My first offsite backup bill was a Wasabi invoice for 1TB of family photos, and I remember staring at it thinking I had been overcharged. I had used maybe 40GB of actual space. The charge was for a full terabyte anyway.
That was my introduction to the single most important difference between these two services. Neither one is expensive in the way a big cloud provider is expensive. But they charge you in completely different ways, and picking the wrong one for your data size can quietly cost you double.
So let me walk through how Backblaze B2 and Wasabi actually behave when a home NAS is pushing backups to them every night, and where each one bites you.
The core pricing difference in one sentence
Backblaze B2 charges you for exactly what you store, billed per GB. Wasabi charges a flat rate but forces a minimum, so tiny backups pay for space they never touch.
Backblaze B2 sits around $6 per TB per month, prorated to the byte. Store 40GB, you pay for 40GB, which works out to roughly a quarter a month.
Wasabi advertises about $6.99 per TB per month, but the catch is a minimum storage charge. Every object you store is billed as if it occupies at least a set floor, and your account has a minimum monthly spend that historically lands near that 1TB mark regardless of what you actually use.
To make that concrete: if your NAS backup is 120GB, Backblaze bills you for 120GB, roughly 72 cents a month. Wasabi bills you as if you stored a full terabyte, so you pay the minimum whether the data is 10GB or 900GB.
The break-even point sits somewhere around 850GB to 1TB. Below it, B2 is cheaper because you only pay for real bytes. Above it, the two converge and the flat-rate model stops feeling like a penalty.
Egress fees: the part most people get wrong
Here is where the conversation usually goes sideways. People compare the per-TB storage number, see they are within pennies of each other, and stop reading.
The real money in cloud storage is often the download fee, called egress. This is what you pay to pull your data back out, which is exactly what happens during a restore.
Wasabi charges zero egress fees, with a fair-use policy: your monthly download can equal your stored amount without extra charge. Backblaze B2 gives you free egress up to three times your average monthly stored data, then bills you after that.
For a home user restoring after a drive dies, both are effectively free. You are pulling your data back once, not streaming it to thousands of visitors.
Side by side for a home NAS
| Factor | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi |
|---|---|---|
| Storage price | ~$6 / TB / month, per-byte | ~$6.99 / TB / month, minimum applies |
| Minimum charge | None | Effective ~1TB minimum |
| Egress (download) | Free up to 3x stored, then paid | Free up to stored amount (fair use) |
| Minimum retention | None | ~90 days per object |
| Best for | Under ~700GB of data | 1TB or more, steady |
| S3-compatible | Yes | Yes |
That last row matters more than it looks. Both services speak the S3 API, which means Synology Hyper Backup, QNAP HBS 3, TrueNAS cloud sync, and tools like QNAP HBS 3 will talk to either one with the same settings screen. You pick a provider, paste an access key and secret, point it at the bucket, done.
Which one wins for your data size
The decision tree is genuinely simple once you know your NAS's backup footprint. Check your Hyper Backup or rsync target and note the real size.
Under about 700GB: Backblaze B2 wins clearly. You pay for what you use, so 300GB costs you under two dollars a month instead of Wasabi's minimum.
Around 1TB and growing: it is a coin toss on price. Pick on features and support quality rather than a few cents.
Multiple terabytes, stable: Wasabi's flat pricing and no-egress policy start to shine, especially if you ever do large restores.
- Family photos and documents only, maybe 50 to 200GB: Backblaze B2.
- Photos plus a modest media library, 500GB to 1TB: either, lean B2 if you are under the line.
- Full media server plus VMs, 3TB or more: Wasabi.
The gotchas nobody puts in the pricing table
A mistake I see constantly is people signing up for Wasabi with 100GB of data, thrilled at the low per-TB rate, then getting the minimum charge and feeling cheated. It is in the terms, but almost nobody reads them.
On the Backblaze side, the free-egress cap of three times your stored data is generous but not infinite. If you host something busy, you can blow past it.
There is also the operational side. Backblaze publishes clear, plain-English docs and their B2 Cloud Storage setup for NAS devices is well trodden, so when something breaks you will find a forum thread. Wasabi's docs are solid too, but the home-user community around it is smaller.
Setting it up on a Synology or QNAP
The process is nearly identical for both. In Hyper Backup, create a new task, choose the S3-compatible option, and enter the endpoint URL for your provider and region.
You will need the bucket name, an access key, and a secret key, all generated in the provider's web console. Enable client-side encryption in Hyper Backup so files are encrypted before they leave your NAS.
Run the first backup on a wired connection if you can. That initial full upload of, say, 500GB can take a day or two on typical home upload speeds, and a dropped Wi-Fi link mid-transfer is a bad time.
One error I hit repeatedly early on was a mismatched endpoint region. If Hyper Backup returns something like Access Denied or a connection timeout right at authentication, nine times out of ten the region in your endpoint URL does not match the region where you created the bucket. Recreate the bucket in the region closest to you and use that exact endpoint.
Testing that the backup actually restores
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup. After the first upload finishes, pick a single folder and run a real restore to a temporary location on the NAS.
Confirm the files open and the encryption passphrase works. Write that passphrase down somewhere offline, because if you lose it, the encrypted blob in your bucket is worthless and neither provider can recover it for you.
My actual recommendation
For the vast majority of home users I talk to, the answer is Backblaze B2, and it is not close. Most people backing up a home NAS have well under a terabyte of truly important, irreplaceable data, and B2's per-byte billing means they pay a couple of dollars a month instead of a fixed minimum.
Wasabi earns its keep once you cross into multiple terabytes and your usage is steady, because then the flat rate and no-egress policy work in your favor.
Check your real backup size tonight, match it to the ranges above, and you will land on the right one without ever seeing a surprise invoice like mine.
Frequently asked questions
Is Backblaze B2 or Wasabi cheaper for 500GB of NAS backups?
Backblaze B2 is cheaper at that size because it bills per byte, so 500GB costs roughly $3 a month. Wasabi's effective 1TB minimum means you would pay for a full terabyte regardless, close to $7. B2 wins clearly under about 700GB.
Do Backblaze B2 and Wasabi charge egress fees on restores?
For normal home restores, both are effectively free. Wasabi allows monthly downloads up to your stored amount under fair use, and Backblaze B2 gives free egress up to three times your average stored data. You only hit fees if you download far more than you store, such as public hosting.
Can I use both services with Synology Hyper Backup?
Yes. Both are S3-compatible, so in Hyper Backup you choose the S3-compatible target, paste the endpoint, access key, secret key, and bucket name. Enable client-side encryption so files are encrypted before upload.
What is Wasabi's minimum storage duration and why does it matter?
Wasabi bills each object for a minimum of about 90 days even if you delete it sooner. For backups that rotate or prune old snapshots frequently, you keep paying for data you already removed, which can inflate the bill.
Which is better for a large media library backup of several terabytes?
Wasabi tends to win at multiple stable terabytes because its flat rate and no-egress policy suit large, steady data. Backblaze B2 stays competitive on storage but its per-byte model offers less advantage once you are well past the 1TB minimum anyway.
Should I use my master API key on the NAS?
No. Create a scoped application key limited to a single bucket and use that on the NAS. If the device is ever compromised, the damage is contained to that one bucket instead of your entire storage account.
