Cubbit vs Backblaze

Why Switch from Backblaze to Cubbit?

Backblaze B2 is one of the more affordable US-cloud-storage options, popular for backup and media-storage workloads. The catch: Backblaze is a US-headquartered company subject to US legal process. Your data may live in a US data centre — and even if you opt for the EU region, the corporate jurisdiction sits in California.

Cubbit is the Italian alternative built on a fundamentally different storage architecture: geo-distributed S3-compatible object storage across EU-only nodes, with end-to-end encryption available and full GDPR compliance.

Feature Comparison

Feature	Cubbit	Backblaze B2
Data location	EU only (geo-distributed) 🇪🇺	US default, EU region option 🇺🇸
Jurisdiction	Italy / EU	United States
S3 API compatible	✅ Full	✅ Full
GDPR	✅ Native	⚠️ Provider claims, US parent
CLOUD Act exposure	❌ None (Italian entity)	⚠️ Yes
ISO 27001	✅	✅
E2E encryption option	✅ Customer keys	⚠️ Limited
Pricing model	Pay-as-you-go	Pay-as-you-go
Storage price	€0.0099/GB	$0.006/GB
Egress	€0.01/GB	$0.01/GB
Carbon model	Distributed/efficient	Conventional DC

Cubbit is fractionally more expensive per stored GB, equivalent on egress — but the sovereignty story changes the calculus for European workloads.

Pricing

Cubbit pricing is simple and pay-as-you-go with no minimums:

• Storage: €0.0099 per GB per month
• Egress: €0.01 per GB
• API requests: included
• Volume pricing: discounts available from 50 TB+

For a 5 TB backup workload with 1 TB monthly egress, monthly cost is approximately €60 — competitive with Backblaze B2 once egress is included, and well under AWS S3 standard.

Privacy & Data Sovereignty

This is Cubbit’s structural advantage. Three properties:

1. Italian corporate jurisdiction — Cubbit S.r.l. is an Italian company. No US parent, no US legal exposure.
2. EU-only nodes — the Swarm consists exclusively of nodes within EU territory. Data placement is jurisdiction-aware by design.
3. Customer-managed key option — for sensitive workloads, customers hold their encryption keys; Cubbit cannot decrypt content even under legal order.

For European buyers subject to GDPR, NIS2, DORA, or sectoral regulation (healthcare, finance, public sector), this is materially different from “we have an EU region” claims from US providers.

Migration Guide

Moving from Backblaze B2 to Cubbit DS3 is straightforward thanks to S3 API compatibility:

1. Create a Cubbit account at cubbit.io and provision an S3-compatible bucket (10 minutes)
2. Generate access keys in the Cubbit console (5 minutes)
3. Configure rclone or AWS CLI with Cubbit endpoint and credentials (10 minutes)
4. Sync data using rclone sync or aws s3 sync from B2 to Cubbit (time depends on volume; 5 TB at typical residential bandwidth ~30 hours)
5. Update application configuration to point to Cubbit endpoints (10-60 minutes depending on environment)
6. Verify integrity with sample restores and checksums (1 hour)
7. Decommission B2 bucket after verification period (your choice)

Estimated total time: 1 day for small workloads (under 1 TB), several days for multi-TB. Difficulty: Easy if you’re already using S3 API; minimal code changes required.

Real-World Use Cases

A Milan-based fintech moved 12 TB of regulated customer document storage from AWS S3 to Cubbit after Banca d’Italia clarified expectations on customer-data sovereignty. The S3 API compatibility meant zero application changes; the regulatory exposure dropped to zero.

A Berlin medical research institute uses Cubbit for storing anonymised but sensitive patient research data. The combination of E2E encryption with customer-managed keys, EU-only data residency, and ISO 27001 met their ethics committee’s requirements where US providers did not.

A Madrid e-commerce platform uses Cubbit for product image storage and CDN origin. Egress costs are comparable to Backblaze B2 with much better GDPR posture for European customers.

Company Background

Cubbit was founded in 2016 in Bologna, Italy, by Stefano Onofri, Alessandro Cillario, Marco Moschettini, and Lorenzo Posani. The company emerged from research at the University of Bologna into distributed storage architectures and erasure coding. Cubbit raised early funding from Italian venture investors and the European Innovation Council Accelerator programme.

The Cubbit DS3 product launched in 2022, replacing the company’s earlier consumer-focused offering with an enterprise-grade S3-compatible service. As of 2026, Cubbit serves several thousand business customers across Europe, including regulated-industry buyers and public-sector entities.

Cubbit is privately held with primarily European investors. The company operates from Bologna with engineering and customer-success teams in Italy and remote across Europe.

Security & Compliance

• ISO/IEC 27001 certified information security management
• GDPR compliant with Article 28 DPA available
• End-to-end encryption option with customer-managed keys
• Erasure-coded distribution for high durability without centralised replication
• TLS 1.3 for all data in transit
• Audit logs with optional immutable-bucket configuration
• NIS2-aligned practices for essential entity supply chains

Integration Ecosystem

• S3 SDK compatibility — works with AWS SDK, boto3, MinIO client, rclone
• rclone — actively maintained Cubbit backend in mainline rclone
• Veeam, Synology, QNAP — supported as S3-compatible backup destination
• Restic, BorgBackup — work via S3 compatibility
• Custom integrations — standard S3 SDK works in any language with an S3 library

Who Should Switch?

Cubbit is ideal for:

• EU regulated industries (healthcare, finance, public sector) needing strict EU data residency
• EU businesses with NIS2 or DORA exposure wanting jurisdiction-controlled storage
• Privacy-conscious developers building EU-targeted applications
• Anyone preferring distributed European architecture over US hyperscaler dependency

The Bottom Line

Cubbit is not the absolute cheapest storage you can buy. AWS S3, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2 list lower headline prices. What Cubbit offers is something the US-based competitors structurally cannot: full Italian/EU jurisdiction with no CLOUD Act exposure, geo-distributed durability across EU-only nodes, and a customer relationship that ends and begins within EU law.

For European workloads where sovereignty matters, Cubbit is the structurally honest choice.

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Looking for more European cloud-storage alternatives? See also: kDrive, Tresorit, and Internxt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cubbit really S3-compatible?

Yes. Cubbit DS3 exposes the standard S3 API, including most common SDK operations (PUT, GET, DELETE, list, multipart upload, presigned URLs). Existing applications that use the AWS SDK or any S3-compatible library can switch endpoint and credentials without code changes for most use cases.

How is Cubbit's geo-distributed model different from regional cloud storage?

Hyperscaler regional storage replicates within one country or region. Cubbit's Swarm distributes erasure-coded fragments across multiple independent EU nodes simultaneously. The result is high durability with full EU jurisdiction — no single data centre holds your data.

What's the legal jurisdiction for Cubbit?

Cubbit is an Italian company subject only to Italian and EU law. The infrastructure is operated entirely on EU territory. Cubbit is structurally outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act and FISA 702.

Is Cubbit suitable for regulated industries?

Yes. Cubbit holds ISO/IEC 27001 certification and supports the audit and compliance requirements of GDPR Article 28 data processors. It is used by EU public-sector buyers, healthcare providers, and financial-services customers.

Can I move existing AWS S3 / Backblaze B2 buckets to Cubbit?

Yes. Standard S3 migration tools (rclone, AWS CLI sync, s5cmd) work for moving objects from S3 / B2 to Cubbit. Cubbit also offers a managed migration service for large data sets.