Many of you enjoyed the Part 1, Behind Backblaze video. Here’s Part 2, Behind Backblaze: Scaling Big Storage, which takes a look at our datacenter and the people behind it that make sure your data is safe and secure with Backblaze.

For those of you who think this kind of stuff is really cool, Backblaze has job openings in our Operations Group for a Director of Web Services, a Systems Administrator and a Datacenter Technician. All positions are in our San Mateo office.

Backblaze has over 30 petabytes of spinning disks and is adding about 3 petabytes every month! We like people who have the creativity to come up with new ways of building bigger and cheaper cloud storage – yet are meticulous about datacenter operations. Sound like you? Our Operations team is staffing up and we are hiring folks at all levels so… Backblaze Team: Assemble!

All three positions require:

• Good attitude and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done
• Strong desire to work for a small fast paced company
• Desire to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technologies
• Understanding of the importance of following best practices
• Relentless attention to detail
• Excellent interpersonal skills and good oral/written communication
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills

Director of Web Services

Responsibilities

• Lead efforts to maintain and scale Backblaze’s web services, including the static/dynamic web servers and monitoring systems
• Be hands on in deploying systems, configuring new services and setting up our network infrastructure
• Implement security measures required by corporate security policies
• Maintain monitoring systems to measure system availability and detect issues
• Help create, maintain and improve operational bash shell scripts and manual procedures
• Help hire and train IT staff as needed, including those in remote (global) locations
• Participate in the pager rotation and respond to alerts
• Handle daily operational tasks including racking new servers, replacing drives, reviewing logs, etc.

Requirements

• Professional experience in large scale, high-availability and high-load environments
• Expert knowledge of Linux system administration, Debian experience preferred
• Experience supporting Apache, Tomcat, and Java services
• Bash scripting skills desired
• Ability to lift/move 50-75 lbs and work down near the floor as needed

Systems Administrator

Responsibilities

• Deploy and configure new systems, networks and services including firewalls, DNS servers and monitoring systems
• Research new services and recommend specific packages and configurations
• Install new software patches, releases and system upgrades
• Troubleshoot and resolve operational problems with minimal supervision
• Help maintain monitoring systems to measure system availability and detect issues
• Participate in the pager rotation and respond to alerts as needed
• Handle daily operational tasks including racking new servers, replacing drives, reviewing logs, etc.

Requirements

• Good understanding of Linux system administration, Debian experience preferred
• Experience supporting Apache, Tomcat, and Java services a plus
• Bash scripting skills desired
• Ability to lift/move 50-75 lbs and work down near the floor on a weekly basis

Datacenter Technican

Responsibilities

• Rack, cable and label servers and network hardware
• Perform basic system setups and configurations
• Manage equipment delivery schedules and work with vendors to ensure timely receipt of critical equipment
• Manage spare parts inventory
• Help maintain infrastructure including replacing hard drive and other system components as needed
• Help troubleshoot and resolve operational issues with minimal supervision
• Help manage facilities including scouting new locations
• Follow and improve datacenter best practices documentation
• Have on-call responsibilities that will include occasional trips to datacenter to resolve issues that can’t be handled remotely

Requirements

• Working knowledge of Linux and/or ability to learn quickly
• Excellent time management skills
• Ability to lift/move 50-75 lbs and work down near the floor on a daily basis

Interested? Check out this video on our Datacenter Operations team.

Want to join our team? Follow these three steps:

• Send an Email to with one of the positions listed above in the subject line
• Include your resume
• Include your answers to 2 of the following 3 questions
  a. What about working at Backblaze excites you the most?
  b. Provide 3 adjectives that best describe your personal workspace.
  c. How would you manage boot images and system configurations on 1,000+ servers (i.e. Backblaze Storage Pods)?

Note: All positions are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Release Date: 5/03/12
Version: 2.0.5
Auto-Update: None

• Improved translations in the restore Downloader.
• Excluded additional Adobe Lightroom temporary folders.
• Localized “Buy” button across all languages. (Mac)
• Changed installer background image to use imagery for “double click to run”. (Mac)
• Added preparation code for new “Safety Freeze” feature.

You can download the latest client here!

What attracted you to Backblaze?
Every time I met up with SBrian for lunch, he always seemed so happy at his job. I wanted to be that happy at my job. Now I am

Did you always meticulously backup data?
I have always planned to backup data, does that count? Now that I am at Backblaze, I really should.

Where are you originally from? Why did you move here?
I was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Came to the US after I graduated from college as part of my parents immigrancy application. I told my mom that I’m giving the US a 3-month trial period and if I didn’t like it, I am going back home. Well…20 some years later, I’m still here.

Favorite place you’ve traveled?
I always love going home to the Philippines. Aside from the Philippines, I would keep going back to Europe. We have been to France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. There are still so many places to visit. UK, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece – those are the top places I would love to see next.

Favorite hobby?
I love to read, listen to music, workout, hike, and ride the bike (although I must say bikes don’t like me too much).

Of what achievement are you most proud?
My family – I have been married to my wonderful husband for almost 23 years, and we have two beautiful and amazing daughters, 21 and 17.

My favorite expression is:
Lord love a duck!

Please welcome her onboard!

When I think back to a few of us sitting in a one-bedroom apartment brainstorming about what we could possibly to do to help people stop losing data…it’s crazy to look around and see hundreds of servers, all of our employees, and the products, stats, and customers that make this all a reality today.

I wanted to share some of our adventures as we’ve grown from a tiny startup over the last five years:

1/15/07 – First thoughts around what to do about people losing data.
4/20/07 – Incorporated in Delaware.

6/10/07 – Original discussion about “funding” the company by 5 partners working 1 year without salary.
8/25/07 – Brian’s 1-bedroom apartment looking more like an office.

10/26/07 – Office warming party.

11/2/07 – Storyboarding the service we would build.


11/30/07 – Proposed $5 unlimited pricing.
12/6/07 – Focus group testing our ideas.

1/29/08 – Decide we want to do a video. Get our friend Cara to be the “actress”.

We created three “official” videos that day: Deadly Plagues, How it Works, and Talk with Gleb. However, the outtakes with Cara were probably the best.

2/5/08 – Gleb’s laptop dies; becomes first person to restore an unrecoverable file.

This computer is still alive four years later…but barely.

2/15/08 – Website goes live for the first time.

3/18/08 – Service given to test to a few people.
4/18/08 – Billing implemented.
4/29/08 – First revenue. Tim Nufire pays $5.

4/30/08 – Friends and family beta.
5/1/08 – First external customer. Brian Beach pays $5.
5/13/08 – Internal admin dashboard online shows 4 paid customer and 46 trials.
5/21/08 – 20 1TB hard drives arrive to be assembled into 4-drive enclosures.

5/26/08 – Backblaze shown to TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and SimpleHelp
6/2/08 – Private beta launch! TechCrunch, Ars Technica, SimpleHelp, and KillerStartups write!
8/12/08 – Fly out to D.C. to meet Walt Mossberg who decides not to write. We fly back with hurt egos.
8/26/08 – Powered on first Storage Pod made of plywood in datacenter.

9/15/08 – Lifetime sales total of about $5,000.
9/16/08 – Backblaze launches v1.0! Written up in TechCrunch, Venture Beat, US News and World Report.
10/10/08 – First full 45 1TB storage pod design live. (Not in a case yet.)

10/28/08 – First release of a Mac version to close friends. (Me with my first Mac.)

11/20/08 – Backblaze experiments with a radio ad on “Energy 92.7″.
12/7/08 – Backblaze website visitors come from all over; almost 50% from outside U.S.

12/9/08 – Beta launch of the Mac version. Crazy amount of interest!
12/15/08 – First DVD restore ordered.
12/17/08 – Mac demand caught us by surprise. We started calling all our suppliers around the world to FedEx raw components for our Storage Pods.

12/20/08 – First “Red Storage Pod” assembled.

1/8/09 – Paid customers on the Mac outnumber those on Windows.
3/23/09 – Back deck “Pod Shed” is brought online where Storage Pods are burned-in before going to the datacenter.

4/2/09 – Backblaze runs first payroll! Founders start making enough for rice and beans.
4/8/09 – Backblaze raises $370k from friendly angels to buy more servers. Only outside investment ever.
4/14/09 – Mac version launches v1.0 to tons of amazing coverage!
5/5/09 – 3rd datacenter rack full of 10 Backblaze Storage Pods

7/21/09 – Experiment with first TV commercial.
9/1/09 – Publish “Petabytes on a Budget: How to build cheap cloud storage post where we open source the Backblaze Storage Pod. Thought a few storage geeks might care. Instead, over 1 million people read the blog post!
9/10/09 – We take a picture of the whole company.

12/24/09 – Backups never stop. Christmas eve. Tim adding more Storage Pods.

12/31/09 – Despite us saying “they’re not for sale”, two government agencies buy Storage Pods for $25k each. Pod being driven (in a $4,500 Nissan Sentra) to TransPak to crate and ship.

2/23/10 – Backblaze has an offer to be acquired and signs a Letter of Intent.
3/5/10 – Largest single customer restore to date: 6,900 GB
4/23/10 – Security guard by mistake presses emergency power shut off in datacenter. All of us spend the next 12 hours bringing all the servers back online.
5/28/10 – Just before acquisition deal is done, it comes apart.
6/4/10 – 100th Backblaze Storage Pod placed into production.
9/2/10 – Backblaze founders have been slowly creeping up salaries. This day’s raise puts most founders at breakeven for living expenses.
9/3/10 – After 3.5 years of pushing our luck, Backblaze gets an eviction notice for being in an apartment.

11/29/10 – Backblaze moves out of it’s Palo Alto apartment/office.

And moves into it’s San Mateo office.

12/21/10 – First “real” holiday party with spouses and significant others.

12/31/10 – Over 10 petabytes of cloud storage deployed.
1/31/11 – Mozy (another online backup company) drops its unlimited plan. Backblaze has the best month ever in new customer signups.
5/22/11 – Launched “Locate My Computer” and within one month helped recover $1 million in counterfeit cash.
7/15/11 – Took a picture of one of our rows of racks.

7/20/11 – Published “Petabytes on a Budget v2.0: Revealing More Secrets“, the second version of our open-sourced Backblaze Storage Pod.
9/16/11 – Paid off the last of the loans the founders extended to the company.
10/10/11 – Thailand floods cause widespread damage; hard drive price triples.

10/26/11 – Launched v2.0, making the service faster and ever “more” unlimited.
12/19/11 – Backblaze puts up its first billboard on Highway 101.

2/10/12 – Somebody in a horse head walks into the office; sets off security cameras.

3/26/12 – Backblaze hosts an IAmA on reddit.
3/31/12 – Backblaze becomes the Presenting Sponsor of World Backup Day. (The single largest marketing spend in our history…on one day.)
4/1/12 – Publish April Fool’s video. I never thought “Pigeon Rental” would be an expense line item.

4/15/12 – Partnership with Sourcenext launches. Konichiwa!
4/20/12 – Backblaze officially turns 5 years old!

Note: a big thank you to Brian Wilson, our co-founder, CTO, and part-time historian for keeping much of this!

Of course, none of this would have been possible without you! So, thank you for being a customer, reading our blog, telling friends about us, and all the other ways in which so many of you have been so helpful. Here’s to another 5 years!

Release Date: 4/18/12
Version: 2.0.4
Auto-Update: None

• Improved Japanese translations as part of Sourcenext partnership launch.
• Tweaked “Transfer Backup State” where old hosts are named “old_inactive_” for clarity.
• Enhanced robustness of Transfer Backup State for clients reporting unknown OS.
• Localized Windows downloader for all 11 supported languages.

Win
• Downloader can now select a specific directory into which to place restores.

Release Date: 3/26/12
Version: 2.0.3
Auto-Update: None

• Auto-detect user-preferred language at time of install.
• Streamlined logging for minor speed improvement of client application.
• Excluded a temporary folder with AVG virus definitions that need not be backed up.
• Touched up Russian language in uninstaller.
• Linked “Learn More” in uninstaller and error dialogs to correct web pages for each language.
• Added date to default name of “online hostname” for new installations to help users distinguish computers. (e.g. “Dell_PC_2012_03_26″)
• Completely revamped all Japanese language content.
• Updated icon in client “Restore…” dialog for “USB Flash Drive” restore option.
• Tailored popup notifications in clients residing within Backblaze for Business accounts to enhance billing clarity.
• Localized uninstaller into all 11 supported languages.
• Updated uninstaller to remove all traces of Backblaze from computer.

Mac
• Removed ability to run installer on Mac OS X 10.4; existing 10.4 customers can continue using the service.
• Added additional functionality to support “Mountain Lion” (OSX 10.8) beta.

Win
• Localized date format for all 11 supported languages.
• Updated to support current Windows 8 beta.

The service provided in Japan still provides automatic backup, unlimited storage, unthrottled bandwidth, robust encryption, restore via download or USB drive, Locate My Computer, and more for one flat rate. Additionally, the entire service is localized into Japanese.

Backblaze online backup in Japanese

Noriyuki Matsuda, founder and CEO of Sourcenext, came to the US a couple months ago and said that his technical people scour the world for the best products to bring to the Japanese market. In 2010, they picked Evernote (one of my favorite services) to bring to Japan. This year they picked Backblaze online backup as a must-have for Japan.

I am thrilled to be partnering with Sourcenext to help every Japanese person keep their photos, music, movies, work files, etc. safe from drive crashes and other data loss.

Sourcenext home page

Japanese coverage of Sourcenext’s launch of the Backblaze online backup:
Cloud Watch
http://cloud.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20120416_526792.html

MyNavi News
http://news.mynavi.jp/news/2012/04/16/108/

YOMIURI ONLINE
http://news.mynavi.jp/news/2012/04/16/108/

NIKKEI PC online
http://pc.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/news/20120416/1046165/

ASCI.jp
http://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/686/686922/

INTERNET Watch
http://internet.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20120416_526789.html

Windows Forest
http://www.forest.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20120416_526833.html

ITpro
http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20120416/391017/

CNET Japan
http://japan.cnet.com/news/service/35016270/

NIKKEI
http://www.nikkei.com/tech/business/article/g=96958A9C938…

Checker-s
http://www.checker-s.com/news_cfD0RLwYi2.html

MDN
http://www.mdn.co.jp/di/newstopics/22863/

Nifty business
http://bizmash.jp/articles/17726.html

Sometimes I am just amazed how much data we store for our customers – pictures, videos, documents, spreadsheets and more. It takes a lot of storage. Yesterday Kirk, Sean, new guy Dave and Guido, from our operations group, outdid themselves. They racked and powered up 12 new Storage Pods in one day; that is freakin’ awesome and it’s a new Backblaze record. Over the next couple of days the RAID arrays will be synched, the pods will be load tested and then they will be added to the hundreds of other working storage pods. As I write this 5 of these new pods have already come online and are busy backing up customer data.

How much data can you store on 12 storage pods? A little over 1.6 Petabytes. And how much is 1.6 Petabytes? A little over 800,000,000 photos (2 MB each). That’s a lot of memories safely tucked away.

So as you sit down at your computer and upload your photos, update a spreadsheet, or just edit your latest cat video, take a minute and thank Kirk, Sean, new guy Dave and the entire operations team for making sure there’s plenty of room for your data in our data center and don’t worry, there are more pods arriving next week…

If you use the “Locate My Computer” feature of Backblaze online backup, you can get a map of the current location of your lost or stolen computer. Beginning today, that map will be provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM) a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world released through an open content license.

What a great idea: crowd-sourced, open-source maps. The more we looked into this opportunity, the better it looked. When the time to renew our existing Google Maps license arrived, we joined foursquare, Apple and now Wikipedia in supporting the OpenStreetMap movement – a perfect fit for Backblaze.

So while we hope you will never have to use the “Locate My Computer” feature of Backblaze, if you do, the OpenStreetMap community will be there to help locate your system. Take a look…

OpenStreetMap of Backblaze office location

Google Map of Backblaze office location