Backblaze has a new jingle, courtesy of Jonathan Mann. Here’s the crazy story of how this came to pass. A few years ago, Jonathan set on the seemingly impossible path of creating a song a day and posting those songs to his YouTube channel. Some of those songs he’s written each day have turned in… Continue reading The Backblaze Song
My Permanent Out of Office Email: One Month Later
Back Story: After a vacation last year I realized how much freedom my out of office email notification provided, so with the new year starting, I decided to try an experiment and make my email management plan permanent. I promised to check back in and let you know what happened. My Original Plan Here was… Continue reading My Permanent Out of Office Email: One Month Later
Reliability Data Set for 41,000 Hard Drives Now Open-source
Stats geeks: Now it’s your turn. Backblaze has released the raw data collected from the more than 41,000 disk drives in our data center. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest data set on disk drive performance ever to be made available publicly. Over the past 16 months, I have been posting… Continue reading Reliability Data Set for 41,000 Hard Drives Now Open-source
Hard Drive Stats: FAQ
Recently, Backblaze released our 2015 hard drive failure rate statistics. After each blog post, and especially popular ones, I spend a large amount of time reading through the comments, answering what I can, and gathering a series of frequently asked questions to help us frame future blog posts better. In order to answer some of… Continue reading Hard Drive Stats: FAQ
Broadband Is Getting Broader
Today, the Federal Communications Commission took measures to redefine broadband as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up in the United States. This is wonderful news for internet users, and will hopefully lead to more broadband availability for everyone in the US! The increase to 25/3 is up from 4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps… Continue reading Broadband Is Getting Broader
What Is the Best Hard Drive?
Check out the latest Hard Drive Stats. It was one year ago that I first blogged about the failure rates of specific models of hard drives, so now is a good time for an update. At Backblaze, as of December 31, 2014, we had 41,213 disk drives spinning in our data center, storing all of… Continue reading What Is the Best Hard Drive?
Ode to Macworld
Macworld Expo San Francisco It’s January. Normally at this time of the year we would just be getting back from CES and getting in to the swing of lining up our booth to exhibit at Macworld, but this year is different. Macworld is currently on hiatus, with no clear indication of when or if it… Continue reading Ode to Macworld
How to Save Marketing Money By Being Nice
We have tried a myriad of ways to promote the Backblaze online backup service. While most people sign up “organically”—through a suggestion from a friend or after reading an article—we do spend many thousands of dollars monthly on Google Adwords alone. For years, we have tweaked ad copy, keywords, targeting, and more to optimize our… Continue reading How to Save Marketing Money By Being Nice
My Permanent Out of Office Email
3,280. That’s how many emails I have in my inbox right now. Some of you probably have even more. Every day, I receive a ton of emails and feel I am required to respond to every single one, and quickly. But on vacation in November I inadvertently had an experience that freed me from my… Continue reading My Permanent Out of Office Email
We Need a Java Engineer!
Thank you for your interest, but this position has been filled. Please check out our jobs page for additional great opportunities at Backblaze. Want to work at a company that helps customers in over 150 countries around the world protect the memories they hold dear? A company that stores over 100 petabytes (one fourth as… Continue reading We Need a Java Engineer!
Congratulations, Eli the Intern!
This past summer, Eli joined Backblaze as an Engineering Intern. He worked on a variety of projects including helping out with our SMART stats data collection and analysis. Since going back to school, Eli has been very busy. He was a member of the winning team in the 2014 Siemens Competition in Math, Science &… Continue reading Congratulations, Eli the Intern!
Office Manager Emily Joins the Backblaze Horde!
The newest addition to the crew at Backblaze, Emily, breaks down her favorite hobbies and aspirations. They involve pets and World of Warcraft… What a combo! What is your Backblaze title? Office Manager. If you didn’t have to work, what would you do? If I didn’t have to work, I would work! I would start… Continue reading Office Manager Emily Joins the Backblaze Horde!
2014 Year in Review
Seven years ago, we started on a mission to make storing data astonishingly easy and low-cost so that no one loses their wedding photos, curated music, work files, or any of the other items from their computers. In 2014, I’m proud to say we made a good dent in that mission. Here are a few… Continue reading 2014 Year in Review
Our 6TB Hard Drive Face-Off
Backblaze is transitioning from using 4TB hard drives to 6TB hard drives in the Storage Pods we will be deploying over the coming months. With over 10,000 hard drives needing to be purchased over the next several months, the choice of which 6TB hard drive to use is critical. Let’s take a look at how… Continue reading Our 6TB Hard Drive Face-Off
Holiday Gift Guide—Backblaze Style
We all have those hard to shop for members of our family, and at Backblaze, we wanted to take a moment and make your holiday shopping conundrums a bit easier to solve. We realize this is coming out a bit late in the holiday gift guide season, so we pooled together some items that you… Continue reading Holiday Gift Guide—Backblaze Style
Backblaze Hacks the Hood
We love hearing stories of people making a difference in their communities. At Backblaze, we are excited to have the opportunity to be a part of one of those stories. We’re pleased to announce we’re supporting a wonderful non-profit called Hack the Hood, both financially and with our online backup service. Working with teens, Hack… Continue reading Backblaze Hacks the Hood
Thank You!
It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States, so we wanted to follow the grand tradition of showing thanks. At Backblaze, we’re incredibly thankful for all of our loyal customers. Without them, we wouldn’t be here, and we’re pleased as punch that some of them feel the same way about us. That’s why we wanted… Continue reading Thank You!
Backblaze + Time Machine = ♥
“Why do I need online backup if I have Time Machine already?” We get that question a lot. Here, we recommend you use both. Backblaze strongly believes in a 3-2-1 backup policy. What’s 3-2-1? Three copies of your data, on two different media, and one copy off-site. If you have that baseline, you’re in good… Continue reading Backblaze + Time Machine = ♥