Case Study: Vintage Aerial achieves cost-effective replacement of on-premise storage and simplified operations with Backblaze B2

Cost effective replacement of on-premise storage with cloud storage

Vintage Aerial, which stores more than 20 million high‑resolution aerial photographs (about 80 TB), needed to replace aging on‑premise storage and simplify operations so engineers could focus on the web service rather than hardware. They evaluated cloud options — Amazon S3 would have cost roughly $1,680/month — and chose Backblaze B2 as a lower‑cost cloud storage alternative.

Using Backblaze B2, Vintage Aerial migrated 80 TB (via a rented 10 Gbps server and "sneaker‑net") in about 80 days and now pays roughly $400/month (about $24,000 over five years) versus an estimated $100,000 for S3 and ~$30,000 for new local hardware. Backblaze enabled them to shut down on‑site servers, reclaim space, reduce storage management time, and support new customer‑facing features (fast access to high‑resolution images for zooming) that should improve the user experience and sales.

Vintage Aerial

Kevin Marsh

Partner and Director of Engineering