The 2020 Top Ten(s)

Top 10 lists! You know them. You read them! You love them? As 2020 comes to an end and we look longingly at the new year ahead of us, I wanted to take a moment and look back at what you, our blog readers, have found amusing, entertaining, and informative over this past year.

To do that, we looked at our analytics and picked out the top 10 most-viewed stories that we published in 2020. The results may not shock you, but they may entertain you, especially if you missed any of these the first time around. Without further ado, let’s jump into the results!

Top 10 Backblaze Blog Posts From 2020

1. 2019 Hard Drive Stats. It’s not surprising to see a year-end hard drive stats post in the first position. Readers show up for these posts in a big way and this one took a look at the entirety of 2019 as a year-end wrap up.
2. The Complete Guide to Ransomware. With huge organizations like Foxconn, Kmart, many K-12 school districts, and hospitals being targeted by ransomware in recent years—and those attacks increasing—it’s no wonder that people are seeking to understand how to protect themselves.



3. Q1 2020 Hard Drive Stats and Q2 2020 Hard Drive Stats. The quarterly drive stats set the stage for our popular yearly reviews and provide a “heartbeat” of how our spinning disks are doing throughout the year.
4. A Beginner’s Guide to External Hard Drives. We took a look at some best practices for folks looking to increase their on-site storage capacity and how to make sure all that data is safe, as well. It would appear a lot of readers were onboarding new hard drives in 2020.
5. Synology Backup Guide. Other readers already have a series of external hard drives connected to their PC, meaning the natural progression is getting a NAS system like Synology in place and making sure that it, too, is backed up.
6. Q3 2020 Hard Drive Stats. Looking at how the stats are progressing, we find that even when some drive models have over 4,029 failures, their annualized failure rate can be below 3%—that’s scale!



7. Backing Up Google Drive. Far be it from us to claim that we saw the future, but when we published this post in June it was a touch ahead of its time. A few months later, Google announced the end of their unlimited storage plan and as people looked for alternatives, this resource on downloading and backing up Google Drive information became invaluable.
8. The Backblaze S3 Compatible API. One of our biggest Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage releases for 2020 was the Backblaze S3 Compatible API suite. This launch cleared the way for a ton of new partner integrations, use cases, and happy cloud storage customers.
9. Cloud Sync Is Not Backing Up. A common misconception is that someone is backed up if they only use iCloud, Google Drive, or Dropbox. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this post, we dig into the differences between cloud backup and cloud sync, why they’re both useful, and how to leverage both for maximum efficiency.

The “Up-and-coming” Top Ten

Looking at the top 10 list for 2020, we see a lot of series and subjects that are popular every year. This got us thinking, what about the stories that broke new ground? Posts that aren’t hard drive stats and yet still drew an admirable number of readers? When we removed the big hitters we found an alternative top ten that will appeal to anyone looking for some more in-depth solutions, some nice news, and answers to a few evergreen questions!

1. What Is an Exabyte? What the heck is an exabyte anyway? We take a look at how much data that really is, and how it compares, on a cosmic level, to a gigabyte.
2. Object vs. File vs. Block—A Cloud Storage Guide. The word “cloud” can sometimes feel amorphous. For readers just starting to look cloudwards, this post aims to help put a finer point on clouds! We take a look at the different types of cloud storage and how to most effectively use each.
3. Duplicati + Backblaze. We love when B2 Cloud Storage gets integrated into popular apps, and Duplicati makes backing up data securely and easily from pretty much any system a piece of cake. No wonder it pairs so well with Backblaze B2!
4. Metadata: Your File’s Hidden DNA. Metadata surrounds pretty much every digital thing we do on a day to day basis, but a lot of people don’t fully understand what it is or how it works. This post defines metadata and looks at how it helps programs keep track of the information about files for both humans and computers.



5. Free Cloud Storage? What’s the Catch? There are a lot of “free” offers in the cloud storage marketplace positioned to help entrepreneurs get their application or website off the ground. In this post we go into some of the pitfalls that might come about when you take cloud storage providers up on an offer that might seem too good to be true.
6. Computer Backup Version 7.0.1. We took some time at the beginning of the year to make some adjustments to our cloud backup software, improving performance and enhancing our Inherit Backup State feature to help folks avoid reuploading data if they switch computers!
7. Exabyte Unlocked. In March, Backblaze crossed a data storage threshold that few other companies have achieved, storing over an exabyte of data for our customers, and we couldn’t be prouder.



8. How to Wipe a Mac Hard Drive. As people get new computers and sell off their old hardware, sometimes they want to make sure that all of their data has been deleted from their computer (just make sure you have a backup first).
9. Upgrading to an SSD. Once readers finish wiping their old drives, they often want something a bit more speedy. SSDs are dropping in price and getting more common, so this post gives you a few things to consider when upgrading.
10. RAM vs. Storage. This post takes a look at one of the most commonly asked questions when people talk about gigabytes—“Do they mean RAM, or do they mean storage size?”—and what’s the difference between the two anyway?

We love writing about the ins and outs of our industry, infrastructure, and the business in general, so it’s always fun to look back at what resonated with you over the past year. Was your favorite blog post not listed? Let us know in the comments below what resonated with you this year!