Over the Thanksgiving weekend I noticed the following tweet from @DigitalRoyalty:

My friend’s laptop was stolen. He tracked the thief via @Backblaze for weeks & finally identified him on Facebook & Twitter. Digital 007.

I know our online backup service saves user data every day, but physical theft recovery? That certainly caught my attention and I asked for the whole story. The friend who had their laptop stolen, Mat Miller, replied:

I received a DM from @DigitalRoyalty that you were interested in hearing the story of how I identified the thief of my computer using Backblaze, here goes:

I was in LA on a work trip and my laptop was stolen from the trunk of my car. Bummed out for sure but o’well at least my data was safe! I was insanely busy over the next week so I was logging in to the dashboard and grabbing files as I needed them. Then, about 4 days after the computer was stolen, I saw that a new user had been created on my computer.

The name was “jack”. I clicked on the folder and noticed that the thief had failed to remove the Backblaze program from applications and his files were being uploaded! On the first day I had a picture but nothing else (wait for it Miller).

A few weeks went by with no specific details to nail him on (I must admit everyday was quite exciting) until last Friday. He added a college paper on his desktop with his full name. I googled his name and came up with his Twitter and FaceBook pages!

I’ve filed a report with the LAPD as of today so we’ll see how this pans out. Backblaze is amazing!!!

Mat Miller

Wow. Nice sleuthing Mat, thanks for telling us about it, and hope you get your laptop!

Two weeks ago I returned from my honeymoon – a trip to Kenya that included an amazing safari. While the trip was incredibly relaxing, I was nervous until a few days after I returned home.

You see, since this was a honeymoon, my wife made a firm request: no laptop. Checking email and doing work could wait until we were back. A few days into the trip I realized the photos we were taking would be great memories, but we had no way to backup the SD cards while we were on the road.

What if I dropped the camera? If our luggage was lost? If the SD cards got soaked?

I started putting the camera and SD cards into a zip-lock bag and then into the hotel safe whenever we did not bring them with us. I thought about backing them up online, but waiting for a slow satellite-based Internet connection in a game reserve in the middle of the Masai Mara was not practical. I figured I could go to an Internet cafe and burn backup copies onto DVDs, but the computer DVD burners did not work.

In the end I just continued to be paranoid throughout the trip. When I got home, I downloaded the photos to my wife’s PC, then to an external hard drive, then to my Mac. Within a day they were also backed up online by Backblaze.

Finally, I felt safe.

How would I backup my photos while traveling in the future?
Backup to an iPod
Backing up to an iPod seems like the most natural option. iPods are fairly inexpensive, capacious, sturdy, and most people have at least one. Looking around, this seems to be one of the best iPod SD card reader options available. However, “best” does not mean “good”. This Belkin device is over six years old and customers have said it is very slow and only works with old iPods (think actual click-wheel.)

Backup to an iPod Touch or iPhone
I actually had an iPod Touch with me on the trip, but had no way to transfer photos to it. This seems to be the only iPhone or iPod SD card reader available that has been reviewed. Again, the reviews are not fantastic – but it does seem to work.

Backup to an iPad
Apple has developed its own SD card reader for the iPad. The reviews are good. It’s developed by Apple. It’s not too expensive. But… it requires taking an iPad with you on your travels. This is not an ideal solution because a) at over $500 not everyone can afford one, b) it is somewhat fragile, c) it is a bit large if all you want is an SD card backup.

Backup to an external hard drive
Using an external hard drive to backup the SD card to versus using the memory inside an iPod should be fine. However, most external hard drives are designed to be plugged into a USB port on a computer.

Backup to an SD card
I would love to just have a small device that would duplicate one SD card to another. SD cards are cheap and I would put the backup SD card in the mail and send it back home. Unfortunately, I can’t find a single device that does this. Belkin? Sandisk? Kingston? I’m looking at you.

Of course, as soon as possible I would do my Backblaze online backup – but while traveling without a laptop, next time I will bring one of the options above.

Have you found a better approach? Email me with tips at and I will update this blog post if someone suggests something really useful.

UPDATE: After receiving a lot of feedback, I published a detailed blog post summarizing the feedback about how to backup photos while traveling.

Ok, maybe not quite the marriage…but at least the sanity leading up to it.

My friend Vlad was planning his wedding recently and posted this on Facebook a couple days before the actual event:

Vlad is grateful for Backblaze.. phew

I asked him what happened and wanted to share his reply:

we’ve been going *nuts* over the last few weeks finishing last minute details, running errands, etc etc. it’s been exhausting and tonight i’m practically delirious. while putting the last minute touches on our wedding playlist… a playlist we’ve spent hours on btw, i accidentally deleted it. gone! holy crap. seriously, i was ready to kill someone, maybe myself… i was totally exasperated. but luckily, i was able to download the old itunes file from backblaze…. oh man.

if it wasn’t for that, my sanity would be gone now. i dont know how long it would take to re-make the playlist, not to mention, i’m sure
we would have forgotten a bunch of songs. phew!

actually, backblaze has saved us multiple times now. both jamie and i have had our computers totally die on us and were able to recover everything using backblaze, and now this playlist issue too. it’s a lifesaver!

Glad that we could help and congratulations again!

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.