# Using BackBlaze B2 Cloud Storage for Encrypted Offsite Backups
03 May 2018
As of right now, one of the cheapest offsite backup solutions by far is BackBlaze B2, with Amazon S3 trailing behind. For a while now, I’ve been using this solution with a piece of software called restic to store encrypted backups of some of my important documents offsite. By doing so, should my Western Digital 8TB external hard drive (which I currently use for all of my backups) fail, or get stolen (it’s strongly encrypted, so my data is safe), I have a solution to get the files I need the most back. While I store anything and everything on my external, I am limiting the files in the offsite backup to things that are important. It’s not economical to push things like your music/movie collection, Linux ISOs and virtual machine hard drive images to the BackBlaze cloud. Ubuntu’s repositories contain the restic binaries, but other distributions may require you to install a new repository or build from source. I could write up a guide on how to set this up, but Fedora Magazine wrote an excellent article on how to setup this exact solution. I’d be doing anyone reading this a disservice trying to write up an article that better explains the setup steps. If you’re not a huge fan of restic, duplicity also supports BackBlaze B2, and is fairly easy to setup from what I hear.