Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Backblaze Business Backup

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

Backblaze does one thing and does one thing well: backup. If you recognize it for what it is, you will be very happy with it as an unobtrusive off-site backup solution. If, however, you want full-featured endpoint protection, you'll want to look elsewhere. For me and my needs, Backblaze provides the right amount of protection at a cheap price. You can't beat it.

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Backblaze utilizes a native app across platforms vs. a javascript app you find with other backup services (CrashPlan being one of them). Native apps function better and have a better user interface than comparable javascript apps.
• Backblaze has an intuitive interface that automatically backs everything up from your computer but allows you to easily exclude items you don't want or need to backup (applications, system files, etc.).
• Backblaze has a built-in bandwidth cap and monitor allowing you to limit how much data is backed up on a daily basis to prevent going over ISP data caps or utilizing all of your upload bandwidth.

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

• User management isn't the greatest. We had the choice of either a site license under one email address, or a domain license, allowing users to log in with their own email address, however there's no management for this option. I can see metrics of the users' backup, but I can't manage the accounts in any way.

Incentivized

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

As stated in my review, Backblaze simply works and works simply. You install it. It runs silently in the background storing and safeguarding all your computer data remotely. You seldom notice it until you've lost something you need - then you can quickly find it online using their interface and restore it - which is what's really important.

They answered any questions I had accurately and politely. I prefer to call a phone number and get a human on the phone, but they prefer email and chat. I understand they have business profits to consider, so it makes sense.

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

It's honestly been so long that I've been using Backblaze - maybe 10+ years - that I don't even remember other options I compared it to way back when. I've had a subscription on all of my personal machines for years, and we've used it on all of our machines at my job for the past six.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized

• The saving of data is almost immeasurable - Backblaze is the best backup company I've ever used.
• Getting started is quick and easy - and you get a 14-day trial.
• The price is cheaper than every other service - but don't tell them!

Incentivized