Actually, kind of the opposite. A few years ago Backblaze posted that the economics of their solution relied on the average customer having less than 1.2TB of data. They explicitly do not support Linux users because they tend to average a larger amount of data and are thus not economical to support, even ignoring the extra costs to maintain a separate Linux client.
The "Personal backup" pricing plan is $99 USD / year and includes "Unlimited data backup" and "one year version history" which implies they are storing much more than just your data at a given time.
$99 would give you 5-6TB of data for consumer HDD costs. And then factor in that they are likely doing some type of additional backup/RAID it would be even less data per dollar. And that's not including maintenance, rent, and employees.
Disclosures: I’ve been a customer for almost a decade. I’m also an early (IPO) shareholder. I’ve never been employed by, or been a vendor to Backblaze.
To add some context and background —
Their “unlimited” plan has a few major capacity-saving caveats. For example, there are built-in exclusions you can’t modify to prevent the cruft and temporary files of supported OSs (and several common apps like Outlook) from taking up space. Backblaze Computer Backup won’t backup certain kinds of data like Time Machine backups on Macs. They also have an automatic policy of deleting backups of external drives that haven’t been connected to the backup host for 30 days. They have a long list of caveats that to their credit they do disclose, although it’s a bit hard to find and understand if you aren’t technical and aren’t looking.
Their backup service is built on their object storage infrastructure to prevent duplicating their own stack, and it also compresses the amount of overhead and capacity accounting they have to worry about between their two product lines. They don’t keep backups of customer data, but they’d need to suffer multiple hard drive and host failures effecting the same file at the same time to lose any single file. Their architecture is proprietary, which I expect adds a lot of human/payroll overhead they wouldn’t have if they just deployed endless ZFS pools “off the shelf”. They build their own servers which offsets the costs of going COTS from a vendor like Dell.
I also find Reddit good- but given I mainly follow subreddits focused on PC hardware, I'm less concerned. I would never go to Reddit for discussion about political or controversial topics where botting would be a target.
But not just due to astroturfing, but their users are also just pretty crazy and exist in a extremely narrow bubble.
Judging by some of the examples listed by Reddit mods, it seems political astroturfing is a serious goal:
"(This is one of the AI comments used in the experiment.)
As a Palestinian, I hate Israel and want the state of Israel to end. I consider them to be the worst people on earth. I will take ANY ally in this fight."
No - most Asian nations did not recognize the South Vietnam govt propped up by Western powers. India for example supported Vietnamese independence from the French and recognized the PRG - Provisional Revolutionary Government which was the resistance movement in South Vietnam.
At any rate, even the US vetoed Vietnamese membership to the UN in 1975 - after losing the War.
Only because Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976 on the basis of a campaign pledge to forgive all draft evaders and beat Ford. Until he was elected, Vietnam was three times blocked from admission by United States vetoes in the Security Council.
Some would argue that American intervention in Vietnam was a continuation of French colonialism and the Domino Theory was a tenuous justification for American imperialism.
> The internationally-recognized government of South Vietnam asked the US for military intervention.
Nope. South Vietnam only existed because of the US. It had no popular support and it was basically a state out of whoever was left of those who collaborated with the French. The first head of state was Bao Dai, a guy who was the head puppet under France, Vichy France, Japan, France again and then US.
South Vietnam was kept together by personal interest, anti-communism and American support.
America is now just a bunch of lobbyist, billionaires and lawyers in a trenchcoat.
We lock up our minorities, deport those in need and separate children from their families for profit, America is an evil nation and history will see it and it's citizens that way. It's amazing that it seems a majority of people (in the US) fail to see the the US for what it is, an imperial nation run on greed and an army of pure evil lawyers hellbent on total economic control. Lawyers and billionaires destroyed this country 20 years ago, now the American machine is just running on fumes and hate. History will see America as a nation and people of pure greed and evil.
America is a mixed bag to be sure. But to say America is “pure greed” and “evil” is just plain ridiculous. As in, absolutely nothing good came out of America?
People's rational thought seems to be dissappearing. Whatever America has become today does not mean that America in the past had no redeming qualities, that is not how time works, it doesn't go backwards :(
Thank you. People's rational thought seems to be dissappearing. Whatever America has become today does not mean that America in the past had no redeming qualities.
They seem to now, a few min after your comment