No need to give your file an obscure name, or use a public bucket. You can use a private bucket and create a presigned URL with an expiration of up to one week.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
> I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.
We have two similar products, and it's easy to mix them up. To clarify:
Backblaze Computer Backup (a different product from Backblaze B2) deletes old versions of files from your backup either 30 days or 1 year (you choose which) after you delete them locally. You also have the option to enable "Forever Version History", which costs $6/TB per month once your files age out of the backup.
Backblaze B2 (S3-compatible cloud object storage) will never delete anything unless you tell it to do so, either via the API or a lifecycle rule.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
Backblaze B2 does include deletion prevention (object lock) and lifecycle management to automatically hide (soft delete) or (hard) delete objects according to a schedule.
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.
Pulling the egress costs from the hyperscalers' storage pricing pages:
* Amazon S3 ranges from $50-$90/TB depending on monthly volume.
* Google Cloud Storage ranges from $80-$230/TB depending on monthly volume and where you're transferring data to/from.
* Azure Blob Storage ranges from $40-$181/TB (with the First 100GB/month free) depending on monthly volume and whether you route data via the Microsoft Premium Global Network.
Cloudflare published a blog post a couple of years ago explaining just how much money AWS makes on egress - customers are paying up to 80x Amazon's costs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
> I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage.
It depends on what "very low" means. We have a capacity-based pricing option, Backblaze B2 Reserve, starting at 20 TB, that includes all egress and transaction fees.