovery options including traditional downloads and shipping you a hard drive.
When you delete files from your computer, they’ll (eventually) disappear from Backblaze. It saves everything for 30 days, so you can go back and get previous versions of a file or restore something you deleted by accident. You can create “snapshots,” data archives that aren’t connected to files on your computer. This more limited approach to online storage means that Backblaze can offer truly unlimited backup. It has done this for $5 per month since 2008.
Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman says the company has made many enhancements over the years, and storage costs have gone up as people back up more data. Backblaze now holds more than 750,000,000 gigabytes of customer data. All your data will remain safe and sound in Backblaze as long as you’re cool with the modest price increase.
Starting March 11th, the monthly price will go up to $6 per month or $60 per year. The two-year plan is going from $95 to $110. If you want to keep the lower price for another 12 months, Backblaze will allow you to buy a new 1-year plan right now at the lower $50 annual price.
The price increase doesn’t affect other Backblaze services like snapshots and data restore options. So, you can still get up to 8TB of your data on a hard drive for under $200. Hopefully, it keeps releasing those awesome hard drive reliability stats, too.
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