“I’ve owned six portable USB hard drives over the past 10 years, and all six of them have failed unrecoverably. Is it just me, or is there a wider problem out there?” Mike Elgan asks. As prices have plummeted over the last few years, the USB hard drive market has exploded. More and more users are counting on these drives to add extra space or backup to their current drive. But these drives don’t protect from many of the items that would kill the main computer—fire, flood, theft, etc. And judging by the 170 or so responses to Mike, he’s not the only one that has lost a hard drive or two.
About Gleb Budman
Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021.
Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.