Had a card die on a client shoot and Backblaze restored 42GB in 58 minutes to my M2 Air on spotty coffee shop Wi‑Fi; this reminds me of how gamers rely on cloud saves — quiet, boring, lifesaving. If there’s a similar service that’s reliably faster or cheaper than $7/month, what are you using?
I’ve had faster pulls using Arq + Backblaze B2 — multi‑threaded restore and picking the nearest region help; under about 1TB it’s often cheaper than $7/mo, but big egress can sting. If you want “quiet, boring, lifesaving” with a courier option, IDrive’s Express restore is solid — do you need unlimited or a fixed TB cap?
If cost’s the driver, Wasabi + Duplicacy has been quicker for me and cheaper than $7/mo under about 1TB (small caveat: 90‑day min storage) — set Duplicacy’s threads to 8–16 for multi‑part restores: https://wasabi.com. That said, “42GB in 58 minutes” on spotty café Wi‑Fi is already solid; the real gains show up on Ethernet. How big is your archive?
Nice pull — “42GB in 58 minutes” on spotty café Wi‑Fi is solid. If you stick with Backblaze, crank Preferences > Performance and use their Downloader so restores open multiple connections; it consistently doubles my throughput: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666778-Using-the-Backblaze-Downloader. The one gotcha that drives me nuts is zip restore limits with huge file counts, so I split restores by folder; what region are you in?
Piggybacking on @cjohnson4835: if you’re OK with Arq, aim it at AWS S3 with the Glacier Instant Retrieval class — restores are immediate, storage is roughly $4/TB, but there’s a 90‑day minimum and per‑GB retrieval fees (Secure archive storage – Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes – AWS). In Arq pick S3, set Storage Class: Glacier Instant Retrieval, and bump download threads to about 10 — like a go‑bag for your RAWs; would that fit your mix of shoots?
I get faster restores going Arq → IDrive e2 (S3 Compatible Storage - IDrive® e2); set Arq’s Advanced > Max concurrent transfers to about 12 and it keeps the pipe full, which has been more “quiet, boring, lifesaving” for me than Backblaze. How much do you usually need to pull mid‑shoot?
I’ve had better real‑world restores by mirroring just my active catalog to Cloudflare R2 with restic (https://restic.net) and keeping the long‑term bulk on Backblaze. On my M2 Air, pulling a about 40–50 GB job from that R2 “hot” tier stays under an hour on shaky coffee shop internet, and it runs me under $6/mo, so cheaper than $7 if you don’t need the whole archive fast. If the “cloud saves” vibe is the goal, would a small hot tier like that cover most of your oh‑crap restores?