Backup services are compared on the price of putting data in. That is the number on the pricing page, it is the number in every review, and it is the number that matters least. You will pay it every month for years without ever thinking about it again.
The number that matters is what happens on the one day you actually need the service: the day a drive dies, or a laptop is stolen, or ransomware encrypts a shared folder. On that day you are not storing data, you are retrieving it, and retrieval is priced very differently from storage.
Two different products wearing the same word
Cloud backup splits into two categories that get discussed as though they are one, and they behave in opposite ways when you need your files back.
Consumer backup services charge a flat subscription and bundle retrieval into it. You are buying an outcome: your files, back on a machine. Object storage charges separately for storage and for every gigabyte you pull out. You are buying infrastructure, and the meter runs in both directions.
Both are reasonable products. The mistake is using the second while expecting the first, which is how people end up with a four-figure bill for the privilege of reading their own photographs.
What retrieval actually costs
These are the published figures from each provider’s own pricing pages.
| Service | What you pay to store | What you pay to get it back |
|---|---|---|
| Backblaze Computer Backup | $99 a year, unlimited data | Download free, zip restores up to 500GB per request. Mailed encrypted hard drive free, with free shipping if you return the drive within 30 days |
| IDrive Personal | From $6.99 a month on annual billing for 5TB, rising through 10, 20, 50 and 100TB tiers | IDrive Express physical shipment, three free requests a year, then $59.95 each |
| Backblaze B2 | $6.95 per TB a month | Free up to three times your average monthly stored data, then $0.01 per GB |
| Backblaze B2 Overdrive | $15 per TB a month | Unlimited free egress |
| Amazon S3 | Metered per GB | First 100GB a month out to the internet free, then metered per GB |
Read the right-hand column rather than the middle one. The two consumer services bundle a physical drive option, which is the thing you want when a whole machine is gone. The object storage tiers meter the exit.
The free egress allowance is better than it sounds
Backblaze B2’s allowance is worth understanding properly, because it is the clearest example of pricing built around normal use rather than disaster use.
You get free egress up to three times your average monthly stored data. Store an average of 2TB and you can pull 6TB out that month at no cost. For a full restore that is generous: you are retrieving one copy of something you store continuously, so a complete recovery sits comfortably inside the allowance.
Beyond it, the rate is a cent per gigabyte, which works out at roughly ten dollars per terabyte. Even a bad month is survivable. The reason egress has a fearsome reputation is the hyperscale providers, where the per-gigabyte rate is an order of magnitude higher and the free allowance is measured in tens of gigabytes rather than multiples of what you store.
Time is the cost nobody prices
Money is the easy part. The expensive part of a restore is how long you spend without your files, and that is a function of your home connection rather than anything the provider controls.
Work it out before you need it. A terabyte over a 100 Mbps line is not a coffee break, it is the better part of a day running flat out, assuming nothing interrupts and the connection sustains its headline speed, which it will not. Two terabytes on a slower line is a weekend.
This is why the mailed drive option matters more than its position in the feature list suggests. For a large restore, a physical disk arriving by courier is frequently faster than your own broadband, and both consumer services here offer one. Backblaze ships it at no cost, provided the drive goes back within thirty days. IDrive gives you three shipments a year before charging.
Note also Backblaze’s 500GB ceiling per zip request. That is not a cap on what you can retrieve, but it does mean a multi-terabyte download becomes a sequence of separate requests rather than one job you start and walk away from.
The test worth running this week
An untested backup is a belief, not a backup. The failure people actually experience is not a provider going bust, it is discovering that the thing they needed was never included in the first place.
- Restore one real file you would genuinely miss, not a test document you made for the purpose. Confirm it opens.
- Check what is excluded. Many consumer services skip external drives unless they are attached regularly, and most skip virtual machine images, system files and anything on a network share by default.
- Find the versioning window. If ransomware encrypts your files and the backup faithfully syncs the encrypted versions, your recovery depends entirely on how far back the service lets you reach.
- Time a realistic restore. Retrieve 10GB, note how long it took, and multiply up to the size of everything you hold.
- Check what happens if you stop paying. Some services delete immediately, others hold data for a grace period. Know which before the card on file expires.
Step two catches the most people. An external drive full of photographs that is only plugged in occasionally is exactly the data you would most want back, and exactly the data a default configuration is most likely to have been quietly ignoring for years.
Common questions
Is cloud sync the same as cloud backup?
No, and the difference matters most in the situation you are insuring against. Sync mirrors whatever is on your machine, so deleting or encrypting a file propagates that change everywhere. Backup keeps historical versions you can reach back into. A sync folder with no version history is not a backup, whatever the marketing says.
Does unlimited really mean unlimited?
Where it is offered it generally applies per computer, so backing up four machines means four subscriptions rather than one. Read the per-device wording rather than the headline, and check how external drives are counted, since that is where the practical limits usually live.
Should I pay for object storage instead?
Only if you are comfortable running the software that talks to it. Object storage gives you a cheaper per-terabyte rate and full control, and gives you nothing else: no client, no scheduling, no restore interface. If the words bucket and lifecycle policy are unfamiliar, the flat subscription is the better value even where it is nominally more expensive.
How many copies do I actually need?
The convention is three copies of anything important, on two kinds of media, with one of them somewhere else. Cloud backup is the easiest way to satisfy the last part. A local external drive alongside it covers the common small disasters quickly without touching the internet at all.
What happens to my backup if the provider fails?
Services that shut down generally give notice and a retrieval window, but it is not a scenario to rely on goodwill for. It is the strongest argument for keeping one copy somewhere you control outright, on a disk in a drawer, where nobody else’s business model is between you and your files.
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