Drama tends to be reserved for reality TV. Or sometimes for Valleywag.

But the last couple of days there has been some drama in the backup space.

About a month ago, “Backify” launched an online backup service claiming to offer 512 GB for free. That surprised me and others and I was curious as to how they could offer that. Well in the last two days the answer came back as “they couldn’t”.

As it turns out, Backify was reselling another service called LiveDrive. That company sent an email to all Backify customers claiming Backify was being fraudulent. Backify sent an email to their customers saying LiveDrive’s service was broken. Unclear what actually happened, but bad for customers backing up their data regardless.

Lifehacker includes both emails here: “You Should Probably Stop Using Backify”

This morning, the Backify homepage changed to say: “Backify is no longer in service”. The company suggests users try Backblaze for unlimited storage for data backups.

We very much appreciate the recommendation and are happy to welcome all Backify customers who wish to protect their data with online backup. While Backify pitched a free service, Backblaze online backup does have a fee. We are $5/month, $50/year, or $95/two years (i.e. $3.96/month). For this, Backblaze provides automatic, unlimited backup with unlimited storage and unthrottled bandwidth.

Backify customers can try Backblaze free and get 10% off when buying:
* Download the free two-week trial at www.backblaze.com
* Use code “backify” by Nov 28, 2011 to get 10% off your initial purchase.

We hope that we can pick up your online backup needs where Backify left off, and as we are unlimited and unthrottled, we can get you backed up and protected quickly!

Each of the last four years during June’s Backup Awareness Month, Backblaze has conducted a data backup survey using Harris Interactive. We always ask the same question: are you backing up your computer data and, if so, how often?

The results of this fourth annual survey and the three previous ones are:

Percent of Respondents Who Backup Computer Data

While in the last few years there has been a steady trend of more people backing up data; this year surprisingly fewer people responded that they backup their computers. Anyone have any theories?

Other interesting statistics from the survey:

Your thoughts on these? Expected/not expected?

Have some friends or coworkers who are not backing up?
Give them the gift of online backup

These surveys were conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Backblaze June 28-30, 2011 among 2257 respondents, June 3-7, 2010 among 2071 respondents, May 13-14, 2009 among 2,185 respondents, and May 27-29, 2008 among 2,761 respondents. In all surveys, respondents consisted of U.S. adult computer users (aged 18+), weighted to the U.S. adult population of computer users. No estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated; a full methodology is available.

No, I am not kidding.

Just over a month ago we launched Locate My Computer, a free feature of our online backup service, to find your computer if it is lost or stolen. Since then a number of people have recovered their computers.

However, one of our customers (let’s call him “Joe” as he requested anonymity since those who stole his laptop are connected to the mafia) shared an incredible story about what happened when the police recovered his laptop:

When they searched the apartment where my macbook was located they also found one million dollars in counterfeit bills. The story was all over the news here in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately for your company, the police and press kept referring to backblaze as a GPS locator. As many times as I told the police the program I was using, they didn’t totally understand what it was, and thought it was a GPS chip. Anyway, I just wanted to let you guys know the good news, and thanks to backblaze I got my stolen computer back, plus a counterfeiting ring was busted!!

While this story hasn’t been covered in the U.S., Joe shared some of the coverage it received in Argentina. The articles are all in Spanish, but the highlights are:
* $1 million in counterfeit bills
* 2450 sheets containing about 10,000 bills
* Mostly $100 denominations
* 1 person arrested; 6 people detained

The Mac and the counterfeit cash were found at Calle Carlos Calvo 1500, San Cristobal:

Clarin, the largest Argentinian paper, writes “Band of foreigners brought down with fake $1,000,000” (Google Translate version.) Other Argentinian sites including Infobae, Yahoo News, ElArgentino also covered this discovery.

Joe says, “Thanks again for the service. Best $5 a month I’ve spent.”

Thanks for sharing the story Joe. The Argentinian police should thank you as well!

Yesterday Apple announced iCloud, launching in the fall, which lets you sync music, photos, apps, calendars, etc. between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. As Mac-fans, all of us here at Backblaze are pretty excited about using these features for ourselves!

A couple people asked, “How will Backblaze work with iCloud?”
The answer? Seamlessly!

* iCloud will sync your recent 30 days of photos across devices and recommends you store all the pictures you want to keep permanently on your Mac; Backblaze will ensure ALL your photos stored on your Mac are safe forever.
* iCloud will sync files from compatible apps; Backblaze will backup all data.
* iCloud will have 5 GB of storage; Backblaze is committed to unlimited online backup.

We are very excited by Apple’s new features and looking forward to using them!
And you can continue to look forward to having all of your data completely protected by Backblaze!

After shutting down its cloud storage business last month, today Iron Mountain sold the entire Iron Mountain Digital business to Autonomy.

Why did Iron Mountain shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business? According to ZDNet, Iron Mountain “is exiting the digital business because it can’t keep up with developing technology.” This is backed up by StorageMojo who says that for it’s cloud storage by “selecting EMC – a premium-priced provider – suggests that IM got off on the wrong foot and never recovered.”

Iron Mountain Digital offered online backup to its customers and charged approximately $60 per computer per month for 30 GB! That is 12 times more than Backblaze charges for its online backup for unlimited storage. Backblaze was able to offer this service profitably at the $5 per month price point by focusing from day one on developing our own cloud storage system which at 10 petabytes five months ago already stored 2x more data for our customers than Iron Mountain.

Are you using Iron Mountain for your online backup needs? Worried about where your service is headed? Interested in a more cost-efficient offering?

We’re ready to help with your business online backup needs.

No, I am not kidding. Apparently two researchers that had been working on a cure for prostate cancer had all their data on a laptop. While they stopped quickly on the way to their lab, a thief stole the laptop out of their parked car.

And, yes, I hate to say it: they had no backup.

Being in the online backup business, I hear about stories of data loss all the time. But some are just more painful to hear than others.

If you happen to live near Oklahoma City, and have any suggestions on finding the laptop, the researchers are offering a no-questions-asked reward of $1000.

Deloitte published the results of it’s fifth “State of the Media Democracy“, which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While there are a number of interesting results from the survey that demonstrate the increase in smartphones and continued viewing of TV and reading of magazines, here is a stat that might be shocking to those who backup their data:

51 percent of Americans have experienced a computer or hard drive failure that caused them to lose photos, movies, or other digital content.

That is over 100 million people that have lost data they have created! Considering the availability of easy and inexpensive unlimited backup solutions such as Backblaze, no one should ever lose data as a result of a hard drive failure.

CrunchGear published that the National Security Agency (NSA) is forecasting it may need yottabytes of storage to keep all of its surveillance data by 2015.

What is a yottabyte?
1000 GB = 1 Terabyte (TB)
1000 TB = 1 Petabyte (PB)
1000 PB = 1 Exabyte (EB)
1000 EB = 1 Zettabyte (ZB)
1000 ZB = 1 Yottabyte (YB)
In other words, a Yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

How much will this cost by 2015
On the one hand, what makes this even tougher is that typical storage systems cost 10x the price of the raw hard drives. Thus, the likely actual cost of storage for the NSA:
* $1,000 trillion for a complete storage system

The NSA may need to partner with NASA to see if it can spin off about 15 more planet Earth’s so their combined GDP could pay for its storage requirements.

On the other hand, this is based on prices and storage technology in 2009. But the cost per GB has dropped consistently 4% per month for the last 30 years. Assume the trend continues for the next 5 years, by when the NSA needs their yottabyte of storage. The costs in 2015 then would be:
* $8 trillion for the raw drives
*$80 trillion for a storage system

Well, that’s getting closer – a bit less than today’s global GDP.

How much space will this take by 2015?
Per historical metrics, a drive should hold 10 TB by 2015. The NSA would require:
* 100 billion hard drives
* 2 billion Backblaze storage pods

And of course, they would probably want this data backed up.
That might really test our offer of $5 for unlimited storage.

To be fair, the original analysis states that the need for yottabytes of information may not be accurate because it assumes that data is collected in a way similar to today. Instead, it purports they may only need hundreds of petabytes of data storage by 2015; significant, but completely manageable. Hard drives are also the assumed technology – which has been a good assumption for 30 years and may continue to be a good one for the next 5 years. SSD and other technologies may provide some interesting options, but in the near term, the price and density winner will likely continue to be spinning platters.

Regardless of how much data the NSA ends up needing to store, could we perhaps recommend a storage design?