Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs AWS S3: Minimum Storage Duration Policies and Egress Ratio Caps

Provider Policy & Rate Card Comparison Matrix

The 90-Day Minimum Retention Trap on High-Churn Workloads

Wasabi enforces a mandatory 90-day minimum storage duration on standard Pay-As-You-Go accounts (30 days on certain custom Enterprise Reserved Capacity Storage contracts). Whenever an object is uploaded and subsequently overwritten, compacted, or deleted after $D$ days (where $D < 90$), Wasabi bills the remaining $(90 - D)$ days as "Timed Deleted Storage."

What We Observed Running `restic forget --prune` Against Wasabi vs. B2: To quantify how deduplicating backup engines interact with minimum retention rules, we mirrored a `2.4 TB` PostgreSQL WAL + base-backup repository (`restic 0.17.1` with `--keep-daily 14`) to both Backblaze B2 and Wasabi over a 30-day cycle:

$ restic -r s3:https://s3.us-east-1.wasabisys.com/pg-prod-backups forget --keep-daily 14 --prune
repository 8f4a21c9 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
to repack:        28,410 blobs / 412.642 GiB
this removes:     19,104 blobs / 278.190 GiB
to delete:         6,842 blobs / 104.310 GiB
total prune:      25,946 blobs / 382.500 GiB
done in 14m22s

# Resulting 30-Day Billing Ledger Comparison:
# Backblaze B2 Billable Volume:  2.41 TB Active Storage  -> $14.46 / mo
# Wasabi Billable Volume:        2.41 TB Active + 6.84 TB Timed Deleted Storage -> $64.66 / mo

Because `restic --prune` downloads partially unused packfiles (`412.6 GiB`), writes newly repacked objects (`134.4 GiB`), and issues `DeleteObject` calls on the old packfiles created only 14 days ago, Wasabi billed the remaining 76 days on every repacked file while simultaneously starting a new 90-day billing clock on the newly written packfiles. If you use Wasabi with `restic`, `kopia`, or `borg`, pass `--max-unused 50%` or schedule `--prune` no more than once every 90 days.

Wasabi's 1:1 Egress Policy vs. Backblaze B2's 3x Egress & Peering

Both vendors advertise "free egress," but the architectural definitions differ substantially:

• Wasabi's 1:1 Egress Fairness Rule: Wasabi's free egress policy is designed for backup, archive, and surveillance workloads where monthly outbound downloads are less than or equal to 100% of your active stored volume (e.g., storing 50 TB and downloading ≤ 50 TB/month). If your workload serves public web traffic or CDN origin fills that routinely exceed a 1:1 monthly ratio, Wasabi reserves the right to rate-limit egress or transition the account to a paid bandwidth tier.
• Backblaze B2's 3x Direct Allowance + Unlimited Bandwidth Alliance Peering: Backblaze B2 includes free direct internet downloads up to 3x your average monthly stored volume (e.g., 150 TB of free direct egress on 50 TB stored), with a flat `$0.01/GB` overage rate thereafter. More importantly, when B2 is fronted by a **Bandwidth Alliance** partner (**Cloudflare CDN, Bunny.net, or Fastly**), origin-to-CDN egress is 100% free and uncapped regardless of whether your egress-to-storage ratio is 5x or 50x.

Configuring Zero-Egress Peering: Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare / Bunny CDN

By default, Backblaze B2 attaches internal metadata response headers (`x-bz-file-id`, `x-bz-file-name`, `x-bz-content-sha1`, `x-bz-upload-timestamp`) to every `GET` response. Stripping these headers at the CDN edge reduces HTTP response header overhead by ~220 bytes per request and allows long-lived `Cache-Control` overrides:

# 1. Backblaze B2 Bucket CORS & Cache-Control Configuration via B2 CLI
b2 update-bucket \
  --bucketInfo '{"cache-control": "public, max-age=31536000, s-maxage=31536000, immutable"}' \
  prod-media-origin-b2 allPublic

# 2. Cloudflare Transform Rule (Modify Response Header) for B2 Origin CNAME
# Target: (http.host eq "cdn.daktan.com")
Remove response header: x-bz-file-id
Remove response header: x-bz-file-name
Remove response header: x-bz-content-sha1
Remove response header: x-bz-upload-timestamp
Remove response header: x-amz-request-id
Set static header:      Cache-Control = "public, max-age=604800, s-maxage=2592000"

Workload Selection Matrix: B2 vs. Wasabi vs. S3