50,000,000,000—that’s a large number. It also happens to be the milestone that we crossed (on February 5th, 2020 at 14:47 UTC) for files restored from our Computer Backup service! Back in 2016, Backblaze hit 20 Billion files restored for our customers. It took us almost 9 years to get to that number, and only another 4 years to more than double it (and that’s not even including all the Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage files that get accessed and downloaded every day).
50 Billion is a giant number, but it’s not just a number to us. It’s baby pictures, first step videos, PhD theses, long lost tax forms from years past, powerpoint presentations, digitized family albums, art projects, documents and writing, manuscripts, book outlines, and all manner of memories. We love that we’ve built a sustainable business around restoring people’s files which they may have thought were lost forever.
The last time we wrote about a restore milestone we went in and took a look at a typical month in the life of our restore system. Lets revisit that and take a look at the stats for January 2020, with a few new ones thrown in:
January 2020 Stats:
- 28,841 Total Restores
- 1,119,500,858 (1.1 Billion) Total Files Restored
- 2.17 Petabytes of Data Restored
- 3 Terabytes per hour—equivalent to a good sized external hard drive
- 48 Gigabytes per minute—about one 4K UHD Blu-Ray movie
- 810 Megabytes per second—just over one CD’s worth of data
Restores By Operating System:
- 49.08% were Mac
- 50.92% were Windows
Of all January 2020 restores:
- 97.82% were Zip
- 1.63% were USB HD
- 0.54% were USB Flash Drive
The Average Amount of Files Per Restore:
- 29,927 files – Zip
- 518,756.23 – USB HD
- 232,711.93 files – USB Flash Drive
The Average Size Of a Restore:
- 42.16 GB – Zip
- 2,081.42 GB – USB HD
- 131.95 GB – USB Flash Drive
Total Data Restored:
- Bytes: 2,169,762,976,872,020
- Kilobytes: 2,169,762,976,872.02
- Megabytes: 2,169,762,976.87
- Gigabytes: 2,169,762.98
- Terabytes: 2,169.76
- Petabytes: 2.17
Based on ZIP restores:
| Range in GB | % of Restores |
|---|---|
| < 1 | 43.65% |
| 1 - 10 | 19.38% |
| 10 - 25 | 11.90% |
| 25 - 50 | 8.90% |
| 50 - 75 | 2.98% |
| 75 - 100 | 1.92% |
| 100 - 200 | 4.80% |
| 200 - 300 | 2.38% |
| 300 - 400 | 1.60% |
| 400 - 500 | 1.41% |
| > 500 | 1.06% |
We started Backblaze with a goal of preventing data loss, and we’re now recovering over 2 Petabytes of data per month, which is a stat that we are, to say the least, very proud of. To put that into perspective, it took us 2 ½ years to reach 2 Petabytes of customer data under management. Now we’re helping our customers restore that amount of data on a monthly basis.
We want to thank our Backblaze customers, and remind folks of how easy it is to restore data with us. You can download it for free via the web, recover your files via a USB Hard Drive or Flash Key, and use our Mobile apps to access your data on iOS and Android! To learn more, visit our restore webpage. If you want to test a restore, try this easy web guide:
Do you have a great story of Backblaze helping you recover data? We’d love to hear it and possibly highlight it in a future blog post. Just comment below with the story of how Backblaze helped you get your data back! Need an example? Here’s a great one.
