Don Honabach has the honor of being the first person to successfully build his own Backblaze storage pod. (At least the first we know about.)

With four servers running at home for media storage, Don, was using a fair bit of power (and probably generating a lot of heat and noise and taking up space.) For five years he was working to come up with an “Extreme Media Server” and after reading about the Backblaze storage pod, he decided this may be the way to go.

Having expertise in the space, Don customized a variety of items in the pod including:
* The operating system (switching to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2)
* Power supplies
* Motherboard
* and more…

In just a couple weeks Don had completed his “Extreme Media Server”. Combining all four servers into one, Don is saving 500 watts of power, and can run 16 independent movie streams across two monitors from a single storage pod.

Don created a blog that describes his experiences building his Extreme Media Server.

Congratulations Don and good luck watching all those movies at the same time!

Thousands of photographers use Backblaze to protect their digital photos, in part due to the recommendation of some great photo sites such as Photojojo, Stuck in Customs,
Digital Composting, TWIP, NSLog(); and many others.

This week one of our customers sent us a note to show some of the 400 GB of photos recovered from Backblaze - and a reminder that it doesn’t have to be a catastrophic event to cause data loss:

I can’t thank you enough for the quick responses yesterday and the work your team has done to help me and my wife out with restoring this hard drive.

I have to say that the story behind the E drive isn’t anything to write home about, but it wasn’t until we needed something on this drive that we realized it was no longer being recognized by our computer.

This is when the panic set in, as my wife is a well known photographer out here in the Philadelphia area and a good bit of her portfolio work is on this E drive.

To say the least, she is so thankful to know that her work wasn’t deleted.