1 You backup strategy is to burn CDs and DVDs.
A diamond may be forever, but CDs and DVDs have a shelf-life. Even the Optical Storage Technology Association says an unrecorded disk will only last 5 to 10 years. And this assumes you’ve selected the right files and remember to do it, which brings me to reasons #2 and #3.

2Your backup strategy requires picking which files to backup.
If you’re like most people, you actually have no idea where your files are. Wait, you’re not like most people – you absolutely select which folders you put your files in. But some applications save files in random places. Have any idea where your iTunes playlists are? Hint: They’re not in My Documents. Windows hides folders. Vista forces older applications into a hidden sandbox. You probably know where most of your files are…but some files your care about are almost certainly somewhere else.

Continue reading…

CloudCamp gathered a crowd of developers, entrepreneurs, business people, and investors last night to have an un-conference focused on honing the future of computing clouds. Despite spending less than a month on the event, Reuven Cohen and his team attracted several hundred people and 22 sponsors including Sun, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon and a number of smaller companies. This was a testament to the organizers, but also an indicator of the fervor surrounding cloud computing.

Run in the traditional “BarCamp” approach, following a brief introduction the audience was invited to offer discussion topics they would like to lead with a set of 30 session slots available. Many topics revolved around:

• Deploying, scaling, and automating cloud computing applications
• Best practices and common pitfalls in using cloud computing
• Vendor discussions around how to use their products with cloud computing

…but “What is Cloud Computing?” drew perhaps the largest attendance.

In this discussion, cloud computing was likened to electricity (”you should be able to plug in, use as much as you want, and have a standard interface to access it.”); people discussed whether cloud computing is a technology or a business model; some pondered whether the margins of cloud providers would eventually be driven to zero; and many struggled with what really is cloud computing and how is it different than hosting and shared servers.

Vendors like Amazon with its AWS and Nirvanix provide numerous benefits, especially for early stage companies:

• Pay-per-use computing and storage – limiting capital investments
• Ability to scale up quickly – good if you get a burst of usage
• Ability to scale down quickly – good if that burst goes away
• Allowing companies to focus on their core – which is often not infrastructure

Technology startups building social applications with viral hooks trying to fund advertising based business often use miniscule processing and storage relative to the business, marketing, and salary expenses. At least until they hit that viral hockey stick that requires scaling up at hyperspeed. If that magic happens, the question of “will we continue to see this and we should throw servers at this, or is this a flash of momentary virality and we’ll need to scale down on Wednesday” arises. Leveraging a cloud provider for these startups may be an excellent decision enabling them to scale up, scale down, and pay-per-use.

So did Backblaze use a cloud vendor to power our online backup service? No.

There is wisdom in clouds, but they aren’t for everyone. Stay tuned and I’ll explain our logic and approach in a post coming soon.

No doubt about it, the name Backblaze is hard. I’ve had people come up to me at parties and say, “I love your Blackblaze site. Or was it Backbaze“. We noticed people coming to our site searching for “back blaze” or “blaze back”.

Brian Wilson’s previous company was called Codeblaze, so when he started working on a backup client, he called it Backblaze. It was supposed to be temporary, but the name grew on us.

It isn’t just our name that often gets confused or typed wrong. We see other people searching for an online backup solution type “bakcup” or “bakup”. Google’s result bring up typos from users on forums to sites with a mix of German and English right next words like Geschäftsbeständigkeitsplanung.
Maybe they are on to something. Perhaps we should change our name to Superbackupblazingfastandhappy.

Wow. This was not your typical Monday.

The Backblaze online backup service has been in a very private beta since early February. Monday we made our beta a bit more public.

We showed Backblaze to top 10 blogs TechCrunch and Ars Technica, and great tutorial site SimpleHelp and gave them about 1000 invites total to hand their users starting at 6am PST Monday morning. At 6:01am, it got very exciting.

TechCrunch penned Backblaze: Online Backup With Time Machine’s Finesse and The Washington Post reprinted it; Ars Technica published a detailed hands-on piece titled Making off-site backups brainless; SimpleHelp wrote a review the next day. Traffic on our site shot up, installs were blazing, requests for a Mac version were ticking in twice a minute, hundreds of requests for beta invitations arrived from people who didn’t visit Backblaze through one of the these sites, the corporate phone rang non-stop with vendors calling to sell us drives and bandwidth, companies emailed asking about affiliate and OEM opportunities, and we even had a job request.

By late afternoon, thousands of people visited the site, all invites were used up, and we had to shut off the custom links, sending people to request a beta invitation for the next time we open a sneak peak. When I looked on Google later that evening, we were the #3 result for the search “online backup.”

Users signed up from all corners of the world, providing us feedback from as far as Australia, Argentina, Europe and Japan. We received some adoring emails saying “I love this backup solution” and “I am testing out backblaze and so far it was super easy to install and start backing up.” We also received lots of interesting feedback on what we could do better and we’re reading every email and working to get that feedback reflected in the service. We are scaling up our operations to fulfill more beta requests (if you missed the sneak peak, get an invite at www.backblaze.com.)

I want to say a big thank you to TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and SimpleHelp for looking at Backblaze and helping us in our mission to make sure every user is backed up - and to all of you that installed our online backup service and have been providing us with invaluable feedback.

It was definitely not your typical Monday.

Originally I wanted to do a graphic showing the life and times of a user going about his day, backing up his computer online, suffering from data loss and then using Backblaze to restore. I liked some of the information designs done by Megan Jaegerman for the New York Times and wanted to do something similar. However, it seemed to raise more questions then it answered.
Are these three guys different people or the same person at different times? Why would Data Loss even occur? I see a guy with a dog, where is the woman with the cat?

A decade ago the idea of entering your credit card information into a webpage was reserved for only a few web sites as ecommerce was in its infancy. Purchasing a book from Amazon.com was acceptable, but joesbooks.com saw no customers – even if they were a reputable offline store. Users were not ready to make that leap of faith. Over the years, much has been done to establish our trust as consumers in this medium: encryption of connections, little lock icons and green/red address bars in our browsers, Verisign/TrustE/HackerSafe/BBB Online standards and logos, fraud protection by Visa/MasterCard, and much more.

Of course, more than anything, what has garnered our trust is simply time. It’s no longer rare or surprising when someone purchases a $1000 airline ticket or applies for a $1 million mortgage online. We feel safe from experience. We feel safe from others’ experience.

This April 15^th was another milestone for trust in online services and electronic transactions: 22 million U.S. taxpayers filed their taxes from their home computers. That may not sound like a large percentage of the population, but dig a bit deeper and you see that 68% of ALL individual tax returns were filed electronically (a mix of “practitioners” and home users.) While the stats for paper forms are not broken down between practitioners and home users are not broken down, even if you assume every single paper return was submitted by an individual, that still says that of those people who did their own taxes, 38% filed them electronically.

And taxes are more than just a credit card number. Social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, income, stocks, charities, real estate and more are fully documented. And the masses used the internet to file this data with the IRS.

Online backup is not new, but much like electronic transactions, adoption requires trust. And it is not only the encryption, little lock icons, and Verisign logos that enable us to trust these systems. It is our own experience with them. And those of our friends, and family, and mavens we trust. It doesn’t happen overnight, but usage builds usage, and the momentum is clearly building.

I don’t love paying taxes, but this April 15^th provided a pretty positive outlook.

For over five years I have been tied into ancient cell phones because I had originally signed up for a no-longer-offered $99 unlimited minutes plan and converting to any current plan would double my monthly bill. When the iPhone debuted, I looked longingly at it as I continued to use my 1950’s-era RAZR. But someone at AT&T heard my cry and friends and family who knew of my woes emailed me from as far as London and Prague saying, “Did you hear AT&T/Cingular is coming out with a new $99 unlimited plan?” Hallelujah, I could finally get a new phone.

I considered the Blackberry Pearl and a few others, but decided on the iPhone. I’d like to say it was all through a logical process (big screen; best web surfing; Wi-Fi enabled; cheaper data plan) and certainly those were a consideration. And it certainly helped that my master-texter brother said the keyboard worked ok and Apple announced both the SDK and ActiveSync integration with Exchange. Of course, in the end, it was just sexy.

The 16 GB iPhone arrived last week and I immediately synchronized all my contacts, calendar appointments, photos and a chunk of my music. Then I went rock climbing. And I brought my iPhone. But then I hesitated.

Previously I would keep my phone in my pocket while climbing – they were small, solid, and cheap. Arriving at the climbing gym, though, I wondered whether the larger, pricey, and seemingly fragile iPhone would survive. Looked online a bit and it appears they are pretty solid: Mike Beauchamp claims his iPhone survived having his iPhone run over by a semi and Don’s iPhone works even after the screen cracked.

But as the crew at Will it Blend learned, they’re not indestructible. And neither is the data on them. As John C. Dvorak notes at PC Mag, they get dropped in toilets, left in taxis, and abused in numerous ways not typical for a PC. John argues the move to smaller devices is ridiculous as people use them as desktop alternatives. He says these devices are easier to steal, easier to break, and are never backed up.

But my iPhone is backed up. Every picture, every song, every contact and calendar appointment. Did I hack the iPhone with some special backup software?

No. But the iPhone is a copy of my real data – which lives on my laptop. And my laptop is backed up. Ironically, with my new iPhone, my data is more, not less, safe than it was in my older mini-bricks. Those phones may not have been as slippery and arguably may have been less likely to break…but ultimately they would…and since they did not synch, the data on them would be gone. Having my iPhone run over by a semi would be $500 of pain, but since my iPhone is backed up, at least I will never need to send the “oops, could everyone please send me your phone numbers again” email.

You have met the face of Backblaze.

You might have watched her explain that Backblaze provides online backup; or saw her dealing with the deadly plagues that could affect your computer (um, Ninjas?); or maybe you just watched the outtakes. Regardless, if you’ve visited the Backblaze website, she has talked to you before.

Many of you have asked, “Who is the face of Backblaze?” Some of you surmised we hired a professional actress? Or maybe we recruited her from a local film school? A few of you even proposed that she is related to one of the employees of Backblaze. None of those are the case.

The face of Backblaze is actually a lawyer-in-training, Cara Panebianco, and is completing her third year of law school in May 2008. We held auditions at Backblaze to determine who could represent the company, explain the concepts, enunciate clearly, and not mind having flame throwers aimed at her during filming. And Cara proved fire retardant enough.

Looking for a soon-to-be lawyer? Contact Cara.

Looking for an actress? Contact Cara. Just know that she charges lawyerly rates.

This seems like a mathematical question, but is actually one of philosophy or perspective, and continues to cause confusion in its ambiguity.

A Bit of History
Originally megabyte was used to describe a byte multiple (2²⁰ = 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576) in computer programming. However, several international organizations and most storage media (including hard drives and DVDs) use the Latin approach to the measurement whereby a megabyte is 10³ bytes (1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000.) Operating systems still refer to a megabyte as 1024 x 1024 bytes.

So why does that 500 GB external USB drive already feel a bit small? Well, a small part of it may be that you have actually “lost” 34 GB before taking it out of the package as it actually only stores 466 GB according to your file system.

Where Are We Now?

Apple sticks with the byte multiple approach (1024x) typical for file managers.

Microsoft Windows, for better and for worse, actually provides both numbers, explaining them as “Size” and “Size on disk.” This differentiation does not make sense – there is only one “size” – just different ways to measure it. The distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles does not change whether you measure it in miles or kilometers. Providing both numbers can be useful for troubleshooting or to explain to someone why the hard drive they just purchased has shrunk according to the operating system, but it does continue to perpetuate confusion.

A Solution?
The major measurement organizations tried to propose a solution, creating the terms “kibibyte”, “mebibyte”, “gigibyte”, etc. which would specifically refer to the 1024x approach, and going forward “kilobyte”, “megabyte”, and “gigabyte” would refer to the 1000x interpretation. Unfortunately, the world has already wed itself to the old lingo.

Search for “mebibyte” on the websites of Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Symantec, Dell, EMC, and NetApp.
Number of results: 0

Even Microsoft Word tells me I have a spelling error when I write “mebibyte.”

We Chose the Operating System Interpretation
In other words, whenever you see a measurement presented, it is always based on 1024x. Why? Because more advanced users often compare the size a folder selected for backup according to our system and the size their file manager claims. Standardizing on the size presented to them makes it easiest for the user and to answer any support questions. It would be great if there was one system, but in the meantime, I’m not counting on the mebibyte to save us.

Edward Martin Sr. should be pretty lucky by now. He has worked hard to generate that luck for nearly all of his 76 years by finding and collecting four leaf clovers - 160,000 four leaf clovers to be exact - earning him a world record.

It seems that “luck” is what many count on for backup. Luck that their hard disk doesn’t crash. Luck that their computer isn’t stolen. Luck that they don’t delete a file by mistake. Not as lucky as Edward? Maybe it’s time to consider backing up your computer?

I attended a presentation a couple days ago by Udi Manber, vice president of engineering for Google core search. Manber demonstrated why search is difficult, giving interesting example queries such as “how many calories in a pound”, for which the answer is 9000 trillion, since calorie is a unit of energy and pound a unit of mass, enabling the use of E=MC^2 to calculate the answer. While it’s the “right” answer, it’s more likely the searcher wanted to find out how many miles he would need to run to burn off that last Whopper.

In this query and many others, it would be easy to fix it to provide the right answer - hard code it to assume the food/weight interpretation. But that bandaid does not address the millions of similar issues and it makes the code messy where piece-by-piece a mountain of bandaids grows. Manber said the team often wishes they could just hard code a search result, but that no engineer at Google can move a ranking - they have to actually fix the algorithm - and that this limitation enforces a certain discipline in the development.

In numerous industries ranging from aviation, to automobiles, to power plants, discipline is enforced upon the organizations by the nature of the lifecycles of development. There is no v1.0, v1.0.1, v1.0.2, v1.0.3 in rapid succession, no “just change it on the website” concept. The cycle time of software enables rapid innovation and adjustment but it also allows for a lack of discipline in the development. How does your organization find the right tradeoff before speed and discipline?

EMC made an unsolicited bid for Iomega. While Iomega refused it, choosing to stick with the share purchase agreement it struck with ExcelStor Group Ltd. in December, it begs the question: Why was EMC interested in Iomega?

CEO Joseph Tucci has long stated exploratory interest in the consumer market: “We’re thinking about it. There are no big decisions yet, but I do think there’s a [sizeable] play in the home for a storage mini array,” but noted “We do not have expertise within EMC that understands the consumer market.”

The acquisition of Mozy and attempted acquisition of Iomega point to having made both the decision to enter and to acquire some expertise. Not surprising if Tucci believes the IDC numbers in the just-released EMC-sponsored whitepaper, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe.” In this paper, IDC estimates that not only will global storage increase a factor of 10 from 2007 to 2011, but that consumers will generate 70% of that data, with organizations generating the remaining 30%.

EMC today holds a leadership position in enterprise storage, but has effectively no focus, no products, and no brand in the consumer space. Will EMC up its ante for Iomega? Try to pick up other consumer-focused offerings? And when will we start seeing animated polar bears pitching EMC during the Super Bowl?

This weekend we moved into our new datacenter - 365 Main - a facility we share with companies including Sun Microsystems, Esurance, Ticketmaster, and Cnet. It has all the high-tech wizardry you can imagine to keep our customers’ online backup data safe:

• raised floor with seismic pedestals in case of earthquake
• 16 data carriers
• independent PG&E power feed
• induction coupling system to avoid backup batteries 
• three 20,000 gallon fuel tanks
• ten 2.1 megawatt generators (enough for 15,000 homes)   
• double-interlock pre-action system for fire suppression, and more.

However, the part I liked the best was the lowest-tech: 24×7 staffed security guards. In a world of zombie networks, phishing attacks, and cybercrime, it’s nice to know that it still requires having your driver’s license checked for authorization by a live person before you can come within 100 yards of any system.

Our PCs are more powerful than ever, so why do they feel so slow? It might be our expectations have increased. Or it might be the applications installed on them. A new PC today has 1 million times (4GB vs 4KB) more RAM than the earliest computers. Creating a program back then meant optimizing every line of code. Today, faster computers have enabled programmers to get sloppy. And sloppy code means slower computers.

Symanted launched the new “lighter” version of its Norton 360. Users had complained that after installing the previous version their “PCs experienced severe performance troughs.” It seems users are starting to push back on sloppy software, telling the software industry: I bought a faster computer so my computer would be faster - not so you can write bloated software.

When we were thinking about a logo for Backblaze, we knew we wanted an iconic image that could be connected easily to the software. That meant creating something simple enough that could scale to 16×16 pixels for an icon placed in the system tray. Logos are probably the most difficult for me as a designer to do. There is a feeling that a company will live with this identity for the rest of it’s life, so it better be perfect. And everyone has a different opinion: “That looks too techy. Can we make it more catchy? It looks like a squished squid.”
Well squished squid or running starfish, it’s good to get the stakeholders opinion. As a designer, such criticism makes me articulate what I am trying to accomplish, rather then just feeling intuitively through the design process.

So what do I think of the Backblaze logo? It’s all flamey and stuff.

Robyn Peterson isn’t a computer newbie - after all, he’s in charge of technology for tech publisher Ziff Davis. So how did he lose his backup? Using a popular techie solution for online backup: FTP-ing his files to a web hosting provider. A perfectly reasonable, if somewhat tedious, solution. But as he found out, not such a secure option.

“We have been cracking down on people using our services for backing up files,” Robyn was told by the provider. The Terms of Service said their “servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service.” Don’t check the fine print? Or don’t think it’ll be enforced? Ok sometimes…but when you really need that backup, you don’t want the response Robyn got when he asked whether his deleted files were backed up: “backups go back a maximum of only two weeks, and no backups are guaranteed.”