Cloud storage decision
Backblaze Personal Backup
A small, useful backup workflow (agent that uploads encrypted files to S3-compatible storage plus a restore UI) is realistic for a competent developer, but reproducing Backblaze’s full offering (scale, unlimited-plan economics, mailed drive restores, and polished multi-OS clients) is operationally heavy and out of scope for a single developer.
Visit website↗$8.25/mo
$99/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$5/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Backblaze Personal Backup alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Continuously detect changed files on a user's computer, deduplicate/chunk and encrypt them, upload chunks to S3-compatible object storage, store metadata and version history in a small database, and provide restore/download UI.
What it still won’t have
- Large-scale storage infrastructure and operational reliability at Backblaze scale
- Mailed hard drive restore service and related logistics
- Guaranteed unlimited-plan economics and enterprise care
- Polished native clients maintained for many OS versions
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal cross-platform backup service using Electron (or native frameworks), Rust/Go agent for efficient file scanning, chunking, and client-side AES encryption; store chunks on an S3-compatible backend (e.g., Backblaze B2) and metadata in Postgres. In scope: file discovery and change detection, chunking+optional dedupe, resumable encrypted uploads, metadata/versioning API, basic web UI/CLI for listing and restoring files, and automated tests for core flows. Out of scope: mailed hard-drive restore logistics, enterprise multi-tenant admin console, and commercial billing. Include error handling, retry/backoff for uploads, telemetry for failed restores, and unit/integration tests for upload/download and metadata consistency.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productBackblaze official product
- official pricingBackblaze Computer Backup pricing
- official docsBackblaze docs
- open sourceduplicati/duplicati
- open sourcekopia/kopia
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
