Backblaze vs SnapShooter

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.

SnapShooter is a backup service for servers, volumes, databases and files hosted on cloud and VPS providers. It was founded in the UK as a bootstrapped company and acquired by DigitalOcean in 2023, and it is popular with developers and small teams who run their own infrastructure rather than a fully managed platform.

The service connects to providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode and UpCloud through their APIs to schedule provider-level snapshots of droplets, instances and volumes. For more portable backups, it runs jobs over SSH that dump MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis databases or archive files and directories, then uploads them to S3-compatible storage you control, such as Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or DigitalOcean Spaces. Retention rules, schedules, notifications and one-click restores are configured in a web dashboard. Plans are inexpensive and priced by the number of jobs and resources, with a small free tier.

SnapShooter fits indie developers, agencies and SaaS founders running apps on VPS servers who want automated, offsite backups without writing scripts. It is not built for enterprise backup requirements such as compliance reporting or endpoint protection. Teams comfortable with the command line can achieve similar results for free with restic or BorgBackup, while SimpleBackups is the closest hosted competitor. Because the product now sits inside DigitalOcean, check its current plans and roadmap before adopting it for non-DigitalOcean infrastructure.