I’m considering Restic and Backblaze B2 as my backup solution. I’m a little worried having read about the potential for unexpected restore costs. For example, I’ve read restoring lots of little files adds to the cost (reference). What are the things to look out for when backing up and restoring that can add to the cost? Are there any best practices to keep costs down?
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Does it have to be B2? If you want free egress and cheap storage, you may also consider Hetzner’s storage boxes.
I’ll check out Hetzner. I kept seeing B2 come up so started with researching it.
I moved from Backblaze to a Hetzner storagebox, to backup my Arch (btw) NAS.
Simpler to work with and cheaper.
I’ll have to give that a look. I spun up immich to replace Google photos but I can’t fully switch over till I have them in a cloud backup. Everything else is config/docker files that are small.
Feel free to DM me if you have questions or encounter issues. I’m using restic + hetzner myself.
Restic doesn’t write your files 1:1 to B2, but instead chunks their content into files according to a configurable pack size (16MiB by default). If you have a very large amount of data, you could look into increasing the pack size, although that comes with its own risks (see the docs above).
I doubt that this applies to files smaller than the pack size or a for example bitwise unique 17MB file would result in a (overly simplified) 16 MB and a 1 MB chunk or am i wrong here?
Most of these backup solutions try to reduce the amount of data backed up, so the system will process each file and determine if the contents changed and only upload new data. In this case if you modify the file you may end up with 2 16 MB chunks that have slightly different data, and only when the old backup expires and the pruning process completes would one of those chunks be deleted.
Smaller chunks sizes means you get more files written to S3, but less duplicate data when deduping without compression.
That is not what i have asked.
Question: What does BackBlaze B2 give you that BackBlaze’s personal account doesn’t?
To my knowledge:
- File Versions only 30 days available.
- -> Everything older and deleted than 30 days gone.
- Slow and manual Restore Process
- -> Web downloads max. 500 GB manual selection.
B2 is data storage, Backblaze Personal is a service. 2 Completely different things.
The BackBlaze personal page only lists Windows and Mac as supported. I have both, but also multiple Linux machines that I need to back up.
I use B2 for my restic Backup. Currently i have about 100GB stored there and it says i have about 100,000 files stored.
With the adjusted calculation of the blog you posted for 10TB of 50KB files, adjusted to the mean file size of my restic repository 10 TB of 1MB files:
Transaction fees: 10,000,000 / 10,000 x $0.004 = $4
My Laptop has a mean file size of about 16 MB per file on the local restic repository.
EDIT: Forgot a resume, i do not think you need to worry about it too much. But maybe verify the amount and type of data you want to backup and use calculators to calculate the real cost, also you can always test it by creating a test dataset and then do a backup and recovery scenario and then use this to derive an estimate.
Backup as a zip? Small files warped up in one big file. Only backup what you can’t restore from somewhere else. I think B2 can ship you a HDD to restore from if I remember correctly.
I’d suspect a zip could be problematic for incremental backups. Though that’s not a bad idea for files that won’t be changing regularly (photos, archives).
Restic will compress as well.
I’ll have to look more into it but I use this. I thought it compresses before uploading but I can’t find the doc yet. https://docs.duplicati.com/getting-started/set-up-a-backup-in-the-ui
