In their 2.0 blog post, they said they had a guy spending 1 day a week replacing approximately 10 drives. I would imagine that consists of identifying the drives and pods, issuing software commands to power them down, physically replacing the drive(s), then re-assembling and powering the unit back up and then bringing the storage software back online and issuing a rebuild command.
I'm a long time crashplan user and the reason why is because they have a family plan ($15 for 10machines). I have multiple machines that I need backed up, so that's why I go with this. I wished i can use backblaze because it looks very good and have native apps. If you have a family plan, I'll switch in a heartbeat. :)
CrashPlan is awesome, I have ALWAYS liked those guys.
Backblaze focuses on being really simple, we already have 3 different pricing choices which is probably two more than we should have: 1) $5/month, 2) $50/year, or 3) $95/two years. All are unlimited, none have throttles or caps, we don't even price businesses differently. Simple.
Our theory is (may not be correct) that if you offer customers too many complicated choices, they get stuck in the decision making process and don't buy any of the choices. If we offer a family plan that is MORE expensive for two computers but LESS expensive for three computers, blah blah, too much thought. It's $5/computer/month - done. You can get started IMMEDIATELY with one computer, and add them as you go, you don't have to decide to commit to 10 licenses to get the best price, etc, etc.
We don't have any magic knowledge more than anybody, so internally we sometimes angst over stuff like a family plan, but for now we just want it to be simple and straight-forward.
Yeah, not a big deal to me. The no throttling is awesome.
However, I am seriously considering Crashplan myself when my subscription expires in February because I do not like the 30 day expiration policy. It is definitely a pain with large external drives. But I suppose I might not be profitable so maybe that's not worth fixing :P
We really want to bump it up to 6 months, and the decision all hinges on a slight mystery we have surrounding "data churn". In a nutshell: we aren't sure we can afford to bump it up to a 6 month retention without changing price, but we need to do some additional analysis or tests to make sure.
> I suppose I might not be profitable so maybe not worth fixing
No no, you are (one of) our target customers! Here is why: you post to ycombinator and you are technical enough to understand the implications of the 30 day roll back policy, and you are actually evaluating software on merits - this alone puts you in something like the upper 5 percent of technical computer society. Yeah, maybe we lose a dollar a month on your backup, but if you are using Backblaze you'll probably recommend it to five other people we make money off of. Your recommendation is GOLD to us.
They only had 9,000 drives back then.