{"id":81721,"date":"2018-03-20T08:07:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T15:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=81721"},"modified":"2021-12-22T04:36:30","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T12:36:30","slug":"b2-snapshot-return-refund-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/b2-snapshot-return-refund-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the B2 Snapshot Return Refund Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"B2<\/p>\n

What Is the B2 Snapshot Return Refund Program?<\/h2>\n

Backblaze\u2019s mission is making cloud storage astonishingly easy and affordable. That guides our focus \u2014 making our customers\u2019 data more usable. Today, we\u2019re pleased to introduce a trial of the B2 Snapshot Return Refund<\/a> program. B2 customers have long been able to create a Snapshot of their data and order a hard drive with that data sent via FedEx anywhere in the world. Starting today, if the customer sends the drive back to Backblaze within 30 days, they will get a full refund. This new feature is available automatically for B2 customers when they order a Snapshot. There are no extra buttons to push or boxes to check \u2014 just send back the drive within 30 days and we\u2019ll refund your money. To put it simply, we are offering the cloud storage<\/a> industry\u2019s only refundable<\/b> rapid data egress service.<\/p>\n

You Shouldn\u2019t be Afraid to Use Your Own Data<\/h3>\n

Last week, we cut the price of B2 downloads in half<\/a> \u2014 from 2\u00a2 per GB to 1\u00a2 per GB. That 50% reduction makes B2\u2019s download price 1<\/sup>\/5<\/sub> that of Amazon\u2019s S3 (with B2 storage<\/a> pricing already 1<\/sup>\/4<\/sub> that of S3). The price reduction and today\u2019s introduction of the B2 Snapshot Return Refund program are deliberate moves to eliminate the industry\u2019s biggest barrier to entry \u2014 the cost of using<\/em> data stored in the cloud.\u00a0 Storage vendors who make it expensive to restore, or place time lag impediments to access, are reducing the usefulness of your data. We believe this is antithetical to encouraging the use of the cloud in the first place.<\/p>\n

Learning From Our Customers<\/h3>\n

Our Computer Backup<\/a> product already has a Restore Return Refund<\/a> program. It\u2019s incredibly popular, and we enjoy the almost daily \u201cyou just saved my bacon\u201d letters that come back with the returned hard drives. Our customer surveys have repeatedly demonstrated that the ability to get data back is one of the things that has made our Computer Backup<\/a> service one of the most popular in the industry. So, it made sense to us that our B2 customers could use a similar program.<\/p>\n

There are many ways B2 customers can benefit from using the B2 Snapshot Return Refund program, here is a typical scenario.<\/p>\n

Media and Entertainment Workflow Based Snapshots<\/h3>\n

Businesses in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry tend to have large quantities of digital media, and the amount of data will continue to increase in the coming years with more 4K and 8K cameras coming into regular use. When an organization needs to deliver or share that data, they typically have to manually download data from their internal storage system, and copy it on a thumb drive or hard drive<\/a>, or perhaps create an LTO<\/a> tape. Once that is done, they take their storage device, label it, and mail to their customer. Not only is this practice costly, time consuming, and potentially insecure, it doesn\u2019t scale well with larger amounts of data.<\/p>\n

With just a few clicks, you can easily distribute or share your digital media if it stored in the B2 Cloud. Here\u2019s how the process works:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Log in to your Backblaze B2 account.<\/li>\n
  2. Navigate to the bucket where the data is located.<\/li>\n
  3. Select the files, or the entire bucket, you wish to send and create a \u201cSnapshot.\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. Once the Snapshot is complete you have choices:\n