We’d like to introduce you to the Backblaze “Restore Return Refund” Program, which is an exciting addition to our Restore By Mail service, and supplements our free web and mobile restore options. Simply put, if you order a flash drive or hard drive restore and then return the drive to us within 30 days we will refund you the entire price of the restore. You can always opt to keep the drive, in which case your payment will cover the purchase of the drive.

Background:

Throughout the 9 years that Backblaze has been in business, we’ve tried to make the backup process easier for everyone. Our Mac and PC clients were designed to take the guesswork out of backing up your computers, and allow folks to continuously and easily backup all of their data. We’ve also tried to make the restore process as painless as possible, first with our free web restores (allowing you to download and access your data from anywhere) and then with our DVD (now flash key) and hard drive USB restores. We also added iOS and Android apps to make getting individual files back a snap. Over the years though, the popularity of our Restore By Mail program has only increased.

We’ve stressed throughout the years that we don’t use the restore process as a profit center. That would feel like we’re holding the data hostage or something icky like that, and indeed, we often lose money off of the USB flash drive and USB hard drive restores (especially when we ship them to our customers internationally). They have always been a flat $189 for a USB Hard Drive up to 4TB in size or $99 for a USB Flash Drive up to 128GB in size, and are profit neutral for us. It’s our goal to allow people to get their data back as easily and inexpensively as possible. In the case of hard drive restores you can now decide if a hard drive with your data on it is worthy of keeping and paying for, or worthy of returning for a refund.

Restore Return Refund Program:

Today we are announcing our Restore Return Refund program. For the last 6 months we’ve had a pilot program where some customers requesting a hard drive restore were offered that if they pay for return shipping and send their hard drive to us within 30 days of receipt, we would refund the $189 that they paid us.

We did this because we never want our customers to feel like they can’t get their data back from us, and we understand a web restore of all your data may take a while or be expensive if your ISP has bandwidth caps. This program enables people to get large amounts of data backup quickly and inexpensively.

So far we’ve had over 100 people send us back their hard drive for a full refund, and the feedback has been immensely positive.

How It Works:

How does the process work? It’s easy:

Purchase a Restore By Mail restore. Once you have recovered your data send us that drive back within 30 days. Once we get the drive back we’ll refund you the entire Restore By Mail purchase price. Or – just keep the drive for yourself, it could make a great local copy or backup.

We highly recommend that you delete your data and reformat the USB drive before sending it back to us. If you forget, don’t worry, when we receive your drive back we’ll ensure the drive is wiped and reformatted. We use standalone USB erase devices which are set to the DoD 5220.22-M 3-pass wipe standard. This will securely remove any data on the drive.

For a complete breakdown on how the program works, check out this help article: How To Return a USB Restore Drive for Refund. You can of course continue to download individual files or all of your data via our free web restore, and use our iOS and Android apps to grab your files on the go.

We’re still working hard to make Backblaze the easiest personal and business backup service out there, and this is just one more step in that direction.