Backblaze B2 is the cloud storage option that comes up in every conversation about affordable offsite backup for video editors. At roughly six dollars per terabyte per month for storage, it undercuts AWS S3 and Google Cloud by a wide margin. But storage cost is only one line on the invoice.
Whether B2 actually makes sense depends on how much you store, how often you need to retrieve it, and whether you have the patience to wait for downloads over your internet connection.
The Pricing Breakdown
Backblaze B2 charges $6 per TB per month for storage. That is the headline number, and it is genuinely cheap. For comparison, AWS S3 Standard runs about $23 per TB per month, and Google Cloud Storage is similar.
But there are two other costs that matter:
Egress fees. Downloading your own data costs $0.01 per GB, which works out to $10 per terabyte. That is dramatically cheaper than AWS S3's $0.09 per GB ($90 per TB), but it is not zero. If you archive 20 TB and need to pull it all back, that is $200 just for the download.
Transaction fees. API calls for uploads, downloads, and listing files are charged per transaction. For typical backup workflows, these are negligible. For applications that constantly read and write small files, they can add up. Editors doing bulk archive and occasional restore will barely notice.
When B2 Makes Sense
B2 is excellent as an archive for completed projects. The use case is simple: you finish a project, upload the camera originals and final deliverables, and the files sit there until the day a client calls and needs something re-exported, or you get tired of paying and delete it.
For a freelance editor archiving 10 TB, the monthly bill is about $60. For 20 TB, $120. That is competitive with buying a physical backup drive every year or two, except the data is offsite and protected from local disasters.
B2 also pairs well with tools like rclone, Arq Backup, or Duplicati for automated sync. Set up a nightly job that pushes new and changed files to B2, and your offsite backup maintains itself.
When B2 Does Not Make Sense
B2 is not a working storage solution. It is not designed for editors who need to actively access files during a project. The latency and bandwidth limitations of any cloud download make it impractical as a primary media source.
If you need real-time access to cloud-stored footage for collaborative editing, services like LucidLink or Frame.io are built for that workflow. They cost more, but they solve a fundamentally different problem.
B2 also becomes questionable at very large scales without discipline. Archiving 50 TB sounds reasonable at $300 per month. But if half of that data is render files, proxies, and unused media that could be regenerated or deleted, you are paying $150 per month to store files you do not need.
The monthly cost seems small for any single month. But storage is a recurring expense that compounds. Over three years, 50 TB on B2 costs $10,800. That buys a lot of physical drives.
The Math You Should Actually Do
Before committing to cloud archive, figure out what you are actually archiving. Camera originals and final exports have irreplaceable value. Transcode files, render caches, and unused media do not. Stripping those out before uploading can cut your archive size dramatically.
The Clip Sweeper storage calculator lets you model your archive costs across different providers, including B2. Plug in your current storage total, see what it costs per month, and then consider how much of that total is genuinely worth paying to protect. The cheapest cloud storage is the data you never upload in the first place.