Backblaze vs Restic

Backblaze is a publicly traded storage company from San Mateo, California, founded in 2007, that runs its own data centers and sells two products. Computer Backup continuously backs up an entire Mac or Windows PC, including attached external drives, for a flat monthly price with no data cap. B2 Cloud Storage is S3-compatible object storage priced per terabyte, positioned as a much cheaper alternative to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

Computer Backup offers version history, restores through the web and the app, and the option to have data shipped on a USB drive. B2 includes free egress up to three times the data stored each month, free transfer through partners such as Cloudflare, object lock for immutable, ransomware-resistant backups, and integrations with tools like Veeam, Synology, QNAP, rclone and media asset managers. The first 10 GB of B2 storage is free, and billing beyond that is simple and predictable.

Backblaze suits individuals and creatives who want set-and-forget workstation backup, and developers or IT teams storing backups, media archives and app uploads cheaply. It is not a sync or collaboration tool like Dropbox, it offers far fewer regions and services than AWS, and very large Computer Backup restores can be slow. Against Wasabi it competes on egress terms and ecosystem, and against IDrive on simplicity. The company is also known for publishing quarterly hard drive reliability statistics from its own fleet.

restic is a free, open-source command-line backup program written in Go and released under the BSD 2-Clause license. It started as a personal project of Alexander Neumann and has become one of the most trusted backup tools among system administrators, developers and self-hosters.

restic stores backups as encrypted, deduplicated, content-addressed snapshots, so after the first run only changed data is uploaded and every snapshot behaves like a full backup. Repositories can live on a local disk, SFTP, a REST server, Amazon S3 and S3-compatible storage, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, OpenStack Swift, or any of the dozens of backends supported through rclone. Compression is supported in newer repository formats, the check command verifies integrity, forget and prune apply retention policies, and snapshots can be browsed by mounting them as a filesystem. Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, Windows and BSD.

restic fits people who are comfortable with the terminal and want fast, secure backups for servers, laptops and NAS devices. It has no built-in scheduler or graphical interface, so you combine it with cron, systemd timers or community wrappers such as resticprofile, autorestic or Backrest. BorgBackup is the closest alternative with excellent compression but fewer native cloud backends, Kopia offers a similar design with an official GUI, and Duplicati or commercial tools are friendlier for non-technical users.