Each of the last four years during June’s Backup Awareness Month, Backblaze has conducted a data backup survey using Harris Interactive. We always ask the same question: are you backing up your computer data and, if so, how often?

The results of this fourth annual survey and the three previous ones are:

Percent of Respondents Who Backup Computer Data

While in the last few years there has been a steady trend of more people backing up data; this year surprisingly fewer people responded that they backup their computers. Anyone have any theories?

Other interesting statistics from the survey:

Your thoughts on these? Expected/not expected?

Have some friends or coworkers who are not backing up?
Give them the gift of online backup

These surveys were conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Backblaze June 28-30, 2011 among 2257 respondents, June 3-7, 2010 among 2071 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; a full methodology is available.

No, I am not kidding.

Just over a month ago we launched Locate My Computer, a free feature of our online backup service, to find your computer if it is lost or stolen. Since then a number of people have recovered their computers.

However, one of our customers (let’s call him “Joe” as he requested anonymity since those who stole his laptop are connected to the mafia) shared an incredible story about what happened when the police recovered his laptop:

When they searched the apartment where my macbook was located they also found one million dollars in counterfeit bills. The story was all over the news here in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately for your company, the police and press kept referring to backblaze as a GPS locator. As many times as I told the police the program I was using, they didn’t totally understand what it was, and thought it was a GPS chip. Anyway, I just wanted to let you guys know the good news, and thanks to backblaze I got my stolen computer back, plus a counterfeiting ring was busted!!

While this story hasn’t been covered in the U.S., Joe shared some of the coverage it received in Argentina. The articles are all in Spanish, but the highlights are:
* $1 million in counterfeit bills
* 2450 sheets containing about 10,000 bills
* Mostly $100 denominations
* 1 person arrested; 6 people detained

The Mac and the counterfeit cash were found at Calle Carlos Calvo 1500, San Cristobal:

Clarin, the largest Argentinian paper, writes “Band of foreigners brought down with fake $1,000,000” (Google Translate version.) Other Argentinian sites including Infobae, Yahoo News, ElArgentino also covered this discovery.

Joe says, “Thanks again for the service. Best $5 a month I’ve spent.”

Thanks for sharing the story Joe. The Argentinian police should thank you as well!

Cloud computing success relies on high-speed bandwidth. Whether streaming movies or running applications from the cloud, the ability to get data quickly from the cloud to the computer (or tablet or phone) is a key requirement for rapid adoption.

As such, we decided to take a look at how well Internet bandwidth to the home has kept up with another key ingredient of the cloud: hard drive prices. Below is the comparison and, unfortunately, it seems that while hard drive manufacturers have done a phenomenal job of capacity increases and price reduction (as an example, a petabyte should cost $94 trillion) – bandwidth to the home has not kept up. This means that people are continually able to do more locally than in the cloud.

There have been some interesting announcements in the space recently including Sonic.net testing 1 Gbps fiber for $70 and Comcast demoing 1 Gbps broadband over cable. Will bandwidth change it’s historical trajectory?

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.

Ignite is a “Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global” evening of “high-energy 5-minute talks by people who have an idea.” Specifically, as the presenter you get exactly 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. No running over. No slide remote control.

The theme of the evening was “Lean Startup” a set of principles (clearly communicated by Eric Ries) of building startups in a more efficient manner.

I presented the 5-step process of building Petabytes on a Budget. It was a blast and I highly recommend Ignite events and the Ignite format to anyone wanting to communicate an idea. As they tell you when you prep, a TV commercial tells an entire story in 30 seconds; if you’re crisp you can communicate a lot of ideas in five minutes.

Here is the presentation:

And here are the slides on SlideShare:

Thank you to O’Reilly for starting the Ignite concept and facilitating the community, Sarah Milstein for organizing the entire event, Tony Stubblebine for MC’ing, pariSoma for providing a great space, and DreamSimplicity for providing the video.

Possibly.

A customer yesterday asked, “Do you have any idea how big iCloud is?” I thought it was an interesting question and poked around.

Two months ago it was reported that Apple ordered 12 petabytes of storage rumored to be used for its new North Carolina data center.

Certainly Apple already has significant storage for their existing iTunes and MobileMe data and the North Carolina datacenter has room for much more than 12 petabytes, but is this the storage that Apple expected to need to support the iCloud offering initially? Apple would not confirm, of course, but it does seem plausible now with iCloud announced and Steve Jobs talking about Apple’s massive new datacenter:

Image source: Data Center Knowledge

At Backblaze we hit 10 petabytes of customer cloud storage by the end of 2010 and now we just crossed 15 petabytes!

It’s becoming challenging to take a good photo, but here is what 15 petabytes of Backblaze Storage Pods looks like:

So does Backblaze have more cloud storage than Apple for iCloud? Perhaps.

After we open sourced the Backblaze Storage Pod, hundreds of people contacted us expressing interest in building their own. A few have shared their experiences including the team at Vanderbilt University Institute of Image Science, where Hampton Albert and others have modified the original design for their own purposes. They explain their approach and use below.

Thank you and the Backblaze team for open-sourcing your hardware! At the Vanderbilt University Institute of Image Science, we support hundreds of researchers operating multiple high-field Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound scanners. The institute’s MRI scanners alone generate over 200 GB of data per month. We need to reliably store these data for our research partners.

Without affordable storage solutions, we could not centralize storage and were forced to rely on optical backups for long term archive. Your “Petabytes on a budget” post was exactly the starting point that Hampton, our IT expert, needed in order to undertake construction of two 90 TB (raw) storage servers. As Hampton explains, hardware tweaking was a bit of an adventure, but we are now rolling out these boxes along with the open source clinical image and object management system DCM4CHE, the DCM4CHE enterprise-grade DICOM picture archiving and communication system, and open source Java Image Science Toolkit to provide secure, long-term data archive and rapid image processing.

With this affordable, redundant, and scalable storage system we will be able to provide indefinite data storage and retrieval for imaging studies without substantially increasing cost to our users.

Best Regards,
Bennett Landman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
   Department of Electrical Engineering (primary)
   Department of Biomedical Engineering
   Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences
   Vanderbilt University, School of Engineering
Director of the Center for Computational Imaging
   Vanderbilt University Institute of Image Science

Amazing! Never did we think when we set out to build inexpensive cloud storage for our online backup service that the pieces would end up supporting MRI machines as archival storage.

Thank you Hampton, Professor Landman, and the rest of your team there for sharing this with us!

Yesterday Apple announced iCloud, launching in the fall, which lets you sync music, photos, apps, calendars, etc. between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. As Mac-fans, all of us here at Backblaze are pretty excited about using these features for ourselves!

A couple people asked, “How will Backblaze work with iCloud?”
The answer? Seamlessly!

* iCloud will sync your recent 30 days of photos across devices and recommends you store all the pictures you want to keep permanently on your Mac; Backblaze will ensure ALL your photos stored on your Mac are safe forever.
* iCloud will sync files from compatible apps; Backblaze will backup all data.
* iCloud will have 5 GB of storage; Backblaze is committed to unlimited online backup.

We are very excited by Apple’s new features and looking forward to using them!
And you can continue to look forward to having all of your data completely protected by Backblaze!