While we were off on vacation this summer, evidently Dropbox changed their client and it caused all kinds of problems for people. Earlier in the year, they changed their policies on the free accounts which caused people to lose their ever-loving minds. I know it’s disappointing when something free starts to cost money, but the outrage was over the top in my opinion. Perhaps because I pay for the $120/year for 2TB of storage across all of my devices, I wasn’t very sympathetic to the free folks.
Backblaze is a pioneer in robust, scalable low cost cloud backup and storage services. Personal online backup to enterprise scale data storage solutions. Backblaze backs up. Dropbox is more for working with active files and easily sharing files with others. I have only needed to retrieve a file from Backblaze a few times a year, whereas I am working with files in Dropbox constantly. Backblaze backs up unlimited data for $60/year. Dropbox is $120/year for up to 2 TB. B2 is the kind of backend storage platform you would use to write your own dropbox replacement! Dropbox does a lot on their servers and in their apps to give you the fast change propagation and then use an object store as the backend (They used to use AWS, I think they use a homegrown one now). There are two main products under the Backblaze umbrella: the “regular” Backblaze and Backblaze Business intended for cloud backups and Backblaze B2, which is an IaaS platform. Although both allow.
These egregious changes by Dropbox caused much discussion on podcasts about alternatives to the service. There is Google Drive of course, and if you’ve got Office 365, you’ve already got 1TB of storage on OneDrive. I use Google Drive but I’ve never found OneDrive to be nearly as useful for transferring large files to people. The last time I checked (and I’ll admit it was a long time ago) you couldn’t just right-click on a file and send the link to someone.
Backblaze
There’s one option that doesn’t seem to have grabbed public attention. I learned this little tip while listening to an ad on the Accidental Tech Podcast. The ad was for the offsite backup solution Backblaze. In the ad, I think it was Marco Arment, mentioned that you use the web interface to your backed-up files to send links to people for download.
Before I give you the steps, let me spend a bit of time singing the overall virtues of Backblaze. I switched from CrashPlan to Backblaze back in 2017, and wrote an article about why. Of course CrashPlan is no longer an option for home users.
The best backup software you can use is the one that you never have to think about. As humans, we really truly think we will remember to plug in a drive and run a backup on our computers at regular intervals. This delusion is right up there with believing we won’t eat that entire bag of potato chips if we open it.
Backblaze runs in the background and constantly backs up your data to the cloud with zero intervention on your part. It’s wicked fast. When I converted to Backblaze it backed up 641GB of data in 18 hours. That was 735 thousand files! I now have 880GB backed up to Backblaze.
Backblaze runs in the background and I never even notice it which is exactly what you want. I do disable it during the live show and reenable it afterward (along with Dropbox and Google Drive) but I’ve never noticed it chewing up my bandwidth unnecessarily.
Web Interface
Backblaze has a web interface where you can view and restore your files. You can have them send you a hard drive (up to 8TB) with all of your data on it for only $189, and if you send the drive back you get a refund. Pat Dengler tested the service and it worked exactly as advertised. If you have a catastrophic failure, like a flood or fire that destroys your local data, this is a great way to get all of your data back very quickly.
Using Backblaze to Share Files
One of the strengths of Dropbox is that you can create a shared folder with someone and then both of you can drop files into the folder, edit documents and all of the changes are reflected on all of the computers where Dropbox is enabled and this folder is shared. Backblaze can’t do that, but it can fill another need.
In a lot of cases, I just need to share a large file with someone. I put it in Dropbox, maybe in a folder called deleteme, wait for it to sync, and then right-click and copy the file URL and share it. I do that all the time with software vendors when I make a short video showing a problem I’m having with their app.
Backblaze can do just that with not too much more work. Backblaze has a service called B2, and it’s for storing giant amounts of data, well beyond simple backups of your local drives. They compete with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Backblaze Dropbox Smart Sync
But there’s a free tier of B2 that’s available to all Backblaze users. In the Backblaze help document at help.backblaze.com/…, they explain:
Individual files within a Backblaze backup can be directly shared from the View/Restore Files page.
To share a file, an account must first have B2, Backblaze’s cloud storage service, enabled via the account settings. Once B2 is enabled, up to 10 GB of data can be stored and shared for free, with up to 1 GB per day of download bandwidth. Additional usage will follow normal Backblaze B2 pricing.
When a file is shared, it will be ‘public’, accessible by anyone with the direct link to the file.
To share a file, first locate the file within the Backblaze backup via the View/Restore Files page. Once located, select the file name to bring up the dialog shown below. Selecting the ‘Share with Link’ button will copy the file to B2 under your account, and generate a direct link to the file.
Backblaze’s restore page on the web allows you to navigate folders just as though you’re looking at your own drive, because it is an exact replica. That means any files you have on your Mac can be shared to other people from any location without moving a copy to deleteme.
As an example, I navigated into the folder where I store artwork for the podcast, and grabbed a link to the podfeet logo so you too can put it on t-shirts and mugs. Simply click the link in the show notes and you’ll have a high-resolution version of the wonderful logo created by the delightful Ryan Sakamoto.
To be perfectly honest, opening a web browser to Backblaze, logging in, entering your two-factor authorization, waiting for the file structure to populate on the web page, drilling down to the file in question and requesting a link is a lot more time consuming than right-clicking on a file in a Dropbox folder on your desktop and selecting “copy link”.
But if you’re smart enough to already have offsite backups by Backblaze, and you don’t want to pay for Dropbox just for the rare occasion where you need to send someone a giant file (less than 1GB), then this method of using Backblaze for file transfer isn’t a bad solution.
Backblaze Dropbox Alternative
Compare Backblaze Dropbox
2021. Dropbox to acquire secure document sharing startup DocSend for $165M
Dropbox acquires (for $165 million) DocSend, the service helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment. When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document-sharing workflow it had been missing. Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that.
2020. Dropbox introduces slew of new features for business
Dropbox introduced a couple of updates for business users. To help people manage the multitude of passwords across our lives it's moving into territory of password managers like LastPass or 1Password. Dropbox is also getting into the online vault business. The idea with these tools is to give you a secure place to store your important documents in a digital context, rather than using a safe deposit box as in the past. You can share a pin with trusted loved ones to give access to these documents like a will or insurance policy in the event of an emergency. The company is also getting into the backup business, giving Dropbox Plus users the ability to regularly backup the entire contents of your PC or Mac and retrieve it fully should you lose your computer or experience a full-out machine failure.
2019. Dropbox unveiled feature to send big files
Dropbox unveiled a new feature called Dropbox Transfer that allows to send large files. The maximum file size is 100 Gigabytes; files may come from the local system or may be picked directly from a user's Dropbox to speed up the sharing even further. Dropbox does not reveal if the file size will count against a user's quota on the size. Recipients download copies of the files so that originals remain untouched. Dropbox account is required to create a new file share. Dropbox notes that users who download the files don't need an account though. The new service is currently available to select customers only but will become available to all Dropbox users in the near future.
2019. Dropbox adds cold storage layer
Many people move files to Dropbox for backup purposes and then rarely access them again. So Dropbox engineers realized it made little sense to have everything stored in the same way when many files weren’t being accessed much after the first day of putting them on the service. The company decided to create two levels of storage, warm storage (previously Magic Pocket) and a new level of longer-term storage called Cold Storage, which lets Dropbox store these files less expensively, yet still deliver them in a timely manner should a customer need to see one. Dropbox customers obviously don’t care about the engineering challenges the company faces with such an approach. They only know that when they click a file, they expect it to open without a significant amount of latency, regardless of how old it is. But Dropbox saw an opportunity to store these files in a separate layer.
2019. Dropbox aquired e-signature service HelloSign
Dropbox is to acquire for $230 million HelloSign, a company that provides lightweight document workflow and eSignature services. This can also been seen in the context of the Extension capability that Dropbox added last year. HelloSign was actually one of the companies involved at launch. While Clark says the company will continue to encourage companies to extend the Dropbox solution, today’s acquisition gives it a capability of its own that doesn’t require a partnership and already is connected to Dropbox via Extensions. Dropbox is going to remain HelloSign as a standalone business within the Dropbox family.
2018. Dropbox expands Paper into planning tool with timelines
Dropbox updated Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool. It added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool. As you would expect with such a tool, it enables you to build a timeline with milestones, but being built into Paper, you can assign team members to each milestone and add notes with additional information including links to related documents. You can also embed a To-do lists for the person assigned to a task right in the timeline to help them complete the given task, giving a single point of access for all the people assigned to a project.
2018. Dropbox adds automatic OCR for all PDFs
Dropbox users have a useful new feature - optical character recognition that automatically transcribes all their images and PDFs. Dropbox’s text recognition engine is rolling out to Dropbox Pro, Business Advanced and Enterprise accounts over the next few months, but admins might want to check to see if they can get early access. When it comes into effect, every image and PDF you have will be scanned for text, which will be added to metadata allowing you to search for it that way. Of course, all this data will be kept as secure as the document itself. Handy, though of course much depends on how accurate the transcription is.
2018. Dropbox improves its collaboration layer - Paper
Dropbox adds some enhancements to its collaboration Paper to keep people working in it without having to switch programs. Now you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox. In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table. Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.
2018. Dropbox released new add-on for Gmail
Dropbox announced a new add-on to manage Gmail attachments in Dropbox. It displays the attachments in a side panel after which you can save them if you so choose directly into your Dropbox, and the experience is the same in the mobile app or on the web. Being able to access Dropbox without leaving Gmail or other G Suite tool could potentially save users time and effort spent copying and pasting and switching programs. It's a somewhat surprising partnership, as Google and Dropbox compete on the cloud storage front: Google Drive storage has many of the same features as Dropbox.
2018. Dropbox improved online file collaboration
Dropbox announced several enhancements designed to improve its mobile collabroration. In a typical team scenario, a Dropbox user shared a file with a team member for review or approval. If they wanted to check the progress of this process, the only way to do it up until now was to send an email or text message explicitly asking if the person looked at it yet — not a terribly efficient workflow. Dropbox recognized this and has built in a fix in the latest mobile release. Now users can can simply see who has looked at or taken action on a file directly from the mobile application without having to leave the application. In addition, those being asked to review files can see those notifications right at the top of the Home screen in the mobile app, making the whole feedback cycle much more organized.