There are many causes of data loss, but a lost or stolen computer has been a guaranteed reason to need Backblaze to recover data. Unfortunately, with some exceptions, the computer itself was gone.

Today, Backblaze announces “Locate My Computer” – a new feature of the Backblaze online backup service that shows you a map of your computer’s location.

We have heard many painful stories, such as that of the cure for cancer being stolen; and some amazing stories such as Mat Miller recovering his laptop when he noticed the thief backed up his college paper to Backblaze or Mark Bao catching the thief that stole his laptop by downloading a video the thief took of himself.

Since launching the company, we have had a steady stream of people contacting our support team saying, “my computer was stolen – is there anything you can do to help? With the exception of rare cases, unfortunately, there was little that we could.

Today, all that changes.

With our new Locate My Computer feature, Backblaze enables customers to:
* Accurately locate their computer on a map
* Get the ISP their computer is accessing
* See the IP address it is using
* And easily view new files being backed up

Locate My Computer is available immediately and is free to all Backblaze customers. Mapping is enabled for new users; users with existing accounts can “Turn On” mapping. To turn mapping on or off, sign-in and visit the Locate My Computer page. (Please click “Check for Updates” from your menu icon to ensure you are using the latest version.)

When Mark Bao posted the video of the thief he recovered from Backblaze, he posted it to YouTube with the title: “Don’t steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers” With today’s launch we hope to change that to:
“Don’t steal computers from people who use Backblaze.”

After shutting down its cloud storage business last month, today Iron Mountain sold the entire Iron Mountain Digital business to Autonomy.

Why did Iron Mountain shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business? According to ZDNet, Iron Mountain “is exiting the digital business because it can’t keep up with developing technology.” This is backed up by StorageMojo who says that for it’s cloud storage by “selecting EMC – a premium-priced provider – suggests that IM got off on the wrong foot and never recovered.”

Iron Mountain Digital offered online backup to its customers and charged approximately $60 per computer per month for 30 GB! That is 12 times more than Backblaze charges for its online backup for unlimited storage. Backblaze was able to offer this service profitably at the $5 per month price point by focusing from day one on developing our own cloud storage system which at 10 petabytes five months ago already stored 2x more data for our customers than Iron Mountain.

Are you using Iron Mountain for your online backup needs? Worried about where your service is headed? Interested in a more cost-efficient offering?

We’re ready to help with your business online backup needs.

Backblaze has always kept a four week history of all the files we back up – typically referred to as “versioning”. This enabled you to realize that you liked your Powerpoint presentation from a couple days ago, before you added all that amazing clipart, and simply restore that previously backed up version.

Today we are launching the ability to restore files within a specific date range!

How would you use this? Let’s say you use Ghost, Time Machine, or another disk imaging product to periodically take a full local snapshot of your hard drive. If your hard drive dies and you have one of these backups, you could re-image a new hard drive directly from that image.

However, that image might be days or weeks old. You can use Backblaze to recover your most current files. By using the date range feature you can select only the files that are newer than your image backup.

I love hearing stories about how our online backup service helped someone recover their data. This letter that our support team forwarded to me was an interesting example of a time Backblaze came in handy:

My two year old son likes to listen to the same track from a certain CD every night before bed. It helps him to relax and always ensures he has a good night’s sleep (and therefore we do too). We recently went away on vacation and stupidly forgot to take the CD with us.

After attempting to sing it on the first night he was decidedly unimpressed, then I remembered that Backblaze had probably backed up the mp3 file. From my phone I logged into the Backblaze site, found that the file was indeed there and quickly downloaded it. The quality wasn’t that great when played through my phone’s speaker, but it made a very happy toddler and probably saved us from many miserable nights on holiday. Thanks Backblaze!

Kind regards,

Ste Robson

Glad to have been of help and thanks for sharing Ste!

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.

Backblaze has made a new release available and all users are scheduled to be automatically upgraded over the next two weeks. Below are the enhancements in this release:

Release Date: 3/30/11
Version: 1.5.2
Auto-Update: All Users

• Enabled quick scan of large external drives so files appear quicker in restores (Win)
• Fixed label on “Set Private Encryption Key” button in dialog box fixed (Win)
• Enabled scrollbar in “Transfer Backup State” dialog for customers with more than 16 computers (Win)
• Added exclusions for Office 2011 temporary files (Mac)
• Added launch of Backblaze menu icon when toggle hide/show icon (Mac)
• Added exclusion for OSX 10.4 to no longer auto-update (Mac)

Restoring a three megabyte file takes seconds. Restoring 400 GB might be best done by ordering a USB drive FedEx’ed to you. However, a restore between 1 GB and 100 GB you may choose to download, but that can be painful with most web browsers: some simply cannot support downloads over 4 GB, and most neither check to make sure the file downloaded correctly nor auto-restart where they left off if interrupted.

Thus, Backblaze has developed Restore Downloader apps for Windows and Mac. (The Mac one has been available for a little while; the Windows one becomes available now.)

You still select your restore the way you always did through the website. However, if a restore is over 1 GB, you will automatically be offered a tiny application with which you can download that restore.

Using it is simple: sign-in and click start download.

The Backblaze Restore Downloader will automatically start downloading the most recent restore you have selected. If you stop the restore or there is ever a hiccup in your network, the app will restart from where it left off.

Download the Restore Downloader for Windows, Mac, or have us auto-select for you.

It’s no secret that providing online backup for all of the data on peoples’ computers takes a lot of hard drives. To be specific, four tons of drives show up every week to our datacenter to backup our customers’ school papers, birthday videos and baby photos… So many freaken baby photos.

After a week of long brainstorming sessions and a recycle bin full of Red Bull cans, we still hadn’t had the amazing light bulb moment.

Then I read on Twitter a Wayne Gretzky tweet:

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is,
a great player plays where the puck is going to be”

That was it! The big realization: A quote like that is too good to risk being lost!

Backblaze will no longer backup a customer’s computer; instead we will backup their Twitter account! The idea immediately clicked with the whole team. Brian Wilson, CTO, said “I don’t use Twitter, but if I did, I would totally be bummed if my tweets were no longer available for posterity.”

And with a day of engineering work, we introduce our new path: TwitBlaze

Tim Nufire, VP of Engineering, had to develop a new, patented, artificial intelligence-based compression algorithm to save on storage space, enabling tweets to be compressed by 64%:

Original: “What is going on in my building? It sounds like a crazy dentist downstairs?”
Compressed: “Crzy dentst dwnstrs – wtf?”

Instead of the last 5 years of all tweets fitting into 1/3rd of a Backblaze Storage Pod, we can now fit all tweets onto a USB stick.

In addition, we had to throttle our large customers who tweet more than 100 messages a month – only their consonants will be backed up. This allows us to keep our costs down for all users by discouraging the messaging hogs.

We are proud to offer 5 different plans to meet your needs and increase confusion:

1. Basic for $5/month: backs up to 200 messages
2. Gold for $7/month: backs up to 400 messages, vowels are un-throttled
3. Platinum for $12/month: backs up 900 messages, and your followers’ tweets
4. Unobtainium for $49/month: backs up 20,000 messages, your followers, and Ashton Kutcher’s tweets
5. Adamantium for $99/month: backs up 100,000 messages including friends, followers, and celebrities. Restores are free via FedEx to you on a 3.5 inch floppy disk.

We are looking forward to providing this new service!
(Well, that, and not breaking our backs carrying all those tons of hard drives.)