Backblaze B2 Alternatives in Europe: GDPR-Compliant Object Storage (2026)

Backblaze B2 made cheap object storage mainstream. Six dollars per terabyte per month, no hidden retrieval fees, and a generous egress allowance make it a popular target for backups, media hosting, and static site archives. It is not without reason that Restic, Duplicacy, Veeam, Arq, and countless other tools ship B2 integrations out of the box.

But if you operate in the EU, serve European customers, or are bound by GDPR, B2 comes with a footnote that gets louder every year: Backblaze is a US-based company subject to the CLOUD Act, regardless of which region your bucket lives in. Combined with cross-Atlantic latency for uploads, quirks around minimum file age on their B2 Live product, and the growing appeal of consolidating on a single European stack, a lot of teams are now actively shopping for a Backblaze B2 alternative in Europe.

This guide walks through what B2 actually offers, why some teams are moving off it, and the seven most credible European alternatives in 2026. It includes a head-to-head pricing comparison at 5TB, 20TB, and 100TB, a Schrems II compliance breakdown, real-world use cases (Veeam, Restic, Duplicacy, static sites, media), and copy-paste rclone migration commands so you can move a bucket in an afternoon.

What Backblaze B2 Actually Offers in 2026

Before dismissing B2, it is worth being precise about what you are replacing. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is an S3-compatible object store (both native B2 and S3-compatible endpoints are supported) with a simple pricing model:

• Storage: $6/TB/month ($0.006/GB)
• Egress: $10/TB after a free tier of 3x your monthly storage (so 1TB stored = 3TB free egress)
• API calls: Class A (write) free, Class B (download) free up to 2,500/day then billed, Class C (list) billed at fractions of a cent per 1,000
• Minimum file age: None on standard B2 Cloud Storage, but B2 Live has object lock / retention semantics and Overwrite/Hide are billed as Class A transactions
• Regions: US West (Sacramento), US East (Phoenix), EU Central (Amsterdam, NL)
• S3 compatibility: Good — most major backup tools, rclone, AWS CLI, Cyberduck, and Veeam all work

The Amsterdam EU region is genuinely useful: if your sole concern is latency and data residency, B2 EU already solves half the problem. The issue is the other half.

Why Teams Are Leaving B2 for European Providers

1. CLOUD Act Exposure Regardless of Region

Backblaze Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The US CLOUD Act (2018) compels US-based providers to hand over data stored on any server they operate, anywhere in the world, on receipt of a lawful US warrant. The bucket sitting in Amsterdam does not change that. For organisations processing personal data under GDPR — especially those that went through the Schrems II pain in 2020 — the preferred mitigation is simple: do not use a US-domiciled processor in the first place.

This is not paranoia. The Dutch DPA, German BfDI, and French CNIL have all published guidance that treats US-owned cloud providers as an elevated risk, regardless of where the physical servers sit. A pure-EU provider removes the question from the risk register entirely.

2. Latency for EU-Uploaders

If your applications, VPS fleet, or CI runners live in Germany, France, or the Netherlands and you back up to B2 US West, every upload eats 120-180ms of round-trip time per TCP packet. Even on B2 EU, cross-border peering and routing choices mean EU-to-EU traffic to a German provider is typically 5-15ms faster than EU-to-B2-Amsterdam for a customer in Frankfurt or Munich.

On large backup windows this matters. A 500GB Veeam incremental uploaded at 200 Mbit/s takes ~5.5 hours; squeezing even 10% off that window is material for overnight windows.

3. Stack Consolidation

A team running VPS on Hetzner, managed databases on a European provider, and backups on Backblaze has three vendors, three invoices, three DPAs, and three support channels to manage. Moving to a provider that bundles VPS, databases, and object storage — where traffic between them is free and internal — simplifies both the bill and the architecture.

The Seven Credible European Alternatives

I evaluated every mainstream European S3-compatible object store on price, region coverage, Schrems II posture, and tooling compatibility. Seven made the shortlist.

1. DanubeData Object Storage (Germany)

DanubeData is a Romanian-operated, German-hosted managed cloud built on Hetzner dedicated servers in Falkenstein. Object storage runs on a self-hosted MinIO fleet behind the s3.danubedata.ro endpoint.

• Price: €3.99/month base includes 1TB storage + 1TB egress
• Region: Falkenstein, Germany (fsn1)
• S3 compatibility: Full — works with rclone, AWS CLI, Cyberduck, Veeam, Restic, Duplicacy, Arq
• Features: Versioning, CORS, lifecycle rules, per-team access keys
• Schrems II: Romanian EU entity, German servers, no US ownership
• Bundle bonus: If you are already running VPS or databases on DanubeData, object storage traffic is already inside the 20TB-per-VPS included egress pool

Best for: teams that want everything in one place — VPS, managed databases, and S3 on a single invoice with a single DPA.

2. Hetzner Object Storage (Germany / Finland)

Hetzner Online launched their S3-compatible object storage in 2024, built on Ceph. It is the cheapest pure-EU backup target on the market for large volumes.

• Price: €5.99/month base includes 1TB storage + 1TB egress; additional storage around €5.40/TB/month
• Regions: Falkenstein, Nuremberg (DE), Helsinki (FI)
• S3 compatibility: Good; some edge-case features still catching up
• Schrems II: Hetzner Online GmbH, fully German, no US ties

Best for: pure cheap EU backup targets where you do not need a bundled stack.

3. OVHcloud Object Storage (France)

OVHcloud operates two S3 products: the standard Object Storage (built on Ceph) and High Performance Object Storage (NVMe-backed).

• Price: Standard around €7/TB/month storage + €0.01/GB egress outside OVH; Cold Archive much cheaper for rarely-accessed data
• Regions: Gravelines, Strasbourg, Roubaix, Warsaw, Frankfurt
• Schrems II: French entity (OVH SAS), fully European

Best for: teams that need multiple EU regions and want a Cold Archive tier.

4. Scaleway Object Storage (France)

Scaleway offers Standard, One Zone - IA, and Glacier tiers, all S3-compatible.

• Price: First 75GB free; Standard around €0.0146/GB/month (~€14.60/TB/month) plus €0.01/GB egress
• Regions: Paris (FR-PAR), Amsterdam (NL-AMS), Warsaw (PL-WAW)
• Schrems II: Scaleway SAS, France-owned via Iliad Group

Best for: existing Scaleway customers already using their VPC and serverless products.

5. IDrive e2 (European regions)

IDrive e2 is one of the cheapest S3-compatible offerings globally, with EU regions. Caveat: IDrive Inc is US-based, so while the bucket is in the EU, Schrems II exposure is similar to Backblaze B2.

• Price: Promotional rates around $4/TB/year on annual plans; regular pricing ~$4/TB/month
• Regions: Frankfurt (DE), Dublin (IE)
• Schrems II: US parent company — same CLOUD Act concerns as B2

Best for: cost-sensitive, non-GDPR-critical data. Skip if you need pure EU sovereignty.

6. Exoscale SOS (Switzerland)

Exoscale is a Swiss cloud provider with S3-compatible Simple Object Storage.

• Price: Around CHF 0.0175/GB/month (~CHF 17.50/TB/month) plus egress
• Regions: Zurich, Geneva (CH), Frankfurt (DE), Vienna (AT), Sofia (BG)
• Schrems II: Swiss entity — not GDPR, but Switzerland has an adequacy decision and strong data protection law

Best for: organisations that specifically want Swiss jurisdiction.

7. Self-hosted MinIO or Garage

If you already run a VPS fleet, you can self-host MinIO (single-node or distributed) or Garage (designed for small-scale geo-distributed S3).

• Price: Just your VPS + storage cost. A 1TB VPS on DanubeData costs a fraction of buying the same TB on a managed object store
• Regions: Wherever your VPS is
• Operational cost: You are on the hook for erasure coding, monitoring, upgrades, and key management

Best for: >10TB workloads where you want complete control and are comfortable operating storage software.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Here is how the four most credible contenders stack up on the dimensions that actually matter:

Exact list prices change; always verify against the provider's current pricing page. Numbers above are accurate as of the 2026 pricing cycle.

Real-World Cost at 5TB, 20TB, and 100TB

Abstract per-TB numbers are hard to reason about. Here is what a typical backup workload — 1x full + 6x incremental per week, with 10% of storage egressed each month for test restores — looks like at three real scales:

Two observations: first, Hetzner and DanubeData are neck-and-neck on raw cost; DanubeData wins on bundle (VPS + DB + S3 on one bill) and Hetzner wins on multiple EU regions if that matters. Second, all of the European providers undercut B2 once you factor in egress with meaningful restore testing.

Use Cases: What Each Tier Is Good For

Backup with Veeam, Restic, Duplicacy, Arq

Every mainstream backup tool speaks S3. The only differences worth knowing:

• Veeam Backup & Replication: Works with any S3-compatible provider. Point the Object Storage Repository at s3.danubedata.ro, set the region to eu-central-1, and enable "Use the following S3 immutability period" if you want WORM for ransomware protection. Veeam's SOBR (Scale-Out Backup Repository) offloads cold data to S3 and works identically on every EU provider in this list.
• Restic: Set RESTIC_REPOSITORY=s3:s3.danubedata.ro/mybucket. Restic's forever-incremental model is ideal for cheap EU storage — you pay only for the delta blocks after the initial upload.
• Duplicacy: Works via the generic s3:// storage URL. Performance is excellent because Duplicacy uses lock-free deduplication and does many small PUTs in parallel — low-latency EU endpoints help here.
• Arq / Duplicati / rclone sync / Kopia: All speak S3. Just configure the endpoint, access key, and secret key.

Static Sites and Media Hosting

S3-compatible storage makes a great origin for a static site (HTML/CSS/JS/images) with a CDN in front. Versioning lets you roll back a bad deploy, lifecycle rules clean up old preview branches, and CORS lets browsers call the API from your main domain.

For pure static hosting without the DIY S3+CDN pipeline, DanubeData also offers dedicated static site hosting, but using object storage + CloudFlare/BunnyCDN is still the cheapest and most flexible combination.

Disaster Recovery / 3-2-1 Backup Rule

The 3-2-1 rule says keep 3 copies of data, on 2 different media, with 1 offsite. European S3 storage is the offsite copy for an EU team whose primary data lives on-prem or on a different cloud. Lifecycle rules can transition old backups to cheaper tiers (Hetzner, OVH Cold Archive, Scaleway Glacier) for multi-year retention at minimal cost.

Media / Asset Delivery

For video, images, and large downloads, a European S3 target with a CDN in front (BunnyCDN, CloudFlare, or KeyCDN) delivers better European user experience than US-based B2 + CDN, since the origin fetch on cache miss is a fraction of the latency.

Migration: Moving a B2 Bucket to DanubeData with rclone

Rclone is the Swiss Army knife for object storage migrations. It handles retries, checksumming, parallel transfers, and resume on failure. Here is a complete migration from Backblaze B2 to DanubeData S3.

Step 1: Install rclone

# Linux / macOS
curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

# Or via package manager
# Ubuntu/Debian
apt install rclone

# macOS
brew install rclone

Step 2: Configure the B2 Source

# Run interactive config
rclone config

# Or write directly to ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf:
cat >> ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf << 'EOF'
[b2]
type = b2
account = YOUR_B2_KEY_ID
key = YOUR_B2_APPLICATION_KEY
hard_delete = true
EOF

Step 3: Configure the DanubeData Destination

First, create a bucket and access key in the DanubeData dashboard (Storage → Buckets → Create, then Storage → Access Keys → Create). Then add the remote:

cat >> ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf << 'EOF'
[danubedata]
type = s3
provider = Other
access_key_id = YOUR_DD_ACCESS_KEY
secret_access_key = YOUR_DD_SECRET_KEY
endpoint = https://s3.danubedata.ro
region = eu-central-1
acl = private
force_path_style = true
EOF

Step 4: Verify Both Remotes

# List B2 buckets
rclone lsd b2:

# List DanubeData buckets
rclone lsd danubedata:

# Count objects in source
rclone size b2:my-bucket

Step 5: Run the Migration

# Dry run first - always
rclone sync b2:my-bucket danubedata:my-bucket 
  --progress 
  --transfers=16 
  --checkers=32 
  --fast-list 
  --dry-run

# If the dry run looks right, remove --dry-run
rclone sync b2:my-bucket danubedata:my-bucket 
  --progress 
  --transfers=16 
  --checkers=32 
  --fast-list 
  --log-file=/var/log/rclone-migration.log 
  --log-level=INFO

Step 6: Verify with a Checksum Pass

# Compare source and destination by checksum
rclone check b2:my-bucket danubedata:my-bucket 
  --one-way 
  --log-file=/var/log/rclone-check.log

# If there are differences, resync
rclone sync b2:my-bucket danubedata:my-bucket --checksum

Step 7: Cutover

Once the full sync completes and checksums match:

1. Update your application or backup tool to use the new endpoint (s3.danubedata.ro) and new credentials
2. Run a final incremental rclone sync to catch any writes during cutover
3. Leave the B2 bucket in place for a cooling-off period (7-14 days)
4. Delete the B2 bucket once you are confident

Tuning for Large Migrations

For buckets over 1TB, tune rclone for maximum throughput:

# High-parallelism sync for big workloads
rclone sync b2:big-bucket danubedata:big-bucket 
  --transfers=32 
  --checkers=64 
  --fast-list 
  --s3-upload-concurrency=8 
  --s3-chunk-size=64M 
  --buffer-size=128M 
  --progress

If your source VM has limited outbound bandwidth, run the sync from a DanubeData VPS — inbound traffic to DanubeData is free, and you will usually get better peering to B2 EU from Falkenstein than from a random home connection or office network.

FAQ

Q: How does total cost of ownership compare at 5TB, 20TB, and 100TB?

At 5TB with modest egress, B2 costs about $30/month vs €20/month on DanubeData — a ~30% saving. At 20TB, B2 is $120 vs €80. At 100TB, B2 is $600 vs €400. The gap widens as data grows because Backblaze's free egress tier (3x storage) sounds generous but is less impactful at scale once you are doing meaningful test restores. Pure storage-only workloads tighten the gap, but including realistic restore traffic the European providers win on unit economics in every bracket.

Q: Do Veeam and Restic work with DanubeData Object Storage?

Yes. DanubeData speaks S3 natively, so any tool that supports "Generic S3" or "Amazon S3-compatible" works. For Veeam, use endpoint s3.danubedata.ro, enable path-style addressing, and set region to eu-central-1. For Restic, set RESTIC_REPOSITORY=s3:s3.danubedata.ro/bucket-name and export your access key and secret. Duplicacy, Arq, Kopia, rclone, and Cyberduck all work the same way — point-and-shoot.

Q: What download speed should I expect from DanubeData to an EU user?

From Falkenstein to major German ISPs: 400-900 Mbit/s per TCP stream. From Falkenstein to France, Netherlands, Austria: 200-600 Mbit/s. To Eastern Europe: 150-400 Mbit/s. Rclone and Veeam both parallelise, so aggregate throughput for a backup restore is usually limited by your local network or disk, not by the object store. For CDN-fronted media delivery, local edge speeds are effectively line-rate.

Q: Does DanubeData offer cold storage tiers?

DanubeData currently offers a single hot storage tier. For archive data you do not need to read often, the rule of thumb is: if you touch it less than once a year and have over 10TB, a provider with a dedicated cold tier (OVHcloud Cold Archive, Scaleway Glacier, Hetzner Storage Box for very cold data) may be 50-70% cheaper than hot storage. For most backup retention use cases (daily/weekly/monthly kept for 1-2 years) a single hot tier is simpler and the cost difference is small.

Q: Can I set lifecycle policies to auto-delete or transition old objects?

Yes. DanubeData supports standard S3 lifecycle rules. You can configure rules like "delete objects in logs/ after 90 days" or "delete non-current versions after 30 days" via the dashboard or the S3 API. Veeam and Restic manage their own retention internally, so you usually do not need lifecycle rules for backup buckets — but they are essential for log archives, temporary build artifacts, and CDN edge data.

Q: Is there a GDPR Data Processing Agreement (DPA) available?

Yes. DanubeData provides a standard GDPR DPA covering Article 28 processor obligations. The entity is Romanian-registered (IFAS Consult SRL) and all production data lives in Germany (Hetzner Falkenstein DC), which means the entire processing chain is within the EU/EEA. No Standard Contractual Clauses for third-country transfers are needed for the base service.

Q: What happens if I exceed my included 1TB of egress?

Overage is metered and billed at €1.21/TB — the same rate as VPS egress overage on DanubeData. For context, that is over 8x cheaper than B2 at $10/TB. In practice, most backup workloads stay inside the included allowance because restores are rare; if you are doing heavy egress (CDN origin, video delivery) you will typically put a CDN in front and only pay for origin-cache-miss traffic, which is a fraction of the total delivered bytes.

Q: Can I use DanubeData Object Storage as a Terraform backend?

Yes. Terraform's s3 backend works with any S3-compatible store. Configure it with the DanubeData endpoint, set force_path_style = true, skip_credentials_validation = true, skip_region_validation = true, and skip_requesting_account_id = true. State locking via DynamoDB is not available, but state locking via an S3 lock file (Terraform 1.11+) works.

Which Alternative Should You Actually Pick?

Short answer by use case:

• You want one bill for VPS + DB + S3 + traffic: DanubeData. The €3.99/mo plan with 1TB included is the lowest entry point in the EU, and internal traffic between your VPS and the bucket does not count against egress.
• You want the cheapest pure EU backup target with multiple regions: Hetzner Object Storage. Bare-bones but rock-solid, three EU regions.
• You need a dedicated Cold Archive tier for 5+ year retention: OVHcloud or Scaleway.
• You specifically want Swiss jurisdiction: Exoscale SOS.
• You already run VPS at scale and want full control: Self-hosted MinIO or Garage on your own servers.
• You just want it cheap and GDPR is not a hard requirement: Stay on B2 EU, or try IDrive e2 — accept the CLOUD Act trade-off.

Getting Started with DanubeData Object Storage

If you landed on DanubeData as the best fit — consolidated stack, European jurisdiction, 1TB included — here is how to start:

1. Sign up — you get €50 credit, enough to run Object Storage for roughly 12 months at the base plan
2. Create a bucket in the dashboard (Storage → Buckets)
3. Create an access key scoped to that bucket (Storage → Access Keys)
4. Point your backup tool or rclone at https://s3.danubedata.ro
5. Migrate with rclone sync b2:old-bucket danubedata:new-bucket

The €3.99/mo plan includes 1TB storage + 1TB egress, versioning, CORS, lifecycle, and an unlimited number of access keys. Overage on both storage and traffic is billed hourly, so you pay only for what you actually use.

👉 Create your DanubeData account and claim €50 in free credit.

Have questions about migrating a specific workload (Veeam, large media archive, multi-region setup)? Get in touch — we have helped customers move multi-TB buckets off B2 and can walk you through it.