Cloud backup and cloud storage are not the same purchase
Backblaze, IDrive and pCloud get compared on price per terabyte. That is the one axis that will not decide whether you get your files back.
Published · Keenvale
Search for the best cloud backup and you will get a table sorted by price per terabyte. It is a clean number, it is easy to rank, and it is close to irrelevant.
Price per terabyte tells you what you pay. It tells you nothing about whether your files come back — which is the only reason you bought the thing.
Worse, the comparison usually mixes two products that answer different questions. Sync-and-storage keeps a copy of your files available everywhere. Backup keeps a copy of your files as they were. Those sound similar and behave in opposite ways on the day something goes wrong.
The failure that decides everything
Ransomware encrypts your documents folder. Or you delete a directory and only notice six weeks later, when you need it.
A sync service does exactly what you asked: it propagates the change. The encrypted or deleted files replicate to the cloud and to your other devices. The service worked perfectly, and your data is gone.
A backup service keeps prior versions for a defined retention window. You reach back past the damage. Whether you can reach back far enough is the whole game, and it is set by a retention number that rarely appears on the comparison table.
So the first question is not “how much storage”. It is how far back can I reach, and does it cost extra.
Three axes that actually decide it
1. What happens to a file you delete, and for how long
- Backblaze includes 30 days of version history by default, with one-year extended version history available at no charge. Forever version history exists too, priced incrementally at $0.006/GB/month — and, importantly, that charge applies only to file versions changed or deleted more than a year ago.
- IDrive takes a different shape entirely: it retains the last 30 versions of each file, and states that those versions do not count toward your storage quota. Thirty versions with no time limit is a different promise from thirty days — and which is better depends entirely on whether your files change often.
- pCloud offers Rewind, described as a snapshot of your account up to a number of days in the past. It is a storage product with a rollback feature, not a backup product.
The trap: a file you edit daily burns thirty versions in a month. A file you never touch keeps its version forever. Version-count retention and time-based retention fail in opposite situations, and neither vendor frames it that way.
2. Whether the price is per computer or per account
This is where the market is genuinely confusing, and we are going to describe the confusion honestly rather than resolve it for you.
Backblaze prices Computer Backup as a license — $9 monthly, $99 for a year, $189 for two years — and its documentation describes coverage in terms of “the computer itself as well as internal drives and external drives that are physically connected to the computer”. Its pricing page also carries the phrase “no restrictions on number of workstations”, without stating whether that means one license covers many machines or that you may buy many licenses. We read the page several times and could not resolve it from the page alone.
IDrive is unambiguous by comparison: its personal plans are sold as storage tiers — 2 TB at $69.50/year, 5 TB at $99.50/year, plus a free 10 GB tier — and its own signup material describes backing up multiple PCs, Macs and mobile devices into one account.
So the axes invert. Backblaze gives unlimited data and meters computers. IDrive gives unlimited computers and meters data. Three machines with 500 GB each is a completely different bill under the two models, and neither pricing page will tell you which side you are on until you have counted your own machines.
3. What restoring costs you
Backblaze states that restores are unlimited with no additional fee, through a dedicated restore application.
IDrive’s cost to watch is not restore but overage: exceeding your storage tier can be charged at $0.25/GB/month on a personal plan. On a 2 TB plan, drifting 200 GB over costs $50 a month — more than the annual plan itself. This is the number worth setting a reminder for.
The encryption detail almost nobody states plainly
pCloud offers client-side encryption under the name Crypto, and its help documentation says Crypto is available across plan types — Basic, Premium, Lifetime and Family. What matters is the mechanism: you activate a Crypto folder, and files dropped into that folder are encrypted client-side.
Read that carefully. The zero-knowledge guarantee applies to what is inside the folder, not to your account. Files stored elsewhere in pCloud are not covered by it. That is a reasonable design and it is not a trick — but “the service offers zero-knowledge encryption” and “your files are zero-knowledge encrypted” are different sentences, and a comparison table with a checkmark in an Encryption column will show you the first while you read the second.
Choosing, in one paragraph each
Backblaze if you have one main computer with a lot of data on it, including external drives, and you want to stop thinking about capacity. The unlimited model is genuinely unlimited, and the free upgrade to a year of version history closes the most common gap. Count your machines before you commit.
IDrive if you have several devices and a predictable amount of data. Thirty retained versions with no expiry is the strongest retention promise of the three for files that change rarely. Set a calendar reminder to check your usage against the tier, because the overage rate is the sharp edge.
pCloud if what you actually want is storage and sync with a rollback safety net, and the lifetime pricing model appeals. Do not buy it as your only backup. If you do use it, understand that Crypto protects a folder, not an account.
And whichever you choose: the rule that survives every vendor comparison is that a backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup. Restore a handful of files deliberately, today, and find out whether the process is something you could actually complete under pressure.
What we have not tested yet
Everything above is read from the vendors’ own current documentation and pricing pages, quoted rather than paraphrased so you can check us. Prices were checked in August 2026 and are list prices before regional variation or promotions, and this market discounts heavily and often.
What we have not done is run a real restore on each service — which is, by our own argument, the only test that counts. We have not measured how long a large restore takes, how the Backblaze restore application behaves on a slow connection, or whether IDrive’s thirty-version history is as easy to navigate as it is to describe.
We will publish those numbers when we have them, and we will say so here if they contradict anything above.