No need to give your file an obscure name, or use a public bucket. You can use a private bucket and create a presigned URL with an expiration of up to one week.
Presigned URLs are long and ugly and b2 requires an extra API call to generate that, so I tend to prefer not to use them. The other reason for obscure names is so that you can't download or update files that you don't know the name even if you have the upload key. I know it goes against common sense security practice but compromising convenience can mean compromising security in many cases. The thing is to make sure your scheme is rigourous.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
> I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.
We have two similar products, and it's easy to mix them up. To clarify:
Backblaze Computer Backup (a different product from Backblaze B2) deletes old versions of files from your backup either 30 days or 1 year (you choose which) after you delete them locally. You also have the option to enable "Forever Version History", which costs $6/TB per month once your files age out of the backup.
Backblaze B2 (S3-compatible cloud object storage) will never delete anything unless you tell it to do so, either via the API or a lifecycle rule.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
Backblaze B2 does include deletion prevention (object lock) and lifecycle management to automatically hide (soft delete) or (hard) delete objects according to a schedule.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
Pulling the egress costs from the hyperscalers' storage pricing pages:
* Amazon S3 ranges from $50-$90/TB depending on monthly volume.
* Google Cloud Storage ranges from $80-$230/TB depending on monthly volume and where you're transferring data to/from.
* Azure Blob Storage ranges from $40-$181/TB (with the First 100GB/month free) depending on monthly volume and whether you route data via the Microsoft Premium Global Network.
Cloudflare published a blog post a couple of years ago explaining just how much money AWS makes on egress - customers are paying up to 80x Amazon's costs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
> I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage.
It depends on what "very low" means. We have a capacity-based pricing option, Backblaze B2 Reserve, starting at 20 TB, that includes all egress and transaction fees.
Pat Patterson: Hat tip! Thank you for the excellent follow-up. In short, your prices of 10 USD / TB are a steal according to your data. Keep up the great work. I'm not yet a customer, but I will be very soon.
Every quarter, Backblaze publishes its Drive Stats report, but where does that data come from? In this blog post, David Winings, a senior infrastructure software engineer at Backblaze, explains how the company collects SMART attributes from each of its 250,000 or so hard disks and collates the data into a single file per day, and how he's getting started improving the process.
