I’ve been a big fan of Backblaze for years now. While cloud-backups weren’t new to me when I came across them, having a native macOS app for a cloud-backup service was something I knew I wanted. I’ve been a subscriber for many years, and I have no plans of leaving anytime soon. Today, Backblaze has announced the tenth anniversary of the first release of the Backblaze Storage Pod.

So i have not been able to use B2 with Veeam as an offsite repository in the past. Tiger Bridge never works and just disconnects before anything is transferred. I do not have AWS S3 at all either and just local backups. So this new feature finally allows direct backups from veeam to B2? Tiger Bridge maintains a replica of your backups in Backblaze and increases your retention period by freeing up valuable disk space. A sound 3-2-1 backup strategy requires keeping a backup copy locally and another off-site. Let Veeam take care of primary backups while Tiger Bridge. Using cloud storage gateway software like Tiger Bridge to copy backup data to cloud storage providers like and/or to reclaim disk space belonging to copied backups from the primary backup repository based on certain thresholds. Backblaze’s new integration with Tiger Technology’s Tiger Bridge software is designed to solve a common backup problem faced by Veeam users who want to tier to the cloud, in order to extend the length of backup data that is retained. The integration of B2 with TigerBridge lets VMs be backed up in the cloud and restored for a third of the.

Backblaze offers unlimited backup (including attached USB drives) for only $6 per month. If you have a fire, flood, or theft, a local Time Machine backup might not be useable. With Backblaze, you can download all of your files, or have them mailed to you on a USB drive.

In September 2009, their red 4U storage server came equipped with 45 hard drives with 67 terabytes of storage for just $7,867. Over on the Backblaze blog, they recapped some of the history.

Back in 2007, when we started Backblaze, there wasn’t a whole lot of affordable choices for storing large quantities of data. Our goal was to charge $5/month for unlimited data storage for one computer. We decided to build our own storage servers when it became apparent if we were to use the other solutions available, we’d have to charge a whole lot more money. Storage Pod 1.0 allowed us to store one petabyte of data for about $81,000, today we’ve lowered that to about $35,000 with Storage Pod 6.0. When you take into account that the average amount of data per user has nearly tripled in that same time period and our price is now $6/month for unlimited storage, the math works out about the same for everyone as it did in 2009.

The Backblaze Storage Pod was more than just affordable data storage. Version 1.0 introduced or popularized three fundamental changes to storage design; 1) you could build a system out of commodity parts and it would work, 2) you could mount hard drives vertically and they would still spin, and 3) you could use consumer hard drives in the system. It’s hard to determine which of these three features offended and/or excited more people. It is fair to say that ten years out, things worked out in our favor, as we currently have about 900 petabytes of storage in production on the platform.

Of course, like any technology company, they aren’t stopping. Backblaze has Storage Pod 7.0 on the drawing board. Here is a shortlist of some of the features they are looking at:

• Updating the motherboard• Upgrade the CPU and consider using an AMD CPU• Updating the Power Supply Units, perhaps moving to one unit.• Upgrading from 10Gbase-T to 10GbE SFP+ Optical Networking.• Upgrading the SATA cards• Modifying the tool-less lid design.

For those of us that use services like Backblaze, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. – you might not often think about the platform that’s powering them. A “cloud” is just a fancy term for someone else’s computer. When we upload documents and data to Backblaze, they have to figure out how to store it. Check out their blog post about the announcement to learn more about their upcoming technology.

Backblaze has also announced integration with Veeam. Veeam has become a popular solution for companies who need to back up their virtual servers, Office 365 and other hosts. With a new B2 Cloud Storage partnership with Tiger Bridge, Backblaze allows you to backup your VMs in the cloud and easily restore files as far back as you’d like to go for 1/3rd the price of using Amazon S3. While this solution will have your entire virtual machine backed up to Backblaze, you don’t need to download your entire VM to find a single file. Using Veeam and Tiger Bridge partial restore, you can search your backed up copies for the file you need to download. If the VM is 1TB and the file you want is 100MB, you only pay to download 100MB. You can learn more about this partnership on the Backblaze blog.

Backup is a solved problem for consumers and businesses today. While I love Apple’s Time Machine software for personal backups, if people will only do one backup location, I suggest Backblaze because it’s automatic and offsite.

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The new Backblaze integration with Tiger Bridge is designed to solve a pain point for businesses and MSPs who want to tier their data in Veeam to the cloud at low cost.

Today, online backup provider Backblaze is making a pair at announcements at SpiceWorld in Austin. One is a celebration of the ten years of the launch of their Backblaze Storage Pod in September 2009, which when open sourced, led to the explosion of Backblaze’s business. The other is a new integration with Tiger Bridge that will make things easier for Veeam customers who want to tier inexpensively to the cloud.

Backblaze, based in San Mateo CA, is 13 years old and has 130 employees.

“We have five founders, all of whom are still in their operating roles,” said Ahin Thomas, Backblaze’s vice president of marketing. “The company came together on the initial premise that consumers would pay $5 a month to backup their data off their computer to backup. We found the bump in the road for this model to be that you couldn’t build a sustainable business model on AWS S3. The founders determined that we needed to build our own storage server so we could afford this $5 price point.”

Accordingly, Backblaze designed a 4U storage server, with 45 hard drives delivering 67 terabytes of storage. This was the Backblaze Storage Pod, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this month.

Backblaze Tiger Bridge

“We open sourced it, and that led to great adoption and us getting a lot of help in improving it,” Thomas said. “We are now on the 6.0 version, and are working on releasing 7.0 for next year.” Backblaze never sold the Storage Pod itself to others, although another company, 45 Drives, has done that.

“For us, Backblaze Storage Pod fuels the lowest cost of storage on the market, with 50 per cent gross margin,” Thomas indicated. “The graveyard of storage companies is to build scale and make money off that. Our consumer business fueled us to exabyte scale.”

It also led to requests for a commercial version of the offering.

“We were being asked for the underlying API for servers because of demand for an object storage cloud, so three years ago we introduced B2,” Thomas said.

B2 is Backblaze’s version of AWS S3, but with what the company sees as some distinct advantages.

“We make a three-pronged pitch – our APIs are simpler, our pricing schedule is simpler, and we are half a penny per gig,” Thomas stated. “With them, you need a calculator and the cost is 4x. B2 is a flat fee, with one cent a gig for egress. We want customers to be able to both store and use their data.”

Backblaze has channel partners, although their acquisition has been more opportunistic than by design.

Backblaze Tiger Bridge Veeam

“Speaking directly to the channel is relatively recent for us,” Thomas said. “We have some channel partners, both MSPs and VARs, in our consumer backup business. $5 a month for them is cheap, and we offer a 10 per cent commission to registered resellers for the lifetime of the customer. We also have Groups functionality that lets resellers create multiple groups and act on behalf of the individuals. With B2, we do not have a channel program – yet. But we are a quarter of the price of S3. Partners can both mark up our margin, and cut the customer bill, and everybody is happy.”

Backblaze’s new integration with Tiger Technology’s Tiger Bridge software is designed to solve a common backup problem faced by Veeam users who want to tier to the cloud, in order to extend the length of backup data that is retained. The integration of B2 with TigerBridge lets VMs be backed up in the cloud and restored for a third of the price of using S3.

“The most exciting part is that it does not interrupt the customers’ workflow,” Thomas said. “This appears as a destination inside the Veeam VBR console, in a single pane of glass. It lets customers achieve cloud tiering without changing the workflow. That’s exactly what customers told us they want.”

Thomas indicated that Backblaze didn’t really have a good solution for customers backing up to disk before.

Backblaze Tiger Bridge Program

“We do have a partner, Starwind, whose VTL works well for customers who backed up to tape. Most customers now back up to disk, and now we have a great solution for disk.”

Thomas said that SpiceWorld was a great place to launch the new integration.

“We are very active in the SpiceWorks community, which leans heavily to smaller companies and smaller MSPs,” he indicated. “Those folks tend to be price-sensitive, and they love our solutions.”