Backup and Restore Time Machine using Synology and the B2 Cloud

By Andy Klein | March 16th, 2017

Have you ever wished that you could have Time Machine, your Synology NAS, and B2 Cloud Storage work together to automatically backup your Mac locally and to the cloud? That would be cool. Of course, you’d also want to be able to restore your Time Machine backup from your Synology NAS or the B2 cloud. And while you’re wishing, it would be great if you could have an encrypted USB Hard Drive show up at your doorstep with your Time Machine backup. Stop wishing! You can do all that today. Here’s how.

The Economics of Hybrid Cloud Storage

By Andy Klein | February 28th, 2017

“Hybrid Cloud” has jumped into the IT vernacular over the last few years. Hybrid Cloud solutions intelligently divide processing and data storage between on-premise and off-premise resources to maximize efficiency. Businesses seamlessly extend their data processing and data storage capabilities to the cloud enabling them to manage unusual or fluctuating demands for services. More recently….

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016

By Andy Klein | January 31st, 2017

Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers since April 2013. At the end of 2016 we had 73,653 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,553 boot drives and 72,100 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We’ll first look at the stats for Q4 2016, then present the data for all of 2016, and finish with the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track. Along the way we’ll share observations and insights on the data presented.

Introducing Backblaze B2 Lifecycle Rules

By Andy Klein | January 10th, 2017

Lifecycle Rules enable the B2 service to automatically hide and/or delete older versions of files stored in B2. This capability is available for the Web GUI, CLI, and API. Lifecycle Rules are applied to some or all of the files in a B2 Bucket with each Bucket having its own Lifecycle Rules. Let’s take a….

Backblaze 2016 Year in Review

By Andy Klein | December 22nd, 2016

It is hard to believe that 2016 is nearly over. It has been a busy year as Backblaze continued to grow. We have 30% more employees, 30% more hard drives, and 45% more data than this time last year. Here are a few of our highlights from 2016. 20 Billion Files Restored. There are many….

Release 4.3.0 – The Rollover Release

By Andy Klein | December 15th, 2016

The current version of the Backblaze Personal Backup and Backblaze Business Backup applications is being updated to 4.3.0.1 on the PC and 4.3.0.2 on the Mac. The list of fixes, changes, and updates is as follows: Update the version number to 4.3.0. Roll the build number back to start at 1. End of list. If….

Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2016: Less is More

By Andy Klein | November 15th, 2016

In our last report for Q2 2016, we counted 68,813 spinning hard drives in operation. For Q3 2016 we have 67,642 drives, or 1,171 fewer hard drives. Stop, put down that Twitter account, Backblaze is not shrinking. In fact, we’re growing very nicely and are approaching 300 petabytes of data under our management. We have fewer drives because over the last quarter we swapped out more than 3,500 2 terabyte (TB) HGST and WDC hard drives for 2,400 8 TB Seagate drives. So we have fewer drives, but more data. Lots more data! We’ll get into the specifics a little later on, but first, let’s take a look at our Q3 2016 drive stats.

What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives

By Andy Klein | October 6th, 2016

What if a hard drive could tell you it was going to fail before it actually did? Is that possible? Each day Backblaze records the SMART stats that are reported by the 67,814 hard drives we have spinning in our Sacramento data center. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring….