Straight out of Portland, Bryan joins our data center staff to help backup your world! Having had a wide variety of jobs before joining the Backblaze team, including farming and store clerking, Bryan is excited to join the tech industry, and can’t wait to help ensure your data is safe. Let’s learn some more about… Continue reading There’s No “I” in Bryan
How Backblaze Achieved 917% Growth
With 917% revenue growth over the last five years, Backblaze has just secured itself the 128th spot on the list of the fastest growing technology companies in the United States. The journey has been exciting but could have come to an abrupt end at various times. Let me share a bit about how we grew… Continue reading How Backblaze Achieved 917% Growth
Hard Drive SMART Stats
I’ve shared a lot of Backblaze data about hard drive failure statistics. While our system handles a drive failing, we prefer to predict drive failures, and use the hard drives’ built-in SMART metrics to help. The dirty industry secret? SMART stats are inconsistent from hard drive to hard drive. With nearly 40,000 hard drives and… Continue reading Hard Drive SMART Stats
Obama Backs Backblaze—Throttling Is Bad
President Obama is now on the record stating that internet providers have “a legal obligation not to block or limit your access to a website.” We agree and want to thank the President for following in our footsteps by telling the world that throttling is bad. Backblaze itself does not actively throttle our customers. The… Continue reading Obama Backs Backblaze—Throttling Is Bad
Backblaze and Subversion, Time to Change?
Our recent post on Source Code Control led many to ask, what does Backblaze use? The short answer is Subversion (SVN). The longer questions are: why did we pick it, how has it worked out, and should we switch? What Most Companies Use for Version Control According to the folks at Duck Software Open Hub… Continue reading Backblaze and Subversion, Time to Change?
Voting vs. Mobile Phones. The Winner Is…
It is Election Day here in the United States and many people get time off of work to vote—typically two hours. I was thinking about this last week as I spent two hours at the Verizon store waiting to update my wireless service. I had a lot of time to think. One of my random… Continue reading Voting vs. Mobile Phones. The Winner Is…
OS X Yosemite: Four Days. Windows 8: Two Years.
Since very early on, Backblaze has supported both Mac and Windows computers, so we keep aggregate statistics on how many customers are backing up each operating system, and specifically what versions. With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, I wanted to see the percent of people that had upgraded—and what I found… Continue reading OS X Yosemite: Four Days. Windows 8: Two Years.
The New Backblaze Blog Site
As you can see, we’ve updated our blog. Over the years, we’ve published over 300 posts and we decided we could organize things a bit better. Along the way, we made changes to the layout, the categories, comments, and more. Easier to Use First, we changed the look and layout of the blog by adding… Continue reading The New Backblaze Blog Site
Backblaze and OS X Yosemite
Yosemite (OS X 10.10) for Mac was released yesterday, and Backblaze is ready for it! Want to update to the latest and greatest Backblaze version, which supports Yosemite’s new “dark mode?” Do the following: Right click on the Backblaze icon and choose “check for updates,” then click download. or Install the latest client from: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm… Continue reading Backblaze and OS X Yosemite
Backblaze Release 3.0.1
Release Date: 10/16/2014 Version: 3.0.1 Earlier this week, Google researchers released information on a newly found bug they dubbed “Poodle.” The Backblaze client was never in danger of the Poodle exploit, as all of the data is first AES encrypted on the client (computer) before being uploaded to a Backblaze data center via HTTPS. This… Continue reading Backblaze Release 3.0.1
How Do You Do Source Code Control?
If you’ve ever written code for a living, you are familiar with source code control. Even single-person shops can struggle with managing multiple versions of code as well as managing code from different projects. Over the years, source code and revision control systems have been developed to address this task. Some of the more common… Continue reading How Do You Do Source Code Control?
There’s Nothing to See Here—Backblaze 3.0
When Backblaze 1.0 was introduced it was a good product that solved a problem. Over the years, many people have used Backblaze to backup and restore billions of files. As with most software there were always things that could be done to improve the product and over time we added features such as Refer-a-Friend, Safety… Continue reading There’s Nothing to See Here—Backblaze 3.0
Looking for an Accounting Administrator
Thank you for your interest, but this position has been filled. Please check out our jobs page for additional great opportunities at Backblaze. There was a time when Cecilia gleefully did our accounting, counted hard drives, and basically ran our office. As Backblaze has grown, so has her workload and Cecilia is busy, busy, busy.… Continue reading Looking for an Accounting Administrator
Larry: One Truckin’ Data Center Tech
From driving trucks to trucking drives, Larry is our latest addition to the proud line of data center technicians we have at Backblaze! Larry joins us after driving trucks for a living and will be using his quick reflexes and keen eyesight to help swap hard drives and keep the data center smoothly running. Let’s… Continue reading Larry: One Truckin’ Data Center Tech
Unlimited Vacation Time, the Backblaze Way
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Virgin moving towards an unlimited vacation policy. According to Sir Richard Branson in his recent blog post, he got the idea from an article about Netflix, who hasn’t had a vacation policy for the past several years. Basically, employees are free to take time off as they… Continue reading Unlimited Vacation Time, the Backblaze Way
Scorpion Shows Us Why Access to Backups Is Important
I love the new CBS TV show “Scorpion.” It stars one of my favorite actors, Robert Patrick (who taught me how to run in Terminator 2…fingers straight), and centers around a government task-force of geniuses who use their abilities to stop bad things from happening. The premiere episode centered around backup. As io9 so eloquently… Continue reading Scorpion Shows Us Why Access to Backups Is Important
Hard Drive Reliability Update: September 2014
At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced.
Backblaze Mobile for iOS 8
Backblaze is pleased to announce that our latest version of Backblaze Mobile for iPhone (version 1.10) fully supports iOS 8. We’ve been working to support iOS 8 throughout its beta period. Typical to beta software, things would change behind the scenes over the course of the beta period. A feature would work one day and… Continue reading Backblaze Mobile for iOS 8