Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Amazon S3, or Consumer Cloud Storage: What Should Photo Archivists Use?

Object storage is cheap per terabyte and inconvenient by design. It is an API, not an app. There is no web gallery, no mobile sync, no shared album link. What there is, in exchange, is flat per-terabyte pricing that does not flinch when your archive crosses 5 or 10 TB, and a standard interface (S3-compatible) that every serious backup tool already speaks.

Consumer cloud storage is the opposite: friendly and uncomplicated up to about 2 TB, awkward past that. Plans get expensive, the apps slow down on huge libraries, and the storage was never really meant to be a personal datacenter.

For a wearable-camera archive — the kind that produces hundreds of gigabytes a year and only grows — object storage is usually the right off-site copy. Not used directly, but paired with a backup tool that handles encryption and scheduling for you. This piece walks through which provider to pick, which tool to point at it, and the cases where object storage is the wrong tool entirely.

What “object storage” actually means

Most people learn computing through folders. You open Finder or Explorer, navigate into Photos/2025/August, and the files are right there. Object storage doesn’t work that way.

In an object store, there are no real folders. There are “buckets” (think: top-level containers, one per project) and “objects” (the files themselves), each identified by a “key” that looks like a path but is really just a string. The slashes in photos/2025/08/clip_073412.jpg are convention, not structure. Two different keys with the same prefix happen to look like they live in the same folder, and the provider’s web console shows them that way, but underneath everything is flat.

You don’t browse an object store. You talk to it. A backup tool calls an HTTP API to upload, download, list, or delete objects. The interface that almost everyone has standardized on is Amazon’s S3 API, which is now spoken by Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, and a dozen others. “S3-compatible” is the keyword.

This is a developer and power-user product. The pricing reflects that — cheap per byte, no monthly account fee, no “photo library” features. The provider gives you durable storage and an API; you bring everything else.

The three real options for individuals in 2026

The object-storage market is crowded, but for an individual archiving photos there are really three names worth considering, plus a useful fourth.

Backblaze B2

Backblaze B2 is the default recommendation for most people. Pricing is flat at roughly six dollars per terabyte per month, the API is S3-compatible, and the egress story is unusual in a good way: you get free egress up to three times your average monthly storage, which in practice means one full restore per year is essentially free. Backblaze also runs a long-standing publisher-friendly business and has been transparent about pricing for over a decade — the rare cloud where you can find the bill before you sign up.

Wasabi

Wasabi is the no-egress-fee competitor. Storage runs at flat per-terabyte pricing in the same ballpark as B2, with the promise that you never pay to read your own data. The catch is two real floors: a 1 TB minimum charge per bucket per month (you pay for a terabyte even if you store a hundred gigabytes) and a 90-day minimum retention (delete an object before 90 days and you pay for the rest). For a stable archive that grows over time, those floors don’t bite. For a small or rapidly-changing dataset, they do.

Amazon S3

S3 is the canonical option, the one everyone else copies, and almost always the wrong choice for a personal photo archive. Storage in the cheapest standard tier is competitive, but you pay per request (PUT, GET, LIST, all metered separately) and you pay per gigabyte egressed. Both line items are small individually and large in aggregate. Restoring a 5 TB archive once over S3 standard egress in 2026 can cost more than a year of B2 storage for the same data.

The case for S3 over B2 or R2 is roughly: “I already run an AWS account, my IAM is set up, I want everything in one bill.” That is a real reason, and S3’s durability and ecosystem are unmatched. For everyone else, the math points elsewhere.

Cloudflare R2 (the fourth option)

R2 is Cloudflare’s S3-compatible object store, with flat per-terabyte pricing similar to B2 and famously zero egress fees. If you want to be able to restore a full archive without thinking about bandwidth costs, R2 is the most ruthless version of that promise. The trade-off is fewer “personal backup” companion products in the Cloudflare orbit — R2 is closer to plumbing than to a consumer product. For restic or rclone users, that doesn’t matter.

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The backup tools that make object storage useful

You don’t talk to object storage directly. You point a backup tool at it. The four worth knowing are:

restic. A command-line backup tool written in Go that handles deduplication, snapshotting, and client-side encryption in one binary. You configure a “repository” on B2, R2, Wasabi, or S3, give it a passphrase, and restic backup does the rest. The provider sees encrypted blobs; nobody but you can read the file names, let alone the photos. Restic is the default recommendation for technical users because it gets the security model right without much fuss.

rclone. A lower-level tool that thinks of every cloud as a remote filesystem. Rclone can do plain sync (great for some workflows, dangerous as a backup because it has no versioning by default) and it can do encrypted sync via the crypt remote. Rclone is the right pick when you want fine control, when you want to copy between two clouds, or when you want a tool that does more than backup.

Duplicacy. A backup tool with a real graphical user interface and a sensible deduplication model. Free for personal use on the command-line edition; the GUI is paid. Duplicacy is the answer when you want restic-style snapshots but cannot face writing a cron job. The trade is that it’s less battle-tested than restic and the encryption model is slightly different.

Arq. A commercial, polished macOS and Windows backup app. Arq points at S3-compatible storage, runs in the background, and handles encryption and scheduling through a normal app interface. Around $50 one-time in 2026. Arq is the right answer for someone who wants object storage’s price without learning a CLI.

Pick one and stick with it. The biggest backup failure is not “I picked the wrong tool” — it is “I configured three tools, none of them ran reliably, and now my archive is months out of date.”

When object storage is the right answer

Object storage is the right off-site copy when:

• You already have a NAS (or just a folder of photos that’s too big for a consumer cloud plan). Your master copy lives on your hardware; you need a cheap, durable second copy somewhere else.
• You want flat per-terabyte pricing past 2 TB. Consumer cloud plans usually have a sweet spot around 1–2 TB and get expensive above that. B2 or R2 stay flat.
• You’re comfortable running a small backup script on a schedule. This can be a cron job, a launchd plist on macOS, a Task Scheduler entry on Windows, or just a restic backup command you run before bed. It does not have to be sophisticated.
• You want the provider to see ciphertext only. Restic and rclone-crypt encrypt before upload, with a key you hold. Even if the provider is breached or subpoenaed, your photos are unreadable without your passphrase.

If three of those four are true, object storage is the answer.

When object storage is overkill

It’s the wrong tool when:

• Your total archive is under 2 TB and not growing fast.
• You don’t want to think about it monthly — you want a vendor that just runs.
• You want a web interface to browse your photos from anywhere.
• You’re not the technical person in the household and there is no technical person in the household.

In those cases, pick a consumer cloud. The three we keep coming back to:

A worked example: 5 TB on Backblaze B2 with restic

Here’s what the math and the feel of it actually look like.

Say you have 5 TB of lifelogging photos and short video, sitting on a NAS at home. You install restic, create a B2 bucket, initialize a restic repository there with a strong passphrase, and run the first backup.

The first upload is bottlenecked by your home internet’s upload speed, not by B2. On a 100 Mbps upload line (generous for most US residential, common in much of Europe and Asia) you can move roughly 1 TB per day, so the initial seed takes about five days running continuously, or two to three weeks running overnight only. Restic chunks and deduplicates as it goes, so the total stored size after culling near-duplicates is typically smaller than the source.

Ongoing storage cost at roughly six dollars per terabyte per month is around thirty dollars a month for 5 TB, or 360 dollars a year. Verify current pricing at the provider before signing up — the number above is a 2026 ballpark, not a quote.

Day-to-day, restic runs once a night and uploads only the new chunks. A normal week’s worth of new photos (maybe 15 GB) finishes in well under an hour and you’ll never notice it running. You can also prune old snapshots on a schedule — keep seven daily, four weekly, twelve monthly, for example — so the repository doesn’t grow without bound.

Restoring is the moment of truth. To check a single file you run restic restore with a snapshot ID and the path you want. To do a full restore — house fire scenario — you download the entire repository to a new drive and let restic put the photos back. The egress cost on B2 for that full restore is, in most cases, free (Backblaze’s 3x-storage free-egress policy usually covers a one-time restore for a stable archive). Verify at the provider; the policy may change.

Encryption is automatic and end-to-end. The B2 dashboard shows a bucket full of files named like data/3a/3a8b7c5e... — the underlying chunks are encrypted with a key derived from your passphrase, and Backblaze never sees the contents. Keep the passphrase somewhere your future self (or your estate) can find. Lose it and the archive is unrecoverable. The same property that makes restic safe makes it unforgiving.

What we deliberately don’t recommend

• Glacier-class cold storage for personal photos. S3 Glacier, B2 Cold Storage tier, Azure Archive — they all cost less per terabyte than standard object storage, and they all charge real money and real time to retrieve. For an archive you might want to look at once a year, the friction isn’t worth the savings.
• DIY object storage on a VPS. MinIO or SeaweedFS on a $20-a-month VPS sounds tempting. By the time you’ve added storage, redundancy, monitoring, and a real backup of the backup, you’ve rebuilt Backblaze badly, and you’re still on one machine in one datacenter.
• Storing photos directly in S3 (or B2) with plain sync, no backup tool. Sync without versioning is not a backup — it propagates deletions and corruption straight to the cloud copy. If you’re going to use object storage, use it with a tool that does snapshots.

The hybrid plan that actually works

Most lifeloggers end up with a two-leg off-site strategy and that is the right answer.

A consumer cloud — pCloud or IDrive or Backblaze Personal Backup — handles the easy day-to-day. It’s where the photos you want to show your family live, where the phone app can browse from any couch, where the web link to share an album works on the first try. This is the layer where convenience earns its keep.

Object storage with restic snapshots handles the deep archive. Years of culled-but-kept photos, the master backup that survives anything short of a meteor strike, the copy you might never open but that has to be there. This is the layer where survival earns its keep.

Two off-site legs, for not much more money than one done badly. If the consumer cloud gets your account suspended, the restic repository is still there. If you forget to renew a credit card, B2 emails you well before it deletes anything. The redundancy is the point.

Related reading

• Best cloud storage for lifelogging — the consumer-cloud side of the same question, with comparison.
• NAS vs. cloud for photo archives — when to keep the master on hardware you own.
• The 3-2-1 backup rule for lifelogging — the framework all of the above fit into.
• Build a home photo archive — the end-to-end setup, from camera to off-site.
• How to back up lifelogging photos — the practical walkthrough most readers should start with.

Frequently asked questions