How I spent nearly $100 on useless API calls

I have a modest homelab, only a few hundred gigabytes of content that doesn’t change often. Most of the content is not really that important, but I back it up anyways because, hey, storage costs are pretty low. I use BackBlaze B2, which is about $6/TB, which I am easily under. So you’ll image my surprise when my February bill came from BackBlaze, and it was for $103.91. Yup, I went from spending about $2.50, to over one hundred dollars in about a month. How? ...

23 February, 2026 · 4 min · Josiah McKay

Back It Up - Part 2

Welp, I’m ready to start writing my backup script! I ended up using Python, mostly because I feel more comfortable using it. I considered Bash, and perhaps in the future I will convert the process to Bash. But as I said, I am more comfortable in Python, and, at least for now, think Python could be better. We shall see. Bash may be more ubiquitous, but I’m not planning on ever running this on any exotic hardware, so Python is a reasonable requirment. ...

15 February, 2026 · 3 min · Josiah McKay

Back It Up - Part 1

Backups are like oral hygiene. Everyone knows they’re important and most people are doing something, but very few people are actually putting in the effort to do it completely. They’ve always been on my TODO list, but other things have always caught my attention and distracted me from this all-important endeavor. Plus, I was honestly kinda scared to dive into the proper way of doing Docker Volume and database backups; everything is working fine for now, why change it? ...

10 December, 2025 · 9 min · Josiah McKay