Tag Archives: Backblaze Bits

You’ve Cat to Be Kitten Me…

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/youve-cat-to-be-kitten-me/

Catblaze. It started as an April Fools’ joke four years ago, but it stuck around as part of our website ever since. A few intrepid website perusers even found their way to the page and signed up for our backup service there. To be clear: There’s no actual difference between the two products except the landing page. If you bought Backblaze on Catblaze, it’s Backblaze. You received the same great service as everyone else, just with a nice cat-themed wrapper. Got it? Great!

It’s been a while since we’ve done anything with Catblaze though, and so I got to thinking… If the page is still functional, how can we make use of it again? Well, why not redirect some traffic there and see how it affects conversions?! A lot of people love cats, maybe that love could be translated to loving backing up, too?

So, that’s exactly what we did! A few weeks ago, for one day, we diverted some traffic from backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html to backblaze.com/catblaze.html to see how they performed against each other. Did anyone even notice? And if they did, did they sign up anyway? Read on to find out! The results may shock you! And other clickbait hyperbole!

Why are we doing this? Well, along with everyone else who has had to shift to remote office-ing during the pandemic, we’ve been working hard to maintain high spirits and morale here at Backblaze. While we made a lot of changes to help our team be as productive as possible while working remotely, we thought, why not get a little silly, engage in a little charitable fundraising, and also buoy the spirits of our community at large: You!

With a lot of people spending more time at home, animal adoption in urban areas increasing, and “Tiger King” being so popular on Netflix, I spent some time chatting with a friend of mine who works for the Humane Society of the United States, and asked if there were any shelters that were looking for aid. He told me that the Peninsula Humane Society—the same branch that the models for the original “Catblaze Cats” came from—could use some donations. So, as part of this experiment, we’ll be contributing to them in honor of the kittens that helped make this experiment possible!

It also happens to be National Cat Day today, so what better way to celebrate?

And Now, on to the Results!

Wow, who would have known that diverting 50% of our hard-earned traffic to an April Fools’ landing page was an interesting idea? The results may or may not surprise you, but here’s the bottom line: Sending traffic to catblaze.com resulted in a decrease in trial conversions (folks coming to our site and creating a trial account) by 15%. Which, admittedly, is better than some of us had guessed!

Let’s dive into more of those numbers, shall we? (Assuming we’re comparing Catblaze to our regular Backblaze Computer Backup landing page.)

  • Days of experiment: One.
  • Traffic diverted: 50%.
  • Percent change in conversion rate from visit to trial: 15% reduction.
  • Percent change in conversion rate from visit to purchase (skip trial): 41% reduction.
    • 69.96% (A palindrome!) of people were less likely to purchase directly from Catblaze—that’s how many fewer folks went to the “buy” page next.
  • Percent change in bounce rate: 15% improvement.
    • Percent change in visits going to the home page from Catblaze: 118%.
  • Tweets asking us what is going on: Zero.
  • Support tickets asking us, “Why the cats?”: Zero.
  • Donation to the Peninsula Humane Society: $2,000.

Lessons Learned

While we probably shouldn’t update our onboarding messaging to include a picture of our Catblaze friends, it may be worth going a bit more kitten-friendly in future illustrations and designs for our website. The fact that there was a 15% improvement in bounce rate (and 20% reduction in exit rate) meant that people were sticking around and looking at that awesome cat content, or they were very confused. The cat content was at best amusing, but at worst confusing (which is usually not what you want your customers to be feeling), and you can see that was the case because we saw the number of people going back to our homepage increase by 118%. So, while we kept people on our website, their confusion was visible in how they navigated our website.

Perhaps the most entertaining thing is that no one asked about the Catblaze website. We received no Tweets or support tickets asking us why everything was cat-themed on our website. Based on our daily traffic, and the seemingly minor reasons that people write in with support tickets, I would have sworn up and down that I’d be on social media answering questions all day—though, if I responded to folks asking about it, that may have affected the experiment—so, it’s great that it went unnoticed.

Will we be doing this again? I doubt it. The Finance department is already sending me eye roll emojis, but it was definitely an interesting experiment and taught me one important lesson: While people definitely noticed the cats, they certainly didn’t seem to mind them.

The post You’ve Cat to Be Kitten Me… appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Not So Suite: Dealing With Google’s New 2TB Caps

Post Syndicated from Skip Levens original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/not-so-suite-dealing-with-googles-new-2tb-caps/

It’s easy to get used to “all you can eat” data plans—and one of the biggest justifications to use G Suite until now was that users could store as much as they wanted. But when we have unlimited data, we tend to forget about how much our content is growing until someone tells us our unlimited data plan is now… limited?

So it was a bit of a shock for lots of G Suite users to learn that they now only get 2TB per user for their $12 per user per month plan.

Hat tip to Jacob Hands who alerted us about this on Twitter!

G Suite users have to upgrade to the Enterprise class of service to retain unlimited storage. It’s unclear how much that costs because their pricing chart refers you to a sales representative if you want to get a quote. But as is true in restaurants: If you need to ask, it’s probably more expensive than you’d care to know.

If you’ve been using G Suite for long, and especially if you work with large data sets or rich media, you’re probably using more than 2TB per user. You’re going to need a plan to not only reduce your storage footprint on Google, but also safely store the content you’re forced to move while making it available and useful for your users. What do you do?

Side Note: Backblaze has proudly offered unlimited backup plans at a fixed price for close to 14 years, and we’ll continue to do so. This article focuses on solutions for teams using G Suite for collaboration. If you just need a solid backup, check out our guide on backing up your
G Suite data. If you’re looking for an incredible cloud storage offering, read on to learn about Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Take Control of Your Shared User Content

Good question. You can make the largest reduction quickly by shifting videos, image libraries, and data sets out of Google Drive and into Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage!

Backblaze B2, of course, is our easy-to-use cloud storage that stores everything you want to protect at only $5/TB per month, and it makes everything you store there immediately available to you, the instant you need it.

Getting started is as simple as signing up, then you can upload files and browse them in Backblaze’s web interface, or use any one of hundreds of solutions that incorporate Backblaze B2 seamlessly, such as the popular (and free) Cyberduck SFTP file browser.

With your Backblaze B2 account set up, it’s time to start pruning files in Google Drive and preparing them for transfer!

Step One: Take an Inventory of What You Have in Google Drive

Back in Google Drive, organize your efforts by file size. In other words, move the biggest stuff first. The simplest way to uncover large files is to use a not so obvious search feature to organize by file type: ZIP archives, videos, and photos will almost surely be filling the most space. To select files by type, click the tiny triangle at the right of the search field to reveal a file type dropdown.

Using Google Drive’s search field, and the dropdown triangle, you can specify large files to move manually.
Advanced Tips: If you’re reasonably proficient and have a ton of shared files to dig through, there are a few handy tools you can use to tackle this step.

Cyberduck: In Cyberduck, for example, you can add a new Bookmark for Google Drive, and follow the wizard to authenticate to G Suite. Now you can browse Team Drives, Shared Documents, and My Drive contents easily, identify the largest files, or simply move all of this content to local storage, then into your Backblaze B2 account.

Rclone: Rclone offers another way to mount and copy all of this content off of Google Drive as well, though that path is only recommended for more advanced users. You can then start moving the largest files, or even copy your entire Google Drive folder of content with rclone.

Step Two: Migrate Your Data to Backblaze B2

Now it’s time to carry out your plan: Download from G Suite, copy to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Buckets, and organize your data! Once your files are safely downloaded, and uploaded to your Backblaze B2 account, they’re safe to remove from Google Drive.

Step Three: Give Your Users Remote-friendly, yet Managed Storage

If you’re a solo operator, you should be all set. But if you’re working with a team, you’re going to want to take one more step to help out your users. The best way to present storage to your team is a solution that is both accessible for remote workers, yet also easily administered by you.

For Small Teams (3-20 Users): In Backblaze B2, you can define your users into workgroups, create Buckets of storage for them, and issue app keys for users that correspond to those Buckets—all from your account management page. Users can apply those app keys to a number of tools to make their storage available on their laptops, such as Cyberduck, Mountain Duck, or ExpanDrive.

For Larger Teams (21-Infinity): You can present fully managed storage to your users that offers the same experience as corporate, shared NAS storage with a pairing of LucidLink and Backblaze B2. This approach can be set up quickly, and tie into your company’s directory services for provisioning without having to buy and set up your own hardware NAS systems.

Welcome!

We hope you’ll join us—we look forward to protecting your content and helping you serve your users!

The post Not So Suite: Dealing With Google’s New 2TB Caps appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Wishful Thinking: Extended Version History in Real Life

Post Syndicated from Caitlin Bryson original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wishful-thinking-extended-version-history-in-real-life/

When it comes to your data, sometimes you just need to roll back time. Fortunately, with Extended Version History now available, Backblaze can save old and deleted files for up to 30 days, one year, or even forever—depending on the option you choose—so that you can access old versions of your files and restore files that you’ve previously deleted over a longer stretch of time.

Restoring a file just prior to that big “oops” moment or salvaging a deleted file you didn’t think you’d need again is a great feeling, but it’s a little hard to describe in the abstract. The more we thought about it, the more we realized that there are plenty of things other than data that we wish had retain/restore capabilities. Here are the top 10 things in real life that we wish had Extended Version History! We hope they help convey why Extended Version History could be valuable for you.

Where Extended Version History Would Be Great in Real Life

Haircuts

We’ll admit it—during shelter-in-place—more than a few of us have given ourselves poorly-advised, unskilled haircuts at home. It usually starts out well, your new hair actually looks pretty good, and you start feeling confident!

“This isn’t so hard,” you think, “so maybe I’ll just go a LITTLE shorter.” And then disaster strikes.

You’ve gone too short and your hair is ruined. What we wouldn’t give for the ability to restore back to the moment just before that last snip!

To take it a step further, with Forever Extended Version History, you could even go back to that one perfect haircut from a few years ago that your stylist has somehow never been able to recreate. Great hair for life!

Reading

Re-reading can be wonderful, but nothing compares to the thrill of reading an incredible book for the first time. Short of losing your memory, there’s no way to get that feeling back—but with Forever Version History, you could shift back to before your first read. Meet the characters all over again, follow every plot twist, and experience every page-turning moment again like new!

Eating

That second pint of ice cream seemed like such a good idea at the time. But now that you’ve finished off that mint-chocolatey goodness, your stomach is feeling… less than pleased. What if you could restore yourself to a single-pint state, while retaining the memories of that delicious second helping? We’d be on board, and just think of the endless “tasting” opportunities!

Avocados

Avocados are delicious, especially when you catch them at the perfect level of ripeness. Unfortunately, that level usually seems to be about a three-hour window between “rock hard” and “completely mushy.” If only Extended Avocado History existed—then you could avoid the sinking feeling of cutting into one and realizing you were too early or too late. Someone contact the Avocado Board!

Baking

We heard a few of you have taken up baking during the shelter-in-place orders. And by “heard,” we mean we’ve looked for yeast at the grocery store for months and it’s never in stock. We hope you enjoy your sourdough starter!

But whether you’re making cookies, pies, or sourdough, there’s nothing worse than smelling that burning odor and realizing you’ve just wasted time and a good portion of your ingredients on an inedible product.

Wouldn’t it be great to rewind back to just before smoke started billowing from your oven, saving you from having to throw out your charred baked goods and start over? We think so. (With our standard 30 Day Version History, you can at least recover old recipes you’ve saved over.)

Coffee

Ah, coffee. Delicious, caffeinated, and a crucial part of most morning routines. Until you spill it down the front of your brand-new shirt or across your laptop keyboard, and suddenly everything is terrible. Your shirt is ruined, your laptop is making funny noises, and now you have no coffee.

Being able to restore back to a pre-spill moment would save your clothing, your technology—and your morning. Backblaze has a lot of experience with helping people after spills…

Plants

Some people have green thumbs. Some seem to be death incarnate for our little vegetal compatriots. And there truly is no worse feeling than doing your absolute best and watching your newest plant friend slowly die, again.

Did you water too much? Did you not water enough? Did you leave it in direct sunlight or shade? By the time you figure it out, it’s usually too late. But if One Year Plant Version History was real, you could find the issue and revert back to when your plant was healthy—and this time, do it right. And just think about your never-ending cherry tomato yields!

Hiking

A seven-mile hike sounded like such a good idea at the time. But now you’re four miles down the trail, and you’re ready to be done. Too bad you’ve still got three more miles, and turning around would just make the trip back even longer!

Being able to restore back to an earlier point on the trail—maybe a mile or two—would let you cut your hike short and head back to the start, giving you the fun hiking experience without the pain of those last few miles. Sign us up.

Dates

The first date has been going so well. Conversation has been easy, the chemistry is there, and you feel like a second date is imminent. Then you make one comment, and you know as soon as it starts exiting your mouth that it’s coming out wrong.

You backpedal, you explain, you apologize—but the damage is done, and that first impression is ruined. The chance to rethink or rephrase would be everything in this moment, and Dating Version History would let you skip back a moment and save your potential future relationship. Also great for business meetings (ask that question that you’re a bit nervous to ask, get the answer, then go back in time and nod knowingly to yourself)!

Naps

It’s coming up on mid-afternoon, and you’re starting to feel a lull. Perfect time for a power nap, so you’ll awake refreshed and ready to take on the rest of the day. Except instead, you slept for four hours, and now you’re groggy and your sleep schedule is a mess. Sleeping through alarms happens to the best of us, but it can easily turn an energizing nap into a sleepy evening. The dream fix? Using Nap Version History to get back to that perfect 90-minute nap time, wake up, and finish off your day strong!

Conclusion

Okay, sure, we get it—this is all a tad unrealistic. But there’s one area of life where your keenest regrets CAN be corrected with a quick visit to our restore page: your backup! So check out our version history page and explore your options for gaining greater peace of mind! And if you’re an existing customer, you can upgrade easily right here.

The post Wishful Thinking: Extended Version History in Real Life appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Amazon Drive and Third Parties—Derailed

Post Syndicated from Skip Levens original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/amazon-drive-and-third-parties-derailed/

Backblaze laptop

If you ever used Amazon Drive for storing files or photos, it’s a good time to think about how to transition your content to a new platform—especially if you had been backing up your Synology NAS system!

Today, Amazon customers notified Amazon Drive and Amazon Photo customers that beginning November 1st, only Amazon’s proprietary web and mobile apps will be able to access your files.

This means, for example, that Synology users who had relied on Synology Cloud Sync or HyperBackup to back up their systems to Amazon Drive will have their access shut off via those tools.

Getting Back on Track

If you’re still using Amazon Drive to store general files, and Amazon Photos to store photos, you might be wondering how to protect that content with a tool that you prefer before the November 1st deadline hits.

1. Recover Your Content

Your first task will be to recover all of your content from Amazon Drive. Via their website, download the Amazon Photos app. Install, and select “Download” to download all of your Amazon Drive content locally. To download photos stored in Amazon, you may find it helpful to click “Home,” then “Photos Backed Up” will take you to a webpage that lets you download photos directly, say, by year.

First, recover all of your content from Amazon Photos and Amazon Drive.

2. Welcome to Your New Platform

With your content stored locally, we invite you to try Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for unlimited storage for all of your files and photos at a better price than Amazon Drive.

Sign up for your Backblaze B2 account first. Your first 10GB of storage every month is free, and beyond that is only $5 per terabyte of storage per month, vs. Amazon’s $6.99 for a terabyte of storage.

3. Choose the Tool That Fits How You Work

Best of all, with Backblaze B2 you have a choice of over 60 solutions to connect to your new account!

If you’re a Synology user, you can keep using Synology Cloud Sync or HyperBackup to back up your files—simply select your new Backblaze account instead of Amazon Drive.

If you prefer graphical tools that help present your cloud storage as files and folders, Cyberduck is a great choice, and Mountain Duck will even mount your Backblaze B2 account as drives on your Mac or Windows system.

You can browse our guides for all integration tools here.

Cyberduck connected to your Backblaze B2 account makes it as simple as browsing files and folders to upload and download your files.
Mountain Duck will even mount your Backblaze B2 cloud storage on your computer as a drive—here showing a thumbnail of an 8K video clip.

And if you prefer command-line tools, rclone is an excellent choice, as is Backblaze’s own command-line tool.

For more information about using rclone, join our webinar, “Tapping the Power of Cloud Copy & Sync with Rclone” on September 17th. Rclone’s creator, Nick Craig-Wood, will explain how to use its simple command line interface to:

  • Optimize your copy/sync in line with best practices
  • Mirror storage for security without adding complexity
  • Transfer data reliably despite limited bandwidth and/or intermittent connection

Whichever tool you choose, getting it set up is as simple as visiting your Backblaze B2 Account Page, generating an Application Key, entering the Application Key ID and Application Key in your new tool’s configuration settings.

4. Protect, and Access Your Content Freely

With your tool of choice configured, it’s time to move your local content to your new Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Welcome!

We hope you’ll join us—we look forward to protecting your files and photos!

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