A problem that was compounded when I started connecting to B2 over the network.

I tried to speed that up by setting up an exclude file, which did wonders, but restic still wasn’t quite fast enough. Even backing up to a local repository took time. The first thing I noticed with restic was how slow it was. Because it uses a repository system, it can intelligently avoid duplicating data that are the same, cutting down on storage costs. Either as files or environment variables. The command line interface is fairly easy to get started with, but you need to manage storing your passwords and so on yourself. It’s a backup system that comes with encryption capability out of the box and packs everything into a repository, not dissimilar to how git works. The first solution I decided to try and use was called restic. The following may also be of interest to Linux users, as Backblaze doesn’t offer a personal backup system for linux OS. So I decided to make the switch from Backblaze’s managed personal backup to a self-managed backup hosted on Backblaze’s B2 cloud storage platform. Cloud storage is pretty cheap these days, and unless you have terabytes of data to backup, going DIY is probably cheapest. I found Backblaze’s cloud storage (B2) calculator, and figured that for this kind of data I should be paying nowhere near as much if I was managing the backups myself. I had in the order of 100GB being backed up at any one time, and was paying $110 for 2 years.

That is until I considered just how much I was spending on it. It works really well, and it’s saved me a couple of times so in my mind it was worth it. XKCD 1718 Backblaze Personalįor the past couple of years I’ve been using Backblaze as my offsite backup solution. If you use a computer and care about the data stored on it, follow best practice and keep backups:īut there are so many options available for how you manage these. I talk about how I switched from Backlaze personal to Backblaze B2 with restic and rclone, and draw some comparisons between them.

Backblaze personal