A few weeks ago we told you we had been selected as a finalist for the 2013 SIIA Software CODiE Awards in the Best Cloud Storage and Back Up Solution category. We were very proud of being selected as a finalist, that was really cool.

Well guess what, WE WON! So, we are no longer a finalist, instead we are the winner! You can read all about the CODiE Awards on the SIIA website. Winning the award was awesome enough, but then they gave us the trophy you see above – is that cool or what? We’ve been admiring it for days and taking turns taking it home to show off. OK, so maybe only I took it home, but it is still an awesome trophy.

So we’d like to say Thank You to the SIIA and its members for naming us as the 2013 Best Cloud Storage and Back Up Solution winner. We will do our best to live up to the high standards they have set for being selected as a CODiE Awards winner.

We are very proud to announce that Backblaze was selected as a finalist for the 2013 SIIA Software CODiE Awards in the Best Cloud Storage and Back Up Solution category. The SIIA CODiE Awards are the premier award for the software and information industries, and have been recognizing product excellence for 27 years.

To become a finalist, Backblaze had to be evaluated by a panel of industry judges and be compared to the other category entrants. There were a myriad of questions to answer and the judges ran Backblaze through it’s paces to make sure it did everything we said. We also had to address how Backblaze delivered in the areas of agility, flexibility, redundancy, reliability, scalability and most importantly security. The thoroughness of the evaluation not only included the Backblaze client like the one on your PC or Mac, but the entire Backblaze infrastructure. This makes sense, given the breadth of the category “Best Cloud Storage and Back up Solution”.

While many people find our service to be the easiest online backup solution around, the real magic is masking the complexity that is inherent in backing up, storing and restoring our customer’s data. Over the past 5 plus years Backblaze has safely backed up and now stores nearly 50 Petabytes of user data and so far we’ve restored over 3 Billion files for our customers.

We’d like to thank the SIIA for naming us as an SIIA CODiE Awards finalist in the Best Cloud Storage and Back Up Solution category. And we’d like to thank you our customers for believing in us as well.

Over the last few months over 500 customers have been using Backblaze online backup on their Windows 8 laptops and desktops. Their photos, videos, music, documents, spreadsheets and more were automatically and continuously backed up by Backblaze. And when needed, those intrepid Windows 8 users were able to recover their files and folders from Backblaze. In short, if you’re looking for Windows online backup Backblaze works fine with Windows 8.

Today Microsoft released Windows 8. Depending on what you read and who you talk to Windows 8 is cool, confusing, great, awful, crystal clear and clear-as-mud. In any case, Windows 8 is here and when you start your Windows 8 system you’ll see a screen that looks something like the one below.

Your start screen will most likely look different, but somewhere on there you’ll find Backblaze – assuming of course that you have Backblaze installed. You may have to scroll to the right or down to find us, but eventually you’ll come across the Backblaze flame. You can select this tile if you need to access the Backblaze Control Panel.

You can also access the Backblaze Control Panel from your Windows 8 Desktop. To reach the Windows 8 Desktop you simply click the “Desktop” tile and move to the “Desktop” screen. Again your Desktop will most likely look different, but it’s layout is similar to your Desktop from Windows 7. As with Windows 7, the Backblaze flame icon will be displayed in the System Tray in the lower right of the window. Right-clicking on the Backblaze flame in the System Tray will display the Backblaze Menu you are familiar with from previous versions of Windows as you can see below. (For this picture we’ve made the menu larger so you can read it).

If you select the Backblaze Control Panel menu item, you will see the Backblaze Control Panel as shown below.

In short, Backblaze supports Windows 8 as well as Windows 7, Vista and XP. We do not currently support Windows RT.

Windows 8 is different and most people think it will take some time to get used to it. When you do decide to take the Windows 8 plunge remember Backblaze will be there diligently backing up your data, like always.

Hitachi announced this morning that they have invented “quartz glass storage”. With this innovation they are able to hold about 40MB of data per square inch on one piece of quartz glass. The Verge’s article doesn’t state the cost of the quartz glass, but the procedure to create such a piece of storage includes using a “high-precision laser to embed dots of binary code across a tiny piece of quartz glass”, and then “an optical microscope (paired with a computer capable of deciphering the imprint) can be used to recover the original data”, so it cannot be cheap!

To put that in to perspective, at 40MB per square inch, it would take 3,375,000 squares to house as much data as a single Backblaze Storage Pod. At 3,375,000 square inches, that many squares would cover almost ½ an acre or about 23,437.5 square feet of space (about 10x the size of Backblaze’s office).

One of the benefits of this is that the quartz glass is more or less fireproof, so it can withstand a lot of natural disaster scenarios and still be readable! The technology was just invented so we’re still a ways away from Backblaze Quartz Pods, but until that technology becomes readily available to the public, don’t forget to backup your current “old-school” non-quartz drives!

Charges against Armando Angulo, a Miami doctor who was pursued by the federal government, have been dropped because the evidence was taking too much space on the DEA servers. Now, to give them their due, the government has more than 400,000 pages of evidence. That must have taken a tremendous amount of resources to assemble. Lawyers, courts, investigations, etc.

But those 400,000 pages of evidence take just 2 TB of data. You can buy a 2 TB drive for $100 at Amazon. But the DEA claims this will be “an economic and political hardship”. $100 versus the $6.5 million he allegedly cost Medicaid through his fraudulent activities.

What may be even crazier is that the DEA claims this 2 TB took up 5% of their entire worldwide global storage network. In other words, the DEA has a total of 40 TB of storage. Worldwide.

That’s 1/3rd of one Backblaze Storage Pod. Which costs $10k to build.

If $6.5 million isn’t enough to keep 2 TB of data, we would be happy to provide an entire Backblaze Storage Pod to them for that much. And we’d be happy to provide online backup for all 2 TB for just $5/month.

It’s nice to have friends. You’ve probably heard of VIZIO and maybe some of those other companies in the picture above, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and the rest. And there’s Backblaze right in the middle – cool huh? That’s Matt McRae, the CTO of VIZIO, introducing their new PC lineup, All-in-Ones, Notebooks, and Thin + Lights. Matt gave us a nice shout out to everyone there, thanks Matt! Yup, really cool.

What all this means is that online backup has taken the first step in becoming an integral part of the PC experience. You get a new computer and one of the things it should do is protect the stuff you put on it, automatically and continuously. VIZIO understands this and reached out to Backblaze, and there we are, with all our new found friends. As part of Backup Awareness month, Backblaze recently announced survey results showing that 10% of computer users backup their computer daily or more often. Having online backup be an integrated part of the PC experience can only help to reduce the senseless loss of data that occurs when a person does not backup their system. VIZIO believes that data backup should be part of the PC experience and we agree.

To be clear we are not built in, we are an add-on service that must be installed. But VIZIO has made it pretty simple. They have a “V” button that brings up a list of services. You can download and install the Backblaze service onto the VIZIO PC, pay for it, and you are backing up your photos, videos, spreadsheet and more. Check out the press release for more details.

Backblaze would like to welcome the Draper University of Heroes to the neighborhood! Last year Tim Draper, the Founder and Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, bought the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in San Mateo with a dream of renovating the building and turning it in to a University for Entrepreneurs. The Draper University of Heroes welcomed its first batch of entrepreneurs this week to be part of a pilot program that will pave the way for the University, which is set to open in January of 2013. Backblaze is located right next to Draper University, so we’ll see the campus and buildings evolve from a front row seat!

We are excited to have even more entrepreneurs in San Mateo and can’t wait to see the talent that Draper University will produce! We’d also like to thank Tim for keeping the pool open! Block party at your place?

Researchers have discovered that a pinch of table salt can get more data onto spinning hard drive platters. A lot more: 6 TB in a single platter!

Considering the latest drives have up to 5 platters, that would be 30 TB in a single hard drive. Put 45 of those drives into a Backblaze Storage Pod and you would store 1.35 petabytes (!) in a single storage pod; more than 10 petabytes in a single rack.

Hello, Big Data. Meet your best friend, Salt.