Last year Backblaze announced a partnership with Sourcenext to help spread online backup throughout Japan.  After all, backing up your computer is a good idea, no matter where you live!  This year Sourcenext is releasing a retail box for us!  Let’s take a look inside shall we?

Backblaze has a great support team and one of the most frequent requests they receive is, “could you please provide an invoice?” From the beginning, we’ve been handcrafting every invoice that’s been sent out, and while we love making our customers happy, as Backblaze has grown it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up with all the requests. Over the last few years, we’ve been hard at work making the best online backup solution possible and that meant that our engineers were working on iterating and expanding the functionality of our backup client. Unfortunately this meant that some of the non-mission critical improvements we’ve wanted to make had to take a backseat. Well, the day of automated invoicing is finally upon us! Thanks to Monika, the latest addition to our engineering team. After joining Backblaze she was tasked with something of the utmost importance, creating an invoicing system so that you can get your own invoices!

That’s right! Starting today you will be able to go to the “Transactions” section of your Backblaze account and select a year or billing period for which you would like to receive an invoice. Once created, you will be able to print or download the invoice which will have all of your Backblaze transactions including your dates of purchase, the number of licenses purchased, and the total cost. Even though this may sound like a minor improvement it is something we are very excited about!

Five years worth of data
10% percent may not seem like a lot, but in the world of online backup it’s a milestone. For the last 5 years Backblaze has had the folks at Harris Interactive ask “How often do you backup all the data on your computer?” To our dismay, daily backup of the photos, videos, music, data and more on people’s computers has languished at 6-8%. But our 2012 survey said “10%” now do daily backups, a 47% increase over 2011 – Woo Hoo. Even better, the survey also revealed that weekly backups increased 38% over 2011 and monthly backups increased 29% over 2011. In other words, people are backing up their data more often and that is GREAT news.

There’s still work to do
But all is not rosy in backup land as 29% of computer users have never backed up all the data on their computer (cue scary music here). While 29% is a decrease of 15% over 2011, it is still too high. So we wanted to know why would someone not do daily backups? Amazingly, 59% thought that daily data backups were either too complicated or too expensive, or they just plain forget to do it. Hmmm, so is there a way to backup a computer that is easy to use, affordable, automatic and continuous?

Our challenge for 2013
Here’s our audacious goal for 2013. Let’s get the percentage of people who backup daily (10% in 2012) to be higher than the percentage of people who don’t backup at all (29% in 2012). Impossible you say. Let’s try – “no try, do”. How can you help? Give the gift of Backblaze, to someone you know from the 90% who don’t back up daily. Of course we’ll keep plugging away here and between us we can reach the 2013 goal. Thanks for your help.

“How often do you backup all the data on your computer?”

Other interesting statistics from the 2012 survey:
• 43% of computer owners backup less than once a year (or never.)
• Only 3% backup more frequently than once-per-day
     (Backblaze recommends backing up continuously!)

How backup corresponds with education; percent of people who have ever backed up their data:
• 62% High-school or less
• 74% Some college
• 79% College or more

How backup corresponds with income; percent of people who have ever backed up their data:
• 71% Less than $35k
• 68% $35k – $49k
• 69% $50k – $74k
• 74% More than $75k

How backup corresponds to employment status; percent of people who have ever backed up their data:
• 75% Full-time employed or self-employed
• 70% Part-time employed
• 68% Unemployed
• 71% Student
• 65% Retired

Survey Methodology
The surveys were conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Backblaze as follows: May 31–June 4, 2012 among 2,209 respondents, June 28–30, 2011 among 2,257 respondents, June 3–7, 2010 among 2,071 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.

Our online backup service will have a 30 minute maintenance at 2pm PDT today (Tuesday 3/13/12.) This is a slight finish up after last week’s maintenance.

During this maintenance, some parts of our service will be affected:
* Restores and access to My Account will be unavailable.
* Creating new accounts will be unavailable. We will provide a form to enter your email address to be notified when maintenance is complete.
* Backups that are in process will continue unless interrupted by your computer shutting down or your Internet connection losing connectivity.
* Buying will be unavailable on our website. However, it will be possible to purchase annual licenses on Amazon.

After the maintenance completes, there will be a ramp up period during which backups will start that may last up to an hour for some users. Thank you for your patience!

Update: Maintenance is done! 22 minutes total – just slightly ahead of schedule. As mentioned above, backups will take up to one hour for some users to restart.

Backblaze is upgrading its central systems, which will take place in two phases:

* Tuesday 3/6/12 for about one hour sometime at 2pm PST.
* Wednesday 3/7/12 for two to three hours starting at 2pm PST.

Due to massive growth, we are tripling the storage on those systems.

Our storage farm scales infinitely without downtime by adding Storage Pods, which we do all the time. However, expanding our central systems will require a couple small maintenance windows to perform the upgrade.

During this maintenance, some parts of our service will be affected:
* Restores and access to My Account will be unavailable.
* Creating new accounts will be unavailable. We will provide a form to enter your email address to be notified when maintenance is complete.
* Backups that are in process will continue unless interrupted by your computer shutting down or your Internet connection losing connectivity.
* Buying will be unavailable on our website. However, it will be possible to purchase annual licenses on Amazon.

We appreciate you backing up your data with us and your patience as we do this maintenance to allow us to continue our rapid growth.

Update: Tuesday maintenance will start between 3pm and 5pm PST.

Update: Tuesday maintenance is complete. Thank you engineering and ops teams!

Update: Wednesday maintenance is complete. Thank you engineering and ops teams!

Thank you also to you for your patience as we scale up!

Several years ago a guy sent us an email saying he liked our service and was planning on recommending Backblaze on his newsletter, Photojojo. We’d never heard of him or his newsletter but we said, “Great!”

Shortly thereafter he wrote “Backblaze: Backup Software You’ll Actually Use” and almost 10,000 people showed up to try the service!

Amit was not only a fan and a great boost for us, he’s also just a great guy. Unfortunately, two weeks ago Amit was diagnosed with Acute Leukemia and is now in for a long slog of chemo and more.

He’s asking for South Asians to do a free bone marrow check by mail. (Just run a cotton swab on your cheek.)

Apparently, Amit also likes “colorful photos, pizza, crafty projects, and macaroni,” and, of course, photos. Send him some cheery thoughts by emailing ([current year] at amit gupta dot com).

And Super Amit, from a few of us at Backblaze: Get well!

IBM is celebrating the 55th anniversary of the first hard drive. At the time, this was a breakthrough that would change the path of technology.

However, to put into perspective how far we have all come:

The hard drive IBM shipped in 1956:
* Stored 5 megabytes (MB)
* Cost $11,000 per megabyte
* Was 60 inches long x 68 inches high x 29 inches deep
* Weighed about 1 ton

In today’s dollars that would mean:

A $179 16 GB iPod Nano:
* Stores 3,200 times more data
* Would cost: $1,429,176,320
* Requires 8 semi-truck shipping containers to hold the data

A petabyte of storage would:
* Cost: $93,662,499,307,520
* Require a building the size of 10,814 football fields to hold the drives
* Require 472 of the world’s largest data centers to hold the drives

Compare that to being able to get a petabyte of storage for $117,000 and store it in a single rack. Of course, IBM researchers from the 50′s are clearly some of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Note: $1 in 1956 is $7.93 in 2010 adjusted for inflation.

A few months ago Backblaze joined EFactor, a worldwide network of entrepreneurs. Many entrepreneurs are busily creating content, writing code, preparing business plans, etc. – all while working from a coffee shop or traveling back-and-forth from meetings. At Backblaze, we wanted to offer all of these entrepreneurs our online backup service in the hope that they do not have one of those “Noooooo!!” moments when they realize the marketing plan they have spent many late nights working on just vanished with the laptop that was stolen out of the taxi cab.

In addition to being available as a resource on the EFactor site, Backblaze was invited to demo last week at the BCSSA Entrepreneurial Pitch Competition and interviewed on EFactor Radio. We hope to help many other great entrepreneurs through our relationship with EFactor.

If you are a current (or budding) entrepreneur, consider joining EFactor. As a bit of extra incentive, they are currently approaching the million-member mark and are awarding a 3-day trip to NYC or Amsterdam for the 1,000,000th member.