Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage vs. ownCloud

Though it offers fewer features than competitors, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage provides an affordable solution for backup and archiving. Its low cost storage acts as a backbone to many small-scale enterprises. However, where low latency in data transfer and more granular permissions over the data are required, in my experience, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage doesn't fit well.

Incentivized

OwnCloud/Nextcloud is a great application for cloud storage of files, and makes sharing specific files or folders easy and fast. It also makes a great tool for real-time collaboration, including real-time chat and simultaneous editing of documents or spreadsheets. I have used ownCloud to assist clients in sending large files that could not be emailed -- for example, one of my clients is a Video Production agency. They produced a commercial to air, but could not email the file as it was 400MB. OwncCloud came to the rescue. I set up a temporary share and allowed him access to upload into that folder. Once the file was in the folder, I generated a share link that was then forwarded to TV stations for instant viewing in a browser. Each TV station then downloaded it and was able to add it to their scheduling system quickly. From the Photography side... I am able to deliver large amounts of files quickly and easily to my clients, and they can download or view on mobile devices easily. Since I use ownCloud on a daily basis, I cannot think of any reason why I would not use this software

Incentivized

• Tight integration with OEM backup application
• Among the lowest price per TB cloud backup provider
• AWS S3 service integration
• Optional services for initial seeding of large backup data sets
• Optional services for physical backup retrieval to speed up recovery

Incentivized

• 100% of our data is stored ONLY on our servers and workstation. No external hosting anywhere.
• Open source, no recurring fees for any amount of data we need.
• Feature rich browser based application.
• Mature desktop sync client for PC and Mac.

Incentivized

• My chief complaint about the former lack of S3 compatibility was resolved so I have no complaints now.
• Please keep egress free!

Incentivized

• Requires you to manage the infrastructure, software updates, backups and security because it is self-hosted
• The picture viewer in ownCloud is not really snappy by default (You need to setup plugins or some kind of cache)
• No video viewer by default
• The web UI requires a cache setup to have reasonable load times (to be fair, it is recommended in the admin page)
• I stopped using the calendar and contacts plugins because after each update they would break

Incentivized

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage offers affordable pricing compared to its competitors. It's a no brainer storage solution for small scale enterprises. It is widely used for storage media and large object files that can be accessed across the globe. With all these, there is still some room for improvement over the features and the latency

Incentivized

OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.

Incentivized

Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.

Incentivized

Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.

Incentivized

Because they continuously had times they required updating the account and there were hiccups when that happened, over time, I became skeptical of their ability to keep my files secure. They were the first cloud backup storage company I had ever used and I stayed with them for almost two decades. Then it happened that we did have to do a recovery two different times because of hardware failures. It was anything but a smooth or complete recovery, and their price kept rising as their service declined. Hundreds of files were totally lost in the process. I guessed that among their strategies, it might well have been a re-focus on their part to build up their enterprise accounts and didn't seem to care about small business. I finally had enough and left them as a client.

Incentivized

ownCloud is better than Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. I have not used Google Drive in some time now, so it may have improved. OneDrive has become better over time too, but my go-to is still ownCloud. Firstly, I prefer to have my data under my control. No other service can offer the level of control that ownCloud does. Setting that aside, in my experience Google Drive never quite got syncing right. Unless you have a very small collection of files and you're not synced across many devices, Google Drive fails to achieve a complete sync. The icon is always showing that Drive is syncing (and not up to date). I've had similar issues with OneDrive, but these days on Windows 10 OneDrive usually can achieve a complete sync across multiple devices, but it often hogs CPU and Network resources to do so, and it's still slower than OneDrive.

Incentivized

• We haven't had any data loss situations yet, however I'm sure our ROI will be fairly high if we have to recover any data. Backblaze is in the insurance industry, not storage.

Incentivized

• The company grew from 4 employees in 2013 when ownCloud was initially deployed to about 40 in 2017 and still using it with a very similar setting without any major upgrade on the same Linux VPS. 95% of all company data are stored and shared via ownCloud successfully. No clear data about ROI but clearly the perfect adoption rate by all people and its ubiquitous use makes it an essential part of the company workflow.

Incentivized