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?

Have you upgraded to Snow Leopard? Users on Apple’s forums are reporting a bug that deletes all user data if someone mistakenly logs into the “Guest” account. This issue was originally reported about a month ago on Cnet’s MacFixIt but today is being mentioned across the web as more people are being bitten by the bug.

While not completely reproducible, it is happening frequently enough to take a basic action: turn off the guest account.

eHow explains how to turn off the guest account – it’s quick and takes just a minute.

Of course, you should also make sure your data is backed up, but I assume you already use Backblaze to do this.

Dan Tynan’s article “The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT” hit a nerve with many an IT worker, and Dan followed it up with, “Even dirtier IT jobs.”

Number 6 on the list of the dirtiest jobs? Data crisis counselor.

This is a person on the other end of the phone from “sobbing adults who’ve lost images or videos of their recently deceased parents” and dentists, and IT managers, and tons of others who lost data and were frantic, upset, and panicked. Kelly Chessen, who has this job for DriveSavers, a firm that tries to recover data from dead hard drives, says her five years on a suicide prevention line is what prepared her best for this position.

Have you been an unwitting data crisis counselor for a friend or family member?
Make sure they backup so you don’t have to be…

Cloud service are forecast to be a bright spot amidst dire economic times. Reaching $56.3 billion by end of 2009, cloud services are expected to generate 2x the revenue of Google (which is partially included) and a growth rate that exceeds the company’s 18% year-over-year rate. By 2013, Gartner expects cloud services to reach $150 billion in sales.

Revenues from cloud application services (such as Backblaze) “were almost twice as large as the market for systems infrastructure and will continue to show strong growth,” according to the Gartner report.

While there is a lot of discussion about terminology and taxonomy (“cloud services” vs “SaaS” etc.)…there is no doubt the market for infrastructure and applications provided over the Internet has arrived.

Online backup service provider Carbonite was all over the news this week for suing two of its suppliers, claiming the vendors setup the systems that were responsible for losing 7,500 customers’ data. First published in The Boston Globe, the story was picked up by TechCrunch, Computerworld, Cnet, and at least 20 other media outlets.

A large number of users losing their data certainly makes for good headlines and stories about the risks of cloud computing, but I think there is a different story here.

Carbonite’s CEO complained the media response was overblown. He claimed, correctly, that the majority of these reports were misleading. While 7,500 customers’ data was lost, only a small percentage of users (54 in total) actually lost data because this data was a backup and most people still had the the files on their computers.

Numerous articles also used this as an opportunity to raise doubts about using “the cloud” in general. Again, this seems to be a red herring. As a whole, cloud computing is generally more available and reliable than systems users put in place themselves. What’s more, backup is the ideal cloud computing application because it adds to the reliability by having data offsite that you already have locally.

What was missed in the news is that a company who’s core business is to provide online backup outsourced their online backup. Carbonite hired a system integrator, and now by suing this vendor, they are effectively denying responsibility for the backup systems.

This would be the equivalent of Google outsourcing search technology.

Building robust online backup technology is difficult. There are certainly lots of complexities involved to ensure data is backed up, redundant, and secure. It is the role of the online backup service provider to have the technical expertise and laser focus to work through these items. Pushing it off on an outside company just seems a bit …risky.

Update: After writing this post, David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, emailed me to state that while they purchased the Promise Technology boxes from system integrator, Interactive Digital Systems, they now write their own software.

It’s 6:30pm on Friday the 13th, so if you’re reading this, it probably wasn’t a completely unlucky day.

Did you avoid walking under a ladder today?
Stood a bit further back from large windows?
Drove a little slower?

According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute, about 1 in 15 people in the U.S. are affected by a fear of this day. Many people acquire good luck charms – horseshoes, lockets, or feathers. However, as R. E. Shay said, “Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.”

At least if you have been backing up with Backblaze, you don’t have to worry if your computer was lucky today.

Ma.gnolia.com was a bookmark storing and sharing service (similar to Delicious.com) that has shut down due to data loss. The company started several years ago and built a small, but adoring user community that liked Ma.gnolia’s easy-to-use API and caching of linked pages. The service was the work of Larry Halff who nearly single-handedly built the service.

Alas, as for many companies without a good backup, data loss caused a mortal wound: Ma.gnolia completely shut down on February 17th, 2009.

Larry explained that when he started the company several years ago, no good cloud-based backup services existed, thus requiring him to develop his own backup. The backup was doing a file sync over Firewire to another computer. Unfortunately there was no integrity checking, no versioning, and the system was never tested to see if the backups worked. When it came time to restore, it turns out they did not.

People often assume simply setting up a copy or sync process is sufficient for backup, only to discover the issues with this when a restore is needed. At Backblaze, every file is compressed, encrypted, de-duplicated, and integrity-checked to ensure the backed up file exactly matches the original.

Larry intends to develop a new service and says when starting the new company, “My first priority is better backups.”

We wish Larry the best with his new service and hope others benefit from Larry’s pain.