BitBlaze Transactions – save costs
BITBLAZE
BitBlaze was costing me over $65/month when storage is so cheap… why?
NOTE: Reference: https://www.backblaze.com/
BackBlaze is an amazing off-site storage solution. Keep in mind that when you set this up, you should encrypt your files from the source before uploading them to backblaze. TrueNAS makes this extremely easy to do using "Cloud Sync Tasks" under the Tasks menu. After creating a BackBlaze account, create a B2 bucket. Then, add an API to it that can be used in your TrueNAS system. You can use those APIs under the "Cloud Credentials" menu located under the System tab.
After configuring your backups, you need to know that there are costs involved. To do transactions (upload your files), your system will be using certain API calls. These calls are recorded and charged. This writeup will explain how I found out that these transactions were costing me more money than I accounted for.
Here’s a screen shot from the account showing that my Class C Transactions were costing me over $65. When storage is about $0.005/GB/Month, my calculations for something was way off!
Looking at the reports generated for my transactions, I’m able to see that the API call for b2_list_file_names was happening quite a few times a day. This make sense when it’s simply a sync going on behind the scenes, and the file list is used to do that. So I ran a test for one of my larger 25GB backups to quickly see the number of transactions.
BEFORE THE TRANSACTION
AFTER THE TRANSACTION
As you can see, there were a little over a thousand transactions. That’s plenty enough for the 2500 free transactions per day. When I was running all of my backup syncs every hour, this turned into quite a few extra that I don’t really need.
NOTE: If you have really important things to ensure are backed up every minute or hour, you’ll need to calculate the transactions to see what you bill will be. For me, I’m simply going to backup only one pool (set of files) per day.
So in the end, it’s easy to schedule your transactions for one a day, and make sure they amount to less than 2500 for Class C Transactions. Also, set an alert cap to make sure you aren’t going over this amount.
In TrueNAS, you can customize your sync to happen whenever you’d like. If you can make sure that less than 2500 transactions are taking place per day, you’re saving money!
