Options are now available for a year of backup protection, as well as one that provides protection forever.
Today, San Mateo CA-based online backup provider Backblaze is releasing the 7.0 version of their Backblaze Cloud Backup service, which serves both commercial and consumer market customers. While there are multiple upgrades, the big one is the ability to keep changed or deleted files by extending them beyond 30 days, to one year, or forever.
“Version 7.0 has one top level feature which was very requested – the ability to extend your Version history,” said Yev Pusin, Backblaze’s director of strategy. “We have had retention of 30 days history for twelve years, but this is the first time that customers have had the ability to go back further in time.”
There are two options for the extended backup storage. The 30 days of backup remains part of the standard license. Extending the Version from 30 days to one year costs an additional $2 a month above the standard $5. Extending the Version forever costs that same extra $2, plus an additional $0.005/GB/Month for Versions modified more than one year ago.
“For the majority of users, at least on the consumer side it’s a peace of mind thing,” Pusin said. “It eliminates the anxiety if they don’t know if something was backed up within the last 30 days. For commercial customers, if they could have it their way, nothing would be deleted, ever. For them, we expect that the Forever plan will be the most popular.”
The addition of the longer Version history has led Backblaze to add a date drop-down menu to select a time frame for restore. The previous format just had a drop-down menu – fine for 30 days, less so for a year or longer, which would involve a lot of scrolling.
While the extended Version History is the headline feature of 7.0, there are also what Pusin described as “a couple of nice tweaks and add-ons.”
Basic performance has been improved by increasing maximum packet size from 30 MB to 100 MB, which allows the app to transmit larger files more effectively by better leveraging threading.
“In terms of performance, people should see it increase a little bit, but it also reduces sensitivity to latency,” Pusin said. “Consumers will also notice that it takes up a little bit less space on their computer.”
For commercial customers, the big news is that the addition of support for Microsoft’s Office 365 in Backblaze Groups, as well as Single Sign On updates to the Inherit Backup State feature, means that you can now sign into Backblaze with your Office 365 credentials.
“This now makes it similar to our Google G Suite integration,” Pusin said.
The application’s look on higher-resolution displays has been enhanced. Support for the just-launched MacOS Catalina is available out of the gate. For Windows users whose systems use Intel’s lower-end Apollo Lake chipset, an OpenSSL issue that was causing problems has been addressed through a workaround.
Backblaze 7.0 is available today at launch.
“For existing customers, it’s available as a default download if they manually update,” Pusin indicated. “The auto-update will be enabled a few days after the launch, for those who don’t manually update.”
Backblaze’s historic Go-to-Market model was direct, although they have acquired a growing channel presence in recent years among both MSPs and VARs because B2 – their equivalent of AWS S3 – is a quarter the price of S3. Consequently, there is a reseller market for the consumer backup product as well as the commercial one.
