Question about Backblaze/cloud backup?

For those of you familair with backblaze specifically (unsure if others handle it identically).

I have a ridiculous amount of data thats growing daily. As it is I cant afford to invest in constant hard drive updates let alone a NAS for any type of redundancy.

For backing up large amounts of data dropbox is a joke. I used it till now, but for the price it doesnt begin to cut it.

With 20 Terabytes to go through I imagine backing up to backblaze initially will take me the rest of my life, but what im concerned about is hard drive failure.

Should one of my big drives decide to go, backblaze "keeps files for 30 days" and im unsure how this applies to me. Do I have 30 days to spring for a replacement of said drive before backblaze deletes it? I mean ideally, I would replace it within that time frame but with a growing family, you never know.

I'd like to think its saved in perpetuity unless you actually stopped paying for/using their service or it were manually deleted from the pc but Im not really sure if/how it would distinguish between the death(removal) of a hard drive vs the deletion.

Anyone able to enlighten me a bit? Google was no help.

I know your looking for experience on BackBlaze, of which I'm not, but have you considered maintaining multiple copies of your data locally ? Backing up small amounts of data to a cloud source is ok, but when you have multiple terabytes, the data rates do not favor a short connection time. Besides that, using a cloud you introduce more complexities. You now are dependent on your Router, Modem, Your Internet supplier, their servers and finally get to your data.

I create daily incremental backups with Macrium Reflect, and then create a copy of what was backed up to another external hard drive. This way if one of my backup HD's fail, I have an identical copy to restore from. Hard drives do fail now and then, but if you have good quality drives, they last for a very long time. I've been using Western Digital Black drives for 10 years, and in reality I have not had one fail yet ! (Note fingers crossed). I always assemble my on external units, because of the enclosure fails, I can remove the drive fom it and replace it and still have my data.

Or you could use one of many external enclosure suppliers provide support for Raid Capability. This gives you automatic redundancy.

Just some other thoughts.

Thing is, for redundancy on 20TB it takes much more space. Space I already can't afford.

I actually just got done making a few scripts to backup the essentials locally but I can't afford to halve/double my space requirements and with Dropbox only handling a fraction, I really need to have something off site and for the cost it can't be beat.

Either way your points are wholly valid. In my case I use a combination. This way I know I'll never lose "everything" regardless of what happens lol.

A couple thousand dollar NAS with 100TB in a mirrored raid would be great and is on my radar for roughly 3-7 tax returns from now but until said point