We announced Backblaze Mobile a few months ago, and while it took a little longer than expected (we couldn’t help but add in features) Backblaze Mobile for iPhone is now ready for you! That’s right! If you have a Backblaze account, you’ll now be able to access your online backup on the go, from your iOS device! What about Android? That’s coming up next, stay tuned!

What Does Backblaze Mobile Do?
Backblaze Mobile is a free app, available in the App Store, that allows you to access, download, experience, and share all of the data that’s been uploaded from your desktop or laptop and to your active Backblaze account.

Access	Download	Experience	Share
(click on any picture above to see it in full size)

How it Works:

Access: After signing in to your Backblaze account, you’ll see a list of all the computers (Windows and/or Macs) you are backing up with Backblaze online backup. Select one of these computers. Next you’ll see all the drives for that system that Backblaze currently has backed up. This can include multiple internal as well as connected external USB, Firewire and Thunderbolt drives.

Download: The folders and files are organized just like those on your computer, so the files you want are easy to find. Once you’ve located your file it can be downloaded to the iPhone. Remember, the current the file size limit for a single file is 30 MB. You can download as many files as you want and you can see a list of your recently downloaded files by selecting the “downloads” button.

Experience: Once the file is downloaded you can see and/or hear the file. Viewing a PDF, listening to a MP3, or previewing a Microsoft Word doc are all possible. You’ll be able to see and/or hear all the file types your iPhone knows how to present.

Share: Once you’re sure you have the right file you can share it. The options you get depend on the type of file, for example, if the file is an MP3, you may not see the “print” option, but it will be present for a JPG or GIF file.

Take Control!

The Backblaze Mobile app will give you greater access to all the data you’ve backed up with Backblaze throughout the years. Forgot a presentation? No problem, just download it to your phone. Have a picture on your computer that you want to show to a friend? No problem, just download it to your phone. Hanging out with friends and remember a fun picture you took, and then have an urge to post it to Facebook and tag them in it? No problem, just download it to your phone and share it! With Backblaze Mobile you can finally take control of your data.

Have questions? Check out the Backblaze Mobile FAQ!

With the recovery from Hurricane Sandy just now starting, the full scope of what has been lost is coming in to view. One of the many challenges you may have will be trying to recover the data on your damaged or destroyed laptop or desktop computer. If you are a Backblaze customer and need to restore your data, please see our Hurricane Sandy blog post for information and instructions on how to do so.

If you are not a customer of Backblaze or another online backup service, you are now faced with the task of trying to reassemble the photos, movies, documents, spreadsheets and more that were lost. If you still have a local backup, great, but just in case we’ve assembled a list of places you can look to attempt to recover some of your data. No one source will most likely have everything you want, but hopefully between these sources, you’ll be able to recover the data most important to you:

1. Shutterfly/Flickr/Picasa/Snapfish/Photobucket – Some of these services have been around for a long time. If you had accounts there and uploaded photos to them, they may be good places to retrieve some of your photos.
2. Physical media – Start with the Flash drives, SD cards, CDs and other media you may still have around. Include those you may have given to friends and relatives.
3. Physical devices – Check your digital camera, smartphones, etc. as they often contain images that you can restore.
4. Dropbox – If you are using a sharing/synching service such as Dropbox, some of your data may be there. How much data you find will depend on what you put there and your account limits.
5. Social Media – Facebook/Twitter/Google+/Tumblr/Pinterest/Youtube – If you uploaded lots of your favorite photos/videos, they should be recoverable from your posts. (Often you will not be able to recover the original, full-resolution version, but you can download a smaller size.)
6. iTunes – If you had iCloud or an iTunes account, the majority of your music library purchased from iTunes should be available to re-download.
7. Email attachments – This may sound like an odd one, but if you were an avid “attacher”, you may be able to recover documents, presentations, and photographs from either your own email attachments or from email you have sent to others.

If your machine was damaged, but you still have access to it, there are many data restoration companies that can try to recover data from damaged hard drives. Here are a few:

• Kroll Ontrack – http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery
• Secure Data Recovery – http://www.securedatarecovery.com
• Vantage Data Recovery – http://www.vantagetech.com
• Data Recovery Systems – http://datarecoverysystems.com
• SalvageData Recovery – http://www.salvagedata.com

(Backblaze is not affiliated with any of these organizations).

We hope this helps in recovering some of your lost data and memories.

There are many causes of data loss, but a lost or stolen computer has been a guaranteed reason to need Backblaze to recover data. Unfortunately, with some exceptions, the computer itself was gone.

Today, Backblaze announces “Locate My Computer” – a new feature of the Backblaze online backup service that shows you a map of your computer’s location.

We have heard many painful stories, such as that of the cure for cancer being stolen; and some amazing stories such as Mat Miller recovering his laptop when he noticed the thief backed up his college paper to Backblaze or Mark Bao catching the thief that stole his laptop by downloading a video the thief took of himself.

Since launching the company, we have had a steady stream of people contacting our support team saying, “my computer was stolen – is there anything you can do to help? With the exception of rare cases, unfortunately, there was little that we could.

Today, all that changes.

With our new Locate My Computer feature, Backblaze enables customers to:
* Accurately locate their computer on a map
* Get the ISP their computer is accessing
* See the IP address it is using
* And easily view new files being backed up

Locate My Computer is available immediately and is free to all Backblaze customers. Mapping is enabled for new users; users with existing accounts can “Turn On” mapping. To turn mapping on or off, sign-in and visit the Locate My Computer page. (Please click “Check for Updates” from your menu icon to ensure you are using the latest version.)

When Mark Bao posted the video of the thief he recovered from Backblaze, he posted it to YouTube with the title: “Don’t steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers” With today’s launch we hope to change that to:
“Don’t steal computers from people who use Backblaze.”

Backblaze has always kept a four week history of all the files we back up – typically referred to as “versioning”. This enabled you to realize that you liked your Powerpoint presentation from a couple days ago, before you added all that amazing clipart, and simply restore that previously backed up version.

Today we are launching the ability to restore files within a specific date range!

How would you use this? Let’s say you use Ghost, Time Machine, or another disk imaging product to periodically take a full local snapshot of your hard drive. If your hard drive dies and you have one of these backups, you could re-image a new hard drive directly from that image.

However, that image might be days or weeks old. You can use Backblaze to recover your most current files. By using the date range feature you can select only the files that are newer than your image backup.

Restoring a three megabyte file takes seconds. Restoring 400 GB might be best done by ordering a USB drive FedEx’ed to you. However, a restore between 1 GB and 100 GB you may choose to download, but that can be painful with most web browsers: some simply cannot support downloads over 4 GB, and most neither check to make sure the file downloaded correctly nor auto-restart where they left off if interrupted.

Thus, Backblaze has developed Restore Downloader apps for Windows and Mac. (The Mac one has been available for a little while; the Windows one becomes available now.)

You still select your restore the way you always did through the website. However, if a restore is over 1 GB, you will automatically be offered a tiny application with which you can download that restore.

Using it is simple: sign-in and click start download.

The Backblaze Restore Downloader will automatically start downloading the most recent restore you have selected. If you stop the restore or there is ever a hiccup in your network, the app will restart from where it left off.

Download the Restore Downloader for Windows, Mac, or have us auto-select for you.

When we started Backblaze, our earliest customers said, “I love backing up my computer with Backblaze. It let’s me sleep peacefully. Now, how can I give this as a gift to my friends to help them as well?” Several holiday seasons went by during which we wished we had the ability to gift Backblaze.

Finally, I’m thrilled to share that you can now give Backblaze as a gift!

For $50 you can get a gift code to a year of automatic backup with unlimited storage. The year will start ticking down once your friend starts using it.

When you buy the gift of Backblaze, you can automatically send an email to, or print out a gift certificate for your friend.

So, perhaps you can finish all your holiday shopping in the next 5 minutes?

A brand new Mac computer has approximately 1 million files. When you’re trying to recover that one document you need after mistakenly clicking delete, it may be a bit daunting to find. With Backblaze, you could always browse through your online backup directories to find your file.

However, we’ve just introduced something to make it a little bit easier: Search.

How To Search Backed Up Files
* Visit www.backblaze.com and sign-in
* Select the computer you wish to restore from
* Enter the text you want to search
* Pick the result(s) you want to restore

An Example
A couple years ago I put together a list of swimming pools that were close to my house and what hours they were open. I was not at my computer and couldn’t remember where I saved that file. So I signed into Backblaze.com, typed in “swimmin” (didn’t even finish the whole word) and clicked the search icon. I got a list of the three files, clicked the first one, and got my file in a few seconds!

A Few Notes
This search will look at the name of the file only. Since your files are encrypted, we cannot search the contents of the files themselves. All files that match the name will show up. The directory that the file is in is shown just below the filename.

Hope you enjoy the new feature!

Are you one of the several million people to have bought an iPad already?

If so, you can now access your files backed up with Backblaze directly from your iPad. Since the iPad only handles a few filetypes by default (and can’t unzip packages or compressed files), get the excellent Good Reader application ($0.99) to view file types including: Microsoft Office, Apple iWork, PDF, photos, audio, and video.

See the video below for a quick demo:

Enjoy the service and send us any interesting stories of how you ended up using this.

And don’t forget that if you don’t have one yet, you can win an iPad by installing Backblaze or referring a friend this month!