Release Date: 7/11/13
Version: 2.3
Auto-Update: No
A core tenet of the Backblaze philosophy is that backups have to work seamlessly in the background. As such, we’ve always focused on performance: providing unlimited bandwidth, automatic bandwidth management, and writing the applications natively on Windows and Mac in high-performance “C” code.
In this latest release, we have gone further in optimizing the performance of the online backup service.
Mac and Windows Releases
SSD Detection and Optimization
While only 6% of computers today have solid-state drives (SSD), that number is forecast to increase to 31% by 2017. Furthermore, a significantly higher percentage of laptops (which are prevalent among our customers) have SSDs, and 100% of new Apple MacBook Airs and retina MacBook Pros use them instead of hard disk drives.
SSDs are up to 10 times faster than regular hard drives. A traditional 5400 RPM laptop hard drive reads data at about 50 MB/s, whereas Apple claims their new MacBook SSD (or “Flash” storage) reads data at up to 500 MB/s.
This new release detects whether your computer has SSD or flash storage versus a traditional hard drive and optimizes Backblaze to take advantage of that additional performance to enable your system to back up even faster.
Retuned RAM Usage for Modern Systems and Data Distribution
Over the years, computers have shipped with more RAM and users have stored more files. This release retunes Backblaze to produce the file list for backup two times faster for users with large numbers of files. (Users will small numbers of files will have unchanged performance.)
Increased File List Scalability by Eight Times
Backblaze was designed to easily back up hundreds of thousands of files per computer. For the few users with millions of files on a single computer, their experience was suboptimal. This new release increases the scalability by eight times on 64 bit architectures to improve the experience.
Instrumented Performance Analytics
The Backblaze service will measure various performance metrics in order to help continue tuning the service for higher performance.
Added Additional Temporary Files to Exclusion List
Added temporary files from Windows 8, Apple Time Machine, and more to the exclusion list to optimize backup speed.
Additionally, on Windows:
Released Application in 64 Bit
Backblaze now runs as a 64 bit application on Windows systems that run as 64 bit architectures: Windows Vista 64 bit, Windows 7 64 bit, and Windows 8 64 bit. Backblaze will continue to run as 32 bit on 32 bit Windows (such as Windows XP) and on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. Backblaze on Mac OS X previously supported 64 bit.
Upgrade Today
Securely download Backblaze Online Backup Release 2.3 for you Mac or PC.
