Backblaze continues to grow and we want to help more people find out about our online backup service. We were inspired by the great “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT” billboard and would love for you to help us make our own!

Suggest a Backblaze billboard. If we use it, we’ll send you the new Kindle Fire!

Suggest ideas by any of these:
* Write them as a comment on this blog post.
* Write them on the Backblaze Facebook page.
* Tweet them and include (http://bit.ly/bzbillboard) to link to this post.

The rules:
* You can suggest as many ideas as you want.
* Suggesting the same idea twice doesn’t increase your chances.
* If multiple people suggest an idea we use, we’ll randomly pick one of those people.

Some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
* Backblaze Online Backup. $5/month. Unlimited Storage.
* Really, a billboard?!? Why?! Because you’re still not backing up.
* (No File Found) Should have backed up with Backblaze.
* Backblaze: because Google won’t ship G-drive.
* Diamonds might be forever, but your hard drive isn’t.

What is your suggestion?

A single Backblaze Storage Pod weighs nearly 150 lbs and takes two people to rack it. Each time Sean has gone to the data center to rack new pods (which happens every two weeks) he needed to bring another person for assistance. In the interest of giving Sean a hand, we bought him a friend. His name is Guido.

Guido is a $10k server lift and he works like a charm. He can lift the servers onto the very top rack and even has a special extender for the very bottom rack. Sean can now deploy Storage Pods without any help.

Meet Guido:

Sean working with Guido:

And a 3 second video of Guido doing the heavy lifting:

No, not 3 TB…3 GB. We stumbled across this scan of a Best Buy news ad from 1996. “30-Message Pagers”, “Motorola Cellular Flip Phone”, “28.8 kbps modem”…what a trip down memory lane.

One of my favorite ads, for obvious reasons, is for for hard drives:

At those prices, a Backblaze Storage Pod today would cost $18,000,000!
(45 drives * 3 GB * 1,000 GB per TB * $400)

The roughly 220 pods that we have at this point would cost nearly $4 billion!

I love the progress of technology.

Ok, actually it was Chloe that built the first pod. And Greg that built the second. But those pods were built to store the geospatial information data for GINA – the Geographic Information Network of Alaska.

When searching for pics of Backblaze Storage Pods, I stumbled across Chloe’s Picasa album, and asked her why she needed boatloads of storage. Here’s her story:

The pod you stumbled upon in my Picasa album was one of two that I helped build for the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA) in 2009/2010 when I was still a CS student. (I built the first pod, and finished up the build on the second, which was assembled by my colleague, Greg Wirth).

GINA is a small research group affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We operate on grants mostly, so we have to be conservative and wise with our spending. That’s why my boss, Dayne Broderson, chose to use the open hardware that you so generously provide schematics to.

At GINA, we have many years worth of spatial and sattelite imagery, and we keep it all saved away for GIS specialists, cartographers, professors and students at the university to use. We also provide the majority of this data online through Web Mapping Services (WMS) on our website. It’s basically our own Google Earth, so millions of image tiles need to be stored. Given those circumstances, we needed something that would allow the data to be readily available for viewing. That’s where the pods came in.

Our pods are the first (that I’ve heard of, anyway) to be used as High Availability cluster nodes. That means if one pod goes down, the other pod takes over its IP and web services, without the users ever noticing. Since robustness is important to us at GINA, we also altered the design a little to allow for a RAID1 system partition. Otherwise, losing that one system disk could lead to unexpected downtime.

My colleague, Greg, made a mounting bracket that mounted something quite similar to this IcyDock inside our pods. It let us use two 2.5″ hard drives, which we then installed with RAID1 for the OS.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994087

Here’s the finished product:

The only issue we ran into when building these was the PSU. The Modu 87 was cheaper and more readily available than the other PSU listed on your site, so we tried the Modu first. Here’s a picture of the problem we encountered:
https://xanth.gina.alaska.edu/pod/IMG_8289.JPG

From there, we tested it out with some molex adapters, which helped with the connector angle problem, but didn’t hold up under testing. (I let out the Magic Smoke! >_>)

We finally got our hands on the Plexton PSUs with the custom cabling, and everything from then on was smooth. It cleared up a lot of space inside the cases too, since the cabling was much neater.

It went so well, in fact, and has been running so reliably since, that my boss is considering implementing the V2 design next. I’m kind of jealous that I wont be there to help them build it this time, since I moved away recently to study more high-availability clustering at LINBIT. But that pod build was one of the most fun and interesting projects I’ve done yet!

Thanks for inquiring about our pods,

Best regards,

Stefanie “Chloe” Edgar

Congratulations Chloe on building a high-availability cluster version!
And thank you for sharing the story!

It’s been over a year since Backblaze revealed the designs of our first generation (67 terabyte) storage pod. During that time, we’ve remained focused on our mission to provide an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month. To maintain profitability, we continue to avoid overpriced commercial solutions, and we now build the Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384. It’s double the storage and twice the performance—at lower cost than the original.

In this post, we’ll share how to make a 2.0 storage pod, and you’re welcome to use the design. We’ll also share some of our secrets from the last three years of deploying more than 16 petabytes worth of Backblaze storage pods. As before, our hope is that others can benefit from this information and help us refine the pods. (Some of the enhancements are contributions from helpful kindred pod builders, so if you do improve your Backblaze pod farm, please balance the Karma and send us your suggestions!)

Quick Review – What makes a Backblaze Storage Pod

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. You can find a parts list in Appendix A. You can also link to a power wiring diagram, see an exploded diagram of parts, and check out a half-assembled pod. The two most noteworthy factors are that the cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and that the system is made entirely of commodity parts. For more background, read the original blog post. Now let’s talk about the changes.
Continue reading…

While Apple just recently announced their newest operating system, OS X Lion (10.7), Backblaze has been working with developers and beta testers for a while to ensure our online backup service is fully compatible.

When you rush out to upgrade to Lion, know that your Backblaze online backup service will work seamlessly. The new OS has 250 new features, but I wanted to call out a few:

Download the latest version (v.1.5.5) by clicking the Start Backing Up button on www.backblaze.com and enjoy the service on Lion! (All users will be automatically updated within a few weeks.)

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!