Preservation
The positioning
Backblaze B2 is object storage built on two arguments: storage pricing well below the large general-purpose providers, and a readable price grid — few lines, few variables.
For a photographer that’s often the deciding factor. A photographic collection is bulky, grows steadily, and is rarely read. That’s exactly the profile B2 serves best.
What it does well
- Cost per terabyte retained, which remains its main strength on a growing collection.
- A comprehensible bill. No arbitrating between six storage classes: there is storage, and that’s it.
- An S3-compatible API, letting you use the same tools as for S3 and change provider without changing your workflow.
- More favourable egress terms than the market average, with free outbound transfer capped at a multiple of stored volume — which comfortably covers the partial restores of normal use.
What to check
No archive classes. Simplicity has a flip side: you can’t drive the cost of a fully frozen collection down further by moving it to deep archive. On very large volumes never read back, a competitor with a glacier class can become cheaper again.
The free egress cap. Generous for occasional restores, it won’t cover repeated full restores. Run the numbers on your actual volume.
Region locations, to weigh against your obligations if the collection contains personal data.
Settings not to miss
- Object versioning, to survive a deletion propagated by a sync.
- A dedicated application key, restricted to one bucket and without delete permission.
- Object lock if you want an archive made immutable for a defined period — the best defence against ransomware.
- Encryption, server-side at minimum, client-side if the collection is sensitive.
In practice
- Create a dedicated application key with no delete permission.
- Enable versioning from the start.
- Compare three-year total cost, storage and egress, against your real volume.
- Test a partial restore to measure actual throughput from where you are.
- Check checksums from the bucket after the deposit.
Obscura Flow treats B2 as a first-class archive destination, with uploads that resume after a drop and remote-side integrity verification once the transfer completes.