Desktop software costs me 49.99 a year with no storage

Our volume discount in MBS starts since the 5th license you would buy in bulk. If you are buying 10 licenses, then the cost per license falls down to $29.99

but like backblaze offers desktop $50 per year with unlimited storage

However, BackBlaze don't do encryption on the user end, it only applies to the server end. So if you are doing local backup as well - it won't be encrypted. And your data will be deleted in 30 days, after you delete it from your machine. So, retention is a concern well (if BackBlaze server cannot connect to your machine, your data is lost after 6 months).

carbonite $59 for unlimited storage.

Carbonite limits upload speed. And there is an issue with the provider lock-in. Just look at CrashPlan users nowadays, trying to migrate their data somehow. It's not easy.

and whats preventing a customer from buying the desktop and actually using it on server.

Actually nothing. This is a file level license not dedicated to workstation exclusively. Doesn't matter on which machine the license is installed.

BTW, backblaze doesn't backup open files. and cannot create images as CBB.

It's only 2 things completly different for 2 differents markets.

Using CBB products is more than fantastic experience. Last week I did restore a whole erp-crm customers machine (taken as an Hyper-V backup to azure) to my premises because my customer was undretaken an audit process and he was needed urgently to approve to the auditors that what is taken backup can be restored. The best part was that the VM was restored off-site succesfully. Who else other than CBB product does these magic things?

there a few :) rude to mention though, our other Image based backup offers < hourly recovery onsite and in the cloud.

For image the "other" solution is better.

I do like the restore to Azure function, having a few problems in testing and its just that a restore, there need to be a way of directly booting the VM from the backup images stored in Azure, get that and your onto a winner !!

Unless that the server is an Active Directory one and has problem boot up with other IP address ... I have done image backup and restore to Azure member servers as a VM succesfully and I cannot see any problem and why others are better.

The one I tested was a standard 2016 server, the backup size is<10GB it took over 2 hours for the failover process and it resulted in a black screen, the server didn't recover.

the problem is they NEED to COPY the files, if you have a large VM 1TB say the recover time is going to be hours? in a BC scenario this is too long.

Perhaps someone from CB can put me right?

So James I suppose you did image based backup and tried to recover it in Azure as a VM ending with a black screen is that right? My last experience with that kind of black screen was when I converted a VMWare image to Hyper-V one. The image when I put in Hyper-V ended up with black screen and a cursor blink. What I did is to boot this VM, aasign a CD image and repair the boot record and worked fine. I suppose that this is not exactly your case but you might consider this kind of workaround if feasible.

yes, I now believe this is because the VM is a GEN2, I'm going to test with a GEN1 and see :) Unfortunately there is now way to boot from a CD in azure so cannot attempt a repair as you did.