2019 was a great year at Backblaze and we want to thank all of our friends, family, customers, and blog readers (why aren’t you customers yet?) for making it one to remember! If you’re worried you missed anything good or you’re just looking for some reading material over your break, we’ve got your back: read below to catch up on the good, the better, and the ridiculous here at Backblaze.
What’s New?
We were hard at work and thrilled to get a lot of interesting updates and features out the door this year, including:
Backblaze Version 6.0: Our “Larger Longer Faster Better” release saw the introduction of larger recovery hard drives, the ability to save backed up data directly to B2 Cloud Storage, a “keep restores longer” functionality that allowed already created restores to be archived into B2, network management and speed improvements for t/b2/docs/he Backblaze App for Mac and PC, a mobile app overhaul for iOS and Android, and the introduction of SSO with Google. Phew!
The Blog Itself: We’d been hard at work on a blog redesign through the beginning of the year, and were ready to unveil the final product in April. This post covered everything that was new (faster load times, archives, post suggestions, better tagging, etc…) and gave a nice breakdown of all the changes.
B2 Copy File APIs: One of the more requested features for B2 Cloud Storage launched in May of this year. This new API allowed people to copy files, which unlocked the ability to rename and re-organize those files inside of their B2 buckets.
EU Data Center: We launched our first data center outside of the United States, firing up an EU Region based out of Amsterdam.
Backblaze Version 7.0: Version history and beyond! One of our most anticipated releases, extended Version History allowed computer backup users to upgrade the retention period of their backups and alleviated the need to continuously plug in external drives—a pain point we heard about a lot before this release!
Behind The Scenes
Taking a page from last year’s post, we wanted to highlight some of the articles where we took a look at ourselves in the mirror and dove deep into some of the internal goings on at Backblaze:
Storage Pod Museum: One of the things we’re most proud of is our storage pods, which enable us to store your data affordably, and pass the savings on. This post looks back at all of our different designs throughout the years.
Reddit AmA: Fielding questions from strangers can be pretty nerve-wracking, but we embraced the chaos and took some questions on Reddit. We highlight some of the questions that were asked and go over how we found ourselves on reddit to begin with.
Who We Are & What We Do: A short post highlighting a video we made to help us continue hiring some of the best minds in their fields.
How We Got To Europe: A series of blog posts (Getting Ready to Go to Europe, The Logistics of Finding the Right Data Center, and Making the Data Center Choice) following us on our path of selecting our first European Data Center.
Raising Prices Is Hard: Not all news is good, and in this post we discuss how we approached our first-ever price increase, and why we had to put it off for over a year at the last minute.
New Faces
Last year we hired 34 people, and this year we’ve outdone ourselves and hired 48! Please help us welcome: Amanda, Brad, Crystal, Shaneika, Mark, Dan, Keith, Nirmal, Malay, Toren, Robert, Zach, Allen, Vincent, Michael H., Julie, Anu, Kim, Nicole, Christine, Queenie, Alex G., Art, Lisa, Cody, Patrick, Fabian, Elton, Matthew, Gloria, Dash, Griffin, Udara, Pavi, Jeremy, Michael F., Jordan, Robert, Madeline, Eric, Kerry, Judith, Jonathan, John, Alex Z., Angelica, Foone, and Anna!
If you want to join our team, don’t worry – we still have a lot of openings, and more on the horizon! Keep up to date on our careers page!
Random Fun?
Not everything has to be serious—we know how to have a good time!
The Backblaze Furball: If you need to get all of your cat photos back in one fell swoop, we have you covered.
No, Thank You!: We take a look at some of the nice notes that we’ve received from satisfied customers over the years.
Interview From Storage Pod Pickup Day: While the actual giveaway process turned out to be much more complicated than expected, the pickup day itself went well, and we got to meet lots of fans—one even brought us cookies!
The Life and Times of a Backblaze Hard Drive: It’s not easy spinning at break-neck speed. This is a colorful tale of what our hard drives live through every day.
The Greenest Member of Our Support Team: Casey, or KC, or Casey2 (since we had one already when he joined) our head of support left for the land of Utah, but The Child he left behind is strong…
Backing Up The Death Star: We take a look at the back up philosophies of the Jedi Counsel, Empire, and First Order and what might have been…(minor spoilers for the films leading up to Rise of Skywalker).
Numbers
There’s always a ton of numbers swirling around and here’s a few that we thought were interesting!
9% – The number of people who were backing up their files at least once a day according to our annual backup survey. In 2018, that number was 6%—we love seeing that trending upwards!
48,300,000,000+ – The number of files that Backblaze has recovered for our customers (both Personal Backup and Business Backup) since we started counting in 2011 (we only started keeping track 3 years after launching the service).
1,038,333,133 – The number of files that Backblaze restored in November of 2019 for our Personal and Business Backup customers. And that’s not including the amount of files that were transacted in B2 Cloud Storage. That’s purely the number of files that we’ve recovered on the back up side of our business. And that number makes us feel good!
115,151 – Spinning hard drives in our data center (boot drives included).
2,220 – Storage Pods in use today, using our Backblaze Vault architecture.
Looking Towards 2020
Foresight is never 2020, but we’re very excited about what we have in store for next year. 2019 was a fantastic year, and we’re looking forward to continuing our trajectory going into the next decade.
Backing Up the Death Star: How Cloud Storage Explains the Rise of Skywalker