Side by Side
| Storage box | Object storage | |
|---|---|---|
| How you reach it | SSH: SFTP, SCP, rsync, Borg | An HTTP API (S3 and compatibles) |
| What it looks like | A folder tree with a fixed size | Buckets of objects, effectively unlimited |
| Price | Flat per month for the size | Per GB stored, plus downloads and requests on most providers |
| Best tools | rsync, Borg, restic, rclone, any SFTP client | restic, rclone, Kopia, cloud-native backup tools |
| Extras | Simple and predictable | Versioning, lifecycle rules, object lock, multi-region |
| Restores | No per-download fee | Egress fees can make large restores expensive |
When a Storage Box Is the Better Fit
When your tools already speak SSH — rsync jobs, Borg, a server's existing backup script — and you would rather know the bill in advance. It is also the simpler thing to reason about: a size, a folder tree, and a login. Restoring a whole server costs nothing extra, which matters because the day you restore everything is the day you least want a surprise invoice.
When Object Storage Is the Better Fit
When the data grows without a ceiling you can predict, when you need features a filesystem does not have — object versioning, immutability locks, lifecycle rules that move old data to colder tiers — or when an application needs to serve files directly over HTTP.
Ours: Object Storage at a Storage-Box Price
Our object storage is priced like a storage box: a flat monthly price for 1, 2 or 5 TB, with monthly transfer (uploads and downloads together) equal to the plan size and no request or download fees. So the choice between our two comes down to your tools — SSH and SFTP for a storage box, the S3 API for object storage. It does not have versioning, Object Lock or public buckets; if you need those, a larger object-storage provider is the better fit.
Or Both
The usual rule for data that matters is three copies, on two kinds of storage, one off-site. A nightly Borg or restic backup to a storage box plus a weekly copy to object storage covers it, and neither provider becomes a single point of failure. The Borg guide sets up the first half. For the second copy, pick a different provider or region from the first. Our storage boxes and our object storage are in the same data centre, so using both of ours gives you two kinds of storage but not two places.