Backblaze Raises Its Fully Refundable Price for Restoration Drives

In an email to customers, online backup service Backblaze tersely announced that “the price of our USB Hard Drive Restores and USB Snapshots will be changing to $279” as of 15 August 2024. This email elicited consternation among some longtime Backblaze subscribers, who worried that it reflected a more significant change in policy for the previously fully refundable fee. It did not! Explaining why the change is effectively irrelevant may be helpful.

As with all backups, local and remote, completing your initial backup with Backblaze takes the longest because all your files have to be copied from your Mac to Backblaze’s servers. You’re constrained by your upload speed. After that initial backup, Backblaze minimizes the amount of data sent by updating only changed files—and only the parts that changed—drastically reducing the amount of data that needs to be uploaded on an ongoing basis.

Restoring from your Backblaze backup is subject to similar bandwidth issues but will likely be faster than backing up. This is because most broadband connections are asymmetric, with vastly more bandwidth downstream than upstream. For instance, my Internet connection provides 300 Mbps down but only 12 Mbps up.

If you need only a single file or a manageably small set of files and folders—up to tens of gigabytes, depending on your throughput—restoring via download will proceed relatively quickly. It might take minutes to a few hours. If you start to cross 100 gigabytes or even into terabytes, you’re squeezing grapefruits through a pea-sized pipe, and downloading could take days.

When calculating the possible restoration time, remember that Internet connections often fail to meet their promised throughputs, Backblaze’s servers can have bottlenecks, and there may be constraints in throughput between Backblaze and your ISP. Test with some small restores first to get a sense of actual throughput. Plus, Backblaze packages files to be restored into bundles, so if there’s a disconnection during download, sometimes the entire bundle has to be re-downloaded.

For instance, the math on my 300 Mbps downstream connection would seem to indicate I could retrieve 1 TB in about 7.4 hours. In reality, it’s much more likely I wouldn’t be able to flood my connection continuously, and it could take a day or even longer.

To sidestep these limitations, Backblaze customers who need to restore huge amounts of data—an entire startup drive, for example—can turn to the company’s USB Hard Drive Restore service. For $189 (until mid-August), Backblaze copies all the data you want to restore to a USB hard drive of up to 8 TB in size and ships it to you via FedEx. You can request that the data be encrypted on the drive for added security. Backblaze says it may take several days to prepare and ship the drive, so this approach isn’t instant either. Once you have received the drive and restored the data, you can return the drive to Backblaze for a full refund, reducing the cost of restoration to whatever you pay for return shipping. You can choose the slowest, least expensive method, though Backblaze recommends a service with tracking.

Despite the email’s lack of detail, the only element of the USB Hard Drive Restore service that changes on 15 August 2024 is the price, which rises from $189 to $279. Since the service remains fully refundable, the increase is moot if you return the drive to Backblaze: the final cost will still drop to zero, plus return shipping.

So why is Backblaze increasing the fee? Yev Pusin of Backblaze told me that this is the first price bump since the USB Hard Drive Restore service’s introduction in 2008. He said that Backblaze’s costs of providing physical media have gone up over the past 16 years. Although the price per gigabyte of hard drives dropped during that time, other parts, labor, and shipping costs increased. Put simply, making a physical backup requires a person to do a fair amount of work, and shipping becomes more expensive every year.

In most cases, Backblaze wants the service to be convenient but not more desirable than downloading the data. Part of that is setting a price that feels affordable but is high enough that those who don’t return the drives reduce Backblaze’s costs. For this reason, you’re limited to returning five drives per year.

The company’s actual costs depend on the percentage of customers who return the drive. A quick search on diskprices.com shows that inexpensive 8 TB drives on Amazon currently cost about $180. If you’ve paid Backblaze $189 and received an 8 TB drive you could use, there’s no economic reason to return it—you’ve gotten a great deal. However, at $279, it makes more sense to return the drive because that much money would get you a 16 TB or even 20 TB drive.

In the end, this change shouldn’t affect most people. It will generate somewhat more revenue for Backblaze from those who don’t return their drives, but that may be offset by more customers opting to return drives for a refund. Regardless, Backblaze isn’t trying to profit from the service; I suspect the company is just trying to find a new balance between revenues and expenses.