Backblaze headquartered in San Mateo, California offers continuous, automatic cloud backup for personal and business use. Backblaze Business Backup consists of cloud solutions to safeguard systems and files (e.g Veeam, Servers, NAS, Workstations).
$7
per month
DigitalOcean
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
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.
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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.
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.
Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
There are no regions available on South America.
They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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.
I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.
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.
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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.
Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.
