Tag Archives: ConsumerBackup

How to Download and Back Up Your Mastodon Account

2023-01-12 Stephanie Doyle

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-download-and-back-up-your-mastodon-account/

Mastodon: Have you heard of it? As a social media platform, it’s unique in that it’s free, open-source, and crowdfunded. It doesn’t have ads, and it’s not owned by a corporation. When you set up an account on Mastodon, you select a server (called an “instance”) where your account lives. All of that can sound confusing to your average computer user, though it also makes it a favorite amongst the more tech-savvy users in the world.

The truth of Mastodon’s distributed servers is that it doesn’t really matter which server you choose to set up on. Since each server talks to every other server (just like email), you’ll be able to use the social network just like you would Twitter or any other microblogging platform. You can publish text posts (adorably called “toots”) and attach media such as pictures, audio, video, or polls. Mastodon lets you follow friends and discover new ones, and also uses hashtags to find communities or topics you may be interested in.

Also just any other social media site, you’ll want to back up all your posts. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

How Mastodon Works: The Nuts and Bolts

There are some people who want to host their own Mastodon server (if that’s you, it means that other accounts would be hosted on your server, and you’d be responsible for setting standards to moderate content). In that case, you may want to back up your Mastodon server data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage—or even use our always-hot storage to actively run your server like this Mastodon user who kept running out of storage and used Backblaze for a cost-effective storage solution.

Stay tuned: We’re planning on writing about this in the future.

But, if you’re just using your account like you would on any other social media platform—that is, you’re posting, finding friends, sharing cute pictures of dogs, etc.—you’ll want to make sure that your posts and memories are protected. There’s the normal run of data loss dangers: natural disasters, computer crashes, and so on. But also, since anyone can bring up their own Mastodon server, they can just as easily take them down. In that case, having a backup means that you can easily move your account to another server on the Mastodon platform without losing your toots.

Let’s talk about the best way to keep your data backed up with Backblaze Computer Backup.

Download Your Mastodon Data

Like most services that prioritize open sourcing, Mastodon has a fantastic documentation center. If you ever have questions, start there first (that’s what we did). To get started with your Mastodon back up, you’ll want to download your account information. After you log into your account, navigate to Settings > Export. The screen should look like this:

As you can see, there are lots of lists you can download straight from this screen. These include your block lists and mute lists—an excellent feature which means you can maintain your privacy settings if you need to move your account, or open a new account on a different server.

To get your toots as well as any uploaded media, like photos or videos, you simply click the button to request your archive. You can request this archive once every seven days.

Once you have that file, you can either upload a copy of it to Backblaze B2 (which is free for your first 10GB of storage), or, Backblaze Personal Backup (we’ve got a free trial there too, of course). Backblaze Personal Backup is super easy—just save that file natively on your computer so that it’s included in your always-running backup service.

While You’re At It…

We’ve gathered a handful of guides to help you protect your content across many different platforms. We’re working on developing this list—please comment below if you’d like to see another platform covered.

Why Back Up Your Mastodon Archive?

It’s always smart to protect your data with a 3-2-1 backup strategy. This means that you’ll have three copies of your data stored in two different local destinations with one copy kept off-site.

Taking your Mastodon archive file as an example, let’s see where those files would live to make sure we satisfy the 3-2-1 backup strategy:

The downloaded copy of your Mastodon archive is saved to your personal computer.
You also back up that archive on your external hard drive.
You have a third copy of the file saved in your Backblaze account.

Especially if you’re using a sync service for the files on your computer, sometimes things get modified or deleted accidentally. When that happens, you can restore from the backup copy on your hard drive. If your hard drive crashes for some reason, then you also have another copy you can easily restore from your Backblaze account. Since it lives in the cloud, even if your computer and your hard drive are lost (say, in a natural disaster), you will still have another copy of your data you can use to get back online.

Even better: If you enable Extended Version History on your Backblaze Computer Backup account, you can see older versions of your file. That’s useful if you accidentally replace your Mastodon archive and there was something you needed, but got changed. They have the same name, right? It’d be an easy mistake to make and not notice until you need to restore. With Extended Version History, you’d just choose an earlier instance of the file, restore it, and then move that file back to your computer and hard drive.

Mastodon Users Are On Top of Back Up

Of course, you can always go above those minimum standards, as these folks were discussing in this Mastodon thread.

We’re not surprised that Mastodon users are talking about their intricate back up systems. Generally speaking, if you’re someone who is interested in or uses open-source tech, you know that it can be a double-edged sword. The community is constantly finding and fixing bugs, asking questions, and creating tech. It’s exciting and creative, but sometimes you have to do a bit more legwork to make things work well.

So, users on Mastodon know the risks when they choose to host their data on someone else’s server, and Mastodon gives you options for how to reconstitute your account if that happens. It’s one of the reasons we love Mastodon: they thought about how to back up when they built the platform.

And, because Mastodon is open source, “they” = users who are (often) also contributing to the code. Of course they’re having spirited debates about how to make their tech lives better and more secure—and we love to see it!

In Theory, It’s Easier to Lose Your Data on Mastodon

We said at the beginning of this article that it really doesn’t matter which server (“instance”) you choose to host your Mastodon account on—and it doesn’t, when you’re talking about interacting with the platform as a user.

The thing that is different about Mastodon is that because it runs on distributed servers, Mastodon is (in theory) more vulnerable than other networks to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. If your server gets overloaded, it may result in you losing data.

A DDoS attack is like all these people shouting different questions at you at the same time and expecting answers—you’d crash and burn too.

Another thing to take note of is that Mastodon doesn’t have automatic updates. As a user, the onus is on you to check GitHub and to update accordingly. Since platform updates are often released to close security vulnerabilities, if you aren’t on top of this, you’re at risk of losing your data from a cyberattack.

This doesn’t mean that Mastodon as a social media site is less safe. In fact, because they automatically set up multi-factor authentication (MFA) and store less of your personal identifiable information, in some ways it’s safer than other platforms.

As long as you’re regularly backing up your Mastodon archive, you should be totally (“toot-ally”?) covered. Start your free trial with Backblaze Computer Backup, follow the steps we’ve set out above, and you’ll be all set.

The post How to Download and Back Up Your Mastodon Account appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The Beginner’s Guide to Computer Backup with Backblaze

2022-12-21 Stephanie Doyle

Post Syndicated from Stephanie Doyle original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/beginner-guide-to-computer-backup/

Wouldn’t it be great if computers never crashed? If laptops never got lost? If that cup of coffee never spilled across your keyboard? As much as we’d like to believe that our computers will always work and the data on them will always be safe and accessible, accidents happen. Regardless of how you’re using your computer, you’re storing data that needs to be backed up.

Whether you’ve accidentally deleted a synced file, have a social media presence that’s just too valuable to lose, are going back to school, or you want to make sure you’re protected from cyberattacks, having your data backed up means that your important information isn’t lost forever. So, let’s talk about how to get the most out of your Backblaze account.

1. Set Yourself Up for Success

Backblaze backs up all the files on your computer, including documents, photos, music, movies, and more. When you’re creating your account for the first time, that can take some time—longer than you might think depending on how much data you have and how fast your internet connection is. (If you think it will take a really long time, you should probably be considering Backblaze B2 and our Universal Data Migration solutions). It’s important that your computer is on and awake during that time period, so we suggest that you turn off your computer’s sleep mode during your initial backup.

2. Keep Your Account Secure

We’ve talked before about how to keep your passwords safe, but we just want to make sure it’s clear how important that is for your backups. When backups are your last line of defense—your only option for recovery—then it’s imperative that you use unique passwords and practice a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

Like Librarians, We Work Quietly

Backblaze works quietly in the background while you go about your normal computer life. Note that we’ll only backup a document that’s not actively open. So, make sure to close out your projects when you’re done for the night (or day).

3. Bring Your Drive to the Table

If you have external drives, it’s essential that you connect them to your computer to be backed up to your Backblaze account. In order to give us enough time to scan the whole drive, make sure that it’s plugged into your primary computer for at least four hours in a row, once every two weeks. Here’s some more information on using external hard drives with Backblaze.

4. Check In

Once a week, it’s a great idea to check that your backups are working properly. If they’re not, make sure that you have the most recent version of Backblaze, or you can always contact our Support Team to make sure everything is running smoothly.

And, once a month, it’s a good idea to try to restore files from your online account. This is especially important if you have external devices. It’s always good practice to double check that things are running well, but it also gives you an opportunity to make sure you’ve backed up your external drive successfully.

5. On Restoration: The Sooner, The Better

When you’ve lost data, make sure you restore your data ASAP. If you’re ever worried you may need data continuity, remember that you can easily enable Extended Version History for $2/month. That will give you the ability to restore any version of a file for one year—or forever—depending on what you need.

Remember that Backblaze offers lots of file restoration options. Of course, you can use our website, but you can also restore from your mobile device or even order a USB. (We know; old school.)

Backup and Beyond

We are big advocates of backing up, of course. Hey, it’s for good reason. We want our tech to be accessible to all types of users. We love when you tell your friends about us, or you can use us to help your family and friends. If we’re missing any good tips or you have questions for us, feel free to comment below, say hi on socials, or contact Support.

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Computer Backup with Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Let’s Not Go Phishing Today: Tips for Home Computer Users

2022-12-15

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/lets-not-go-phishing-today-tips-for-home-computer-users/

Every so often, a family member or friend will ask me if an email they received is a phishing email. That’s part of my job as the unofficial family tech person. Email phishing and its cousins vishing (voice phishing) and smishing (text phishing), are still a serious problem for the average home computer user. While businesses are slowly implementing phishing detection tools—and, more importantly, user training—to help tackle the problem, home computer users are, for the most part, left to fend for themselves.

Our goal in this post is to provide a few tips and tricks for those oft-forgotten home computer users—your old-school neighbor, your unassuming grandma, or your friend who’s just not that tech savvy—in their effort to use their computer without losing their life savings by clicking on the wrong link.

You can scroll past the first few sections to the phishing tips we’ve prepared so that you can use to better understand and identify a phishing email. Or, continue reading to learn more about the phishing problem, why it matters, and then finish up with the phishing tips.

Why It Matters

Phishing is the use of social engineering techniques—tactics that use psychological manipulation like impersonating someone you know—to get you to take an action that can lead to your downloading a virus or malware, having your account credentials stolen, becoming an extortion victim, or some other malicious action.

While detection and blocking technology has advanced over the years, Dark Reading, a cyber security news site, estimates that up to one percent of all emails that make it to the end user’s mailbox are phishing emails. For home users, who typically have to rely on their internet service provider (referred to as an ISP) or their browser (like Chrome or Safari) to keep them safe, the number is probably higher. Still, 1% doesn’t sound like much—until you consider that to get to that point, these phishing emails are the best of the best. Suddenly, it starts to make sense as to why up to 70% of phishing emails are opened by the recipient.

Who Owns the Phishing Problem?

My friends and family are not creators or purveyors of technology; they are primarily users. Asking them to identify phishing emails by deciphering the email raw source or header is not in their wheelhouse, nor should it be. We take planes, trains, and automobiles without knowing much about how they work. It should be possible to safely receive and interact with an email without having to understand sender authentication or bone up on RFC 5322.

Back in 2005, when most of us first heard of phishing, we had a pretty good idea which businesses and people would contact us and how they would reach us. Today, nearly every company or organization we interact with has a website, an email subscription, an app, social media, and maybe a phone number or two. The daily number of messages we receive via email, phone, text, and so on has easily increased 10-fold (100-fold?) over that time. Do you really have any idea how many accounts you’ve created in your lifetime, and if so, how each of them reaches and interacts with you?

Making matters worse is the proliferation of data collection services—legitimate, shady, and illegal—which will sell personal information to nearly anyone with a purchase order, credit card, or better yet, the latest cryptocurrency. Personal data such as your name, address, last four digits of a credit card, and much more are readily available. As a result, a phishing email can use your name and provide additional personal details along the way in an effort to make you believe it is valid ← that’s social engineering at work.

What Can You Do?

For home computer users, the phishing problem may not be of your making, but you cannot rely on technology if you want to safely function in today’s highly connected world. Phishing uses some really crafty tactics (i.e. social engineering) to get you to believe that when you receive a message from the bad guys, it is okay to do what they are asking you to do. That means you have to be at your best when the incoming message chime rings.

To that end, below we’ve provided you with a little social engineering education in the form of some easy to remember tips you can use to ferret out a phish. We’ll use email in our examples, but the techniques can apply to most inbound communications you’ll receive. In addition, you don’t have to have any special technical superpowers, just some common sense and the ability to lower your FOMO (fear of missing out) threshold.

You can read the tips below, but we’ve also prepared a 20-minute Let’s Not Go Phishing Today webinar which provides a little more depth for each of these tips. You can read the tips below, watch the webinar, or both. The webinar is available on the Backblaze channel on BrightTALK. Keep in mind that you will need to register to watch.

Tip 1: No trust and not useful.

Situation	You receive an email from a business, organization, or person. You are certain you do not know or trust the sender and you were not expecting to receive the email.
Example	You receive an email to lower your mortgage interest rate from a bank you do not use. Oh, and you rent.
Considerations	There are zero reasons to open this email. There is no upside here at all for you. Even if this is not phishing, it is most likely spam.
Disposition	Delete the email while crooning, “But there ain’t no Coupe de Ville hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box,” in the style of Meat Loaf (“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” Bat Out of Hell, 1977).

Your on-stage moment is at 2:27.

Tip 2: No trust, but you’re not sure.

Okay, tip one was pretty simple. They get a little harder now.

Situation	You receive an email from a business, organization, or person. You might know the sender, but you really weren’t expecting an email.
Example	You receive an email and the sender name sounds familiar, but that’s it. Maybe you stopped by a store and provided your email to the clerk, maybe you bought a shirt from them two years ago, or maybe it’s just some advertisement you saw, but nothing is ringing a bell.
Considerations	Don’t open the email right away, let it sit in your inbox for a day or two to see if there is a follow up message or perhaps you remember something. Often phishers will use time to pressure you into acting. Surely you would have remembered something so important, so don’t let time pressure you into doing something you shouldn’t. Trust yourself. If you do open the email do not click on any of the links and do not call any phone numbers you may find in the email. Just read the email to see if anything jogs your memory.
Disposition	After a day or two, if nothing rings a bell, delete the email. If it was important, they’ll resend. Click delete. If you think the email could be legit—Okay, really, just lower your FOMO threshold and click delete. I am sure that a bank in Ireland is not waiting to give you a million dollars if you call them.

Fun fact: $1 million in $1 bills weighs 1.1 tons. Say that three times fast!

Tip 3: Trust, but verify.

Situation	You receive an email from a business, organization, or person. You know the sender, but you weren’t really expecting an email from them.
Example	You receive a promotional email from a business. You are a customer of this business and even have an online account with them. You were not expecting the email, but the email makes you an offer that is interesting to you.
Considerations	You can receive promotional emails anytime, but they are more prevalent around holidays and marketing events like Cyber Monday. Phishers know this and will use this to their advantage to avoid detection. A phisher can send out millions of emails in an attack spoofing a given business. If you have a relationship with that business, you are prime pickings. Do not assume that just because you are a customer, the email is legitimate. A phisher can also send out very targeted emails using personal information they have collected from data breaches and other sources, both public and private. Just because an email has your name and other personal details, it does not mean it is legitimate. If you decide to open the email do not click on any of the links and do not call any phone numbers you may find in the email. Read the email and see what they are asking you to do.
Disposition	If you think the promotional offer is legitimate, then open a new browser window and type in the URL to go to the website, or open the app on your phone/tablet for that business. You may have to sign in to your account, but the promotion should be available in one of those places. If the promotion is only available via the email, contact customer service for the business and ask. Remember to use the website or app to contact customer service, not any of the contact information provided in the email. Sometimes, an offer is only available by clicking on a link in the email. In my opinion this is lazy marketing and puts you at risk. Let the business know this is not acceptable.

Spam or Phish?

The email described above could be just a spam email. Whether an email is spam or phishing can be confusing, but in general spam messages are just trying to sell you something and phishing emails have some harmful intent. That said, the same tips we are using for identifying a phishing email can be used to identify spam messages as well.

Tip 4: Trust, but still verify.

Situation	You receive an email from a business, organization, or person. You know the sender and you were expecting the email.
Example	You receive an email on the 10th of the month from your credit card company saying your statement is ready. They always send you this email on the 10th of the month. The email says you can click on the link to sign in to your account and view the statement.
Considerations	It is highly likely this is a legitimate email, but given this email concerns your financial affairs, being extra careful is imperative. Opening up a web browser and typing in the URL to go to the bank’s website to sign in there is safer. This also enforces the good behavior of not clicking on links in emails. Many financial companies and health care providers are starting to maintain a list of messages they send you via email and/or text. You can log into your account to view the list to make sure that any message you received was actually sent by the provider—before you interact with the message. This is an excellent best practice and such businesses should be commended for thinking about their customer’s online safety and security.
Disposition	Even if you think the email is legitimate, use a web browser to access your online account, or use their app to take the requested action.

Downloading Email Attachments?

Only download an attachment that you were expecting to receive, preferably after you were notified via another email—or better yet another method such as a text message. For example, you or whomever you’re interacting with may say, “Hey Monique, I’m going to email those pictures in a minute.” Downloading unsolicited or unexpected attachments is not recommended.

Think of email, text messaging, and voicemail as read-only services, especially when it comes to your financial and health information. This is sometimes really hard with text messages that encourage you to “click this link to…” and voicemail messages saying “call us back at a specific number.” Such messages offer convenience and help move things forward—and sometimes, they are the only way to get things done. At that point, you have to trust the vendor and your instincts.

What to Do When You’re Forced to Click

There are two common situations where you are forced to click a link in an email or message in order to move forward: email newsletters and two factor (2FA) or multifactor (MFA) authentication.

We’re this happy about 2FA security too.

Newsletters

Newsletters can deliver valuable information and often link to other content for additional details. The trouble is, those links are often obscured by tracking redirects used to count how many clicks the link gets—It’s a marketing thing. The average user has little hope of figuring out where the link is actually going, so they are faced with ignoring the information or clicking to the unknown. Let’s break down an example.

Situation	You receive a newsletter from a company you do business with and have received newsletters from them before.
Example	Backblaze sends you a customer newsletter. There’s an article on a new feature and you want to learn more. To do so you have to click on a link, but when you rollover the link (don’t click) it reads something like: `“https://hub.backblaze.com/xxt/XXt/R+000/xx-h-99/V88XHdW7_bXrN4b0ml7W7xsyK94Tmm-9N2x86z13q3phV1-WJV7CgHCJW7swZm-8j6kXwW6cD…”` plus 50-60 more characters that are not displayed.
Considerations	It may seem it goes to the Backblaze website (backblaze.com), but without seeing the entire URL you can’t be sure. It could end with `“.../bad-guys-website.com“,` which would not take you to Backblaze. Were you expecting this newsletter or at least have you gotten a newsletter from Backblaze before? If it is the first time, did you just sign up? What is the intent of the newsletter? Providing information or asking for something? If the newsletter is asking you to sign in to your account for example, it is easy enough to open a new web browser window and sign in from there.
Disposition	This one is all about trust, timing, and clicks. Let’s assume you trust Backblaze as a good sender, the newsletter looks very Backblaze-y, and this is something you would expect. If you do click on the newsletter links, there are two primary things to consider. First, if the link takes you to a sign up or sign in page, stop. Always open a new browser window, enter the URL to go to the site, and sign in from there. Second, make sure the click takes you where you expected to go. If you get pop-ups for downloading a toolbar or extension, land on an unexpected webpage, or other unusual browser behavior (e.g. an automatic download), close the browser window and everything else on your system. Then, run a full antivirus scan immediately. If you are not inclined to click on any links in newsletters, we understand. In our case most of the links on a Backblaze newsletter will go to our blog or our website. You can open a new browser window and find the content on the Backblaze website. This works for the many different newsletters you may get daily. That is: You can usually find the content directly versus clicking on the link.

Tell Us More…

The problem with not clicking on the links in newsletters and other similar communications is that marketing folks lose information about what is important to the recipients, but your peace of mind is more important. So, a healthy alternative is that you could send an email or post something on social media about what you like and what you don’t. Even visiting the pages and interacting with the articles the newsletter highlighted will help. Marketers get feedback, you give your opinion on good content, and you’re a little safer from phishing attacks.

2FA or MFA

More and more websites are requiring the use of two factor or multifactor authentication. Here are a couple of scenarios to help you deal with the messages you might receive.

Scenario 1

Situation	Your bank’s website uses text message-based two factor authentication to confirm access to your accounts.
Example	Using a browser, you log in to your bank’s website. A couple of seconds later, you receive the text on your phone with a code that you need to enter on the website.
Disposition	By asking to log in to your bank, you expect to get the text which provides the authentication code. You’re good.

Scenario 2

Situation	Your bank’s website uses two factor authentication to confirm access to your accounts. You believe it is text message-based authentication.
Example	Using a browser, you log in to your bank’s website. A couple of seconds later, you receive an email asking to click a link to allow the log in to your account.
Considerations	This is one of those cases where you need to know how the bank will contact you for the second factor. It could be a text message with the code (like the first example above). It could also be by clicking the link in a test message, or through an authentication app on your phone, or by email message, or even by phone. Given the timing of the events in this example, it is highly likely that you had set up email as your second factor. But, sometimes it is not that easy to tell, especially if there are several minutes before you get the authentication message—or worse, if you don’t get the message at all. One way to make this easier on you is to try to use the same authentication method for each website. The trouble is that different companies support different methods and not others. In some cases, you may be able to find information on the bank’s website to determine the authentication method they use.
Disposition	If you’re not sure of the authentication method that was set up, you can abandon the sign-in, then open a new browser window and start again. If you get the same authentication method, you can be reasonably confident you’re doing the right thing.

Moving Forward

Over the past couple of years, vendors involved with providing email, text, and voicemail services have gotten better at detecting and eliminating phishing, spam, and malware before it reaches you. That’s great. But the bad guys haven’t given up, and many would say they’ve gotten better.

These tips are a good starting point for improving your ability to stay safe using the internet, email, and your phone. There are many websites and resources where you can learn more and stay informed about phishing and other forms of malware. We listed a few below. You can click on the links, but (if you are a little paranoid at this point), you can search for “consumer phishing resources” or just “phishing resources” using your favorite search engine. Good luck, and stay safe.

Select Phishing Resources

Knowbe4: The world’s first and largest new-school security awareness training and simulated phishing platform.
Phishing.org: A project from KnowBe4 that is a resource for IT professionals to keep you up to date on the latest phishing threats. The Resources page has some free tools to help improve your phishing knowledge.
Phishing info from the Federal Trade Commission.
A phishing primer from the National Cybersecurity Alliance.

The post Let’s Not Go Phishing Today: Tips for Home Computer Users appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Bookblaze: First Annual Backblaze Book Guide

2022-12-12 Molly Clancy

Post Syndicated from Molly Clancy original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/bookblaze-first-annual-backblaze-book-guide/

Fact: Books are the best gifts to give friends and family this time of year. At least we think so here at Backblaze (second to the gift of Backblaze, of course). This post is your case in point—we got so many book recommendations when we put together our annual holiday gift guide that we thought they deserved their own post. So, we’re introducing the very first annual Bookblaze Book List.

For the readers in your lives, here’s a list of books that come highly recommended from the Backblaze team. (And it’s worth noting that we don’t get any affiliate or sponsorship income for these recommendations. They’re just the books our colleagues read and loved this year.) Let’s dive in.

Cozy Reads for Your Winter Needs

Jeremy Milk, Head of Product Marketing

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

“Inspired” presents a thoughtful deep dive and actionable steps for how anyone and everyone within an organization can operate to better serve customers with ever better products and services. The book was written in 2018 (I think) but remains a go-to for the customer-obsessed among us.

Andy Klein, Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

“Chaos” was printed back in 1987, but is still available on Amazon and some bookstores. Why is this my choice? I read the book hoping to understand the burgeoning field of chaos theory, the science of seeing patterns and order in the randomness of the everyday world we live in. The book was amazingly readable. The author takes a subject that could easily be three hundred pages of math, science, and history, swirling down a rabbit hole, and keeps the book approachable and within the grasp of the audience. It won’t change your world, but you’ll look at many things a little differently.

Yev Pusin, Computer Backup Steward

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

One of my favorite books of the last few years. This period piece murder mystery takes place in a Victorian house and from the perspectives of various house party guests. No spoilers!

Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

This series is all the rage in a lot of different circles. If you’re interested in space, necromancy, or mysteries (who isn’t)—this one’s for you!

Kari Rivas, Product Marketing Manager

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I have not yet read a book by Taylor Jenkins Reid that I haven’t loved, but this one is top of the list for 2022. In “Seven Husbands,” Reid paints a picture of a complex and not immediately likable character living a fascinating life. Each chapter (read: husband) of Evelyn’s life marks a point in Evelyn’s evolution from ambitious starlet to mature grande dame who can (nearly) accept herself as she is. Modern themes of how we define family, love, and relationships intersect with this tale of old Hollywood.

Nicole Gale, Marketing Operations Manager

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

For your friend patiently waiting for the TV adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Jones’ “Daisy Jones and the Six,” the book “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev” by Dawnie Walton is also based on faux music history and is, dare I say, even better. Follow Opal Jewel and Nev Charles, an Afropunk rock ’n’ roll duo who find fame and notoriety in the 1970’s after a tragic incident at a concert in 1973. The band splits, but a reunion concert is planned in 2026—which is when S. Sunny Shelton, a music editor at Aural Magazine, takes the chance to record interviews with the duo and those connected to them.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

This book is perfect for anyone in your life that is looking for a book they will read and re-read again. This book is a historical fiction book about Elizabeth Zott who only ever wanted to be a scientist—but because she’s a woman in the 1960s, she has to go begging for beakers despite being the smartest researcher in the building. After reading 50 books this year, this one is by far my favorite, and I still quote Elizabeth Zott in my head. I love her (and her dog 6:30), and you will too.

Caitlin Bryson, Marketing Events Manager

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Two time-traveling spies on opposite sides of a multiverse-spanning war make contact and begin to write letters to each other across time and space. Time travel, suspense, romance, and absolutely GORGEOUS writing—what more could you ask for?

Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist

Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel “Watchmen” was a phenomenon, from its publication in the late 80s to the 2009 movie and 2019 spin-off TV series. I’d like to direct your attention, though, to Moore’s earlier work, specifically on the DC title, “Saga of the Swamp Thing,” available as a series of six trade paperbacks collecting over 40 issues of the monthly comic, originally published between 1984 and 1987. Nearly 40 years on, the story of the Swamp Thing’s discovery of his true nature and role in DC’s supernatural universe has lost none of its power. Not at all a kid’s comic book, Moore’s “Swamp Thing” paved the way for later generations of visual storytelling aimed at a mature audience.

Stephanie Doyle, Associate Editor and Writer

Cost of Living by Emily Maloney

I’m not usually one for memoirs; oftentimes they seem self-serving, or not relevant to larger stories. “Cost of Living” is very much the opposite of that. This book ruminates on the cost of medical debt in America from the perspective of someone struggling with it—while simultaneously working as a medical assistant and medical biller. It also touches on the variability in quality of mental health treatment, overmedication, the opioid epidemic, crazy families, and much more. Bonus: It’s a collection of essays, so you can digest it in big or small doses (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Patrick Thomas, Head of Publishing

All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon

It turns out, when you have kids, you don’t read less, you just read a lot of the same books over and over again by popular demand of your child. During some stretches, my two year old and I read the same books 40 or 50 times in a single week. I’ve learned, quickly, to guide her toward books with beautiful sentences, because if I don’t I’ll be forced to suffer through the bad ones again and again…. and again. I’ll never tire of the sentences in this little beauty, though—and the illustrations are endlessly engaging for young eyes. “All the World” is a must have for parents. But I’ll warn you, it’s going to make you cry fairly regularly.

Molly Clancy, Senior Content Editor

Bad Manners: The Official Cookbook

Do you need some more gosh dang vegetables in your life? Ever thought about giving an ever lovin’ vegan diet a try? This is the cookbook for you. Even if you’re just doing Meatless Mondays, you could always use a couple of freakin’ tasty vegan recipes, and this cookbook delivers those in spades. I’m a big fan of the coconut lime rice with red beans and mango. Holy shish kebabs, that’s good.

Happy Reading from Backblaze

Hopefully this book list sparks some inspiration for your holiday shopping list or your own 2023 reading list. What are you planning to read next year? Let us know in the comments.

The post Bookblaze: First Annual Backblaze Book Guide appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Happy Thanksgiving from Backblaze

2022-11-24 Molly Clancy

Post Syndicated from Molly Clancy original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/happy-thanksgiving-from-backblaze/

To all of our readers: Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at Backblaze! We’re taking some time to be with our families and friends, and we hope you are, too.

If your people are anything like ours, we imagine you might be getting asked to fix grandma’s antique desktop computer or explain what the deal is with TikTok to that one bookish friend. Maybe you’re one of those blended families who are still trying to figure out how to share your iPhone pictures with the Android users or vice-versa.

Never fear—we’ve compiled a list of posts that might come in handy when you’re called upon to be an unofficial IT admin to family or friends. Consider this your guide to being your family’s IT superhero. (Caution: If you do too good a job, they ~~may~~ will definitely keep coming to you).

How to Talk to Your Family About Backups
A Guide for the Family IT Manager
Keeping Passwords Secret and Your Data Safe
How to Back Up Your Data Once You’ve Downloaded It
Backing Up and Packing Up: It’s Time for School
How-To Guides to Back Up Your Syncing Services and Socials
- Email Accounts
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- TikTok
- Twitch
- Twitter
- Facebook
- YouTube Videos
- WhatsApp

Fortunately, unofficial IT admin is not a thankless job—prepare to have thanks showered upon you for making the internet work and quite possibly saving Thanksgiving. Don’t forget to set yourself up well for the future by referring them all to Backblaze Personal Backup. (Or, just gift it to them and then set it up, since you’re already helping.) Just make sure you get an extra serving of pumpkin pie out of the deal.

The post Happy Thanksgiving from Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Holiday Gift Guide 2022

2022-11-17

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/holiday-gift-guide-2022/

The holidays: They start earlier every single year. Two weeks before Halloween, I started seeing gingerbread houses at the store. And you know someone really waited until the last minute to buy Halloween candy when they’re giving out candy canes. Gift giving is not my love language (I’m more of a quality time person), so finding the right things for my friends and family for the holidays fills me with a certain sense of angst. Luckily for me, I’m able to outsource some of the “what’s cool” contemplation to my coworkers, and you get to benefit! So without further ado, let’s get into the annual Backblaze Holiday Gift Guide for 2022 as proposed by a smorgasbord of Backblazers.

Tech and Gadgets

Synology NAS

Data. You know it. You love it. You have it. If you want a local device to help with your 3-2-1 backup strategy, this entry-level Synology NAS device is a great bet.

Insta 360 X3

Wide-angle and 360-degree videos are all the rage right now. If you have a shutterbug in your life, this is a great gift so they have something in their pocket, ready to capture the next viral video. After all, the best camera is the one you have with you.

Bose SoundLink Speaker

For the audiophile in your life that wants to throw a houseparty without having to set up a bunch of speaker wires, this speaker will fill the room and keep you groovin’. Or, for quieter types, it delivers your favorite murder podcast with sharp clarity.

Alfred

This app for the macOS helps you take control of your Mac and boosts your efficiency by allowing you to set up custom actions, text expansion, and hotkeys.

Valve Steam Deck

For the gamer who has everything, this is a mini computer you can travel with. It plays all of your Steam games, and it’s a great portable way to get through your backlog of games you’ve bought on sale and never had a chance to play. Although we know you’ll (or they’ll) just play Vampire Survivors the whole time.

Remarkable 2

Note taking. Has it been solved? The Remarkable 2 takes a run at making your notes and meetings easier to remember. This digital notepad is an easy way to take notes and sync them across devices.

Rocketbook

Another solution for note taking: The Rocketbook (we recommend red) allows you to use a washable pen on special paper, so you can take notes, scan them, send them to the location of your choosing, and then erase the page to start over.

Ember Mug (in red, obviously)

Everyone’s favorite, an Ember mug. This keeps your drinks warm, and most importantly, if you get the red one, (we recommend red, of course) you’ll be helping global pandemic relief!

Toys and Fun Stuff

The Office Lego Set

In case you don’t get enough of the office while at the office, you can make an office in your home office, and this one will have all your favorite pals from The Office! My home office is my kitchen table, but turning it into a Lego workshop is a much better use of space.

Woobles

What better gift to give than the gift of knowledge…of crocheting? I have purchased this and am in the middle of learning to crochet. It’s fun and more importantly, adorable.

The Ted Lasso Game

We believe in believe too, Ted! The Ted Lasso party game is a fun gift in that you can open it right up and start playing. This game is full of positive vibes, just like the show. Help your players be their best selves, and maybe learn a bit about your friends and family along the way.

Blipblox

Do you have or know someone that has a little DJ brewing at their house? This Blipblox is a music exploration tool for kids as young as three years old. Help them learn all about music and get some more synth into your life!

Flying Orb Ball Toys

This tiny orb ball spins and gently glides towards a target. That makes it easy to catch and a great way to build up hand-eye coordination.

Stuff You Can Wear

Birkenstocks

What do you get the person who has everything? Another pair of Birkenstocks. With winter approaching, sandals may not be top of mind, but these are part of the standard spring and summer kit that we see around our San Mateo office.

Allbirds

Sandals not your thing? How about shoes that you can snuggle and hug? These Allbirds are part of the fluff collection, made with fluffy wool. You’ll love ’em!

Bart Bridge Patch

A patch for every occasion, and location. You probably live somewhere, and that place probably has a patch made by Bart Bridge. Show some local pride, or gift your friends a hat with a patch of that one place where that one thing happened which you will never forget, but will also never discuss.

Food and Drink

Panettone

Some say that the way to a person’s heart is through their tummy. The Panettone comes highly recommended by tummies everywhere, and just look at all those seeds! The best part about this gift is that when you hand it over, you can make a strong case about opening it and sharing.

Smoked Fish

If you have not heard of Goldbelly, it’s a great way to order food from your favorite restaurants, no matter where they are. Want to impress your holiday guests? Get this whitefish and salmon salad platter from Zucker’s in New York.

Coffee Beans

Everyone loves a good stocking stuffer, and one that we don’t think gets enough credit is getting a nice bag of coffee beans. This coffee comes highly recommended and, best of all, it’s available on Amazon for your grinding, brewing, and sipping pleasure.

Fellowship Foundry Pewter Mug

For the nerdy folks in your life, a pewter drinking mug. If you’re sitting around a Dungeons & Dragons table, you want to make sure that you’re drinking the part.

Give the Gift of Backblaze

And of course, help your friends and family back up their data with Backblaze Computer Backup. They’ll thank you for helping make sure they never lose a file again.

Happy Gift-Giving From Backblaze

I hope this gift guide helped spark some creative ideas for the upcoming gift-giving season. Comment below and tell me what gifts you’ll be looking to pick up for your friends and loved ones this year (we won’t tell them). And stay tuned for a forthcoming Backblaze Book Guide—we had so many book submissions this year, we decided to start the first annual Bookblaze Roundup.

The post Holiday Gift Guide 2022 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Download and Back Up Your Twitter Account

2022-11-04 Barry Kaufman

Post Syndicated from Barry Kaufman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-download-and-back-up-your-twitter-account/

If you’ve been following the news lately, you might be thinking now is a good time to start downloading and backing up your Twitter history.

It’s officially the Elon Age of Twitter, and subsequently, there have been a few people rumbling about leaving the platform following Musk’s firing of top executives and an alarming rise in hate speech. Needless to say, we’re sticking around—you might have stumbled upon this article from Twitter itself. We just can’t quit the little blue bird quite yet. But there is one thing we can do, and that’s help you download and back up your Twitter archive—most likely for free.

Whether you’re anti-Elon or you’re just worried that the folks who are good at building electric cars or spaceships might not know how to manage a social media algorithm, you can take a few easy steps to protect your treasured Twitter memories. Here’s how.

Downloading Your Twitter Data

The first step is to log in to your Twitter account on a web browser. Once logged in, click on the “More” section in the navigation bar. From there, a new navigation bar will appear. You should select the “Settings and Support” dropdown, followed by the “Settings and Privacy” tab to progress.

Under the “Your Account” section, you will find an area labeled “Download an archive of your data.” The function of this is pretty self-explanatory, but does lead to a further menu that allows you to request an archive of your Twitter data or Periscope data.

After requesting your archive you will receive a notification with a link when your archive is ready for download. This archive will consist of a ZIP file with data that Twitter has deemed most relevant or useful to you, including DMs, moments, profile media and any media you may have used in your Tweets such as gifs, photos, and videos.

Archive Your Twitter Data for Free

Once you download your Twitter data, you can then save a full archive copy in the cloud on Backblaze B2—for free if it’s under 10GB.

Click here to get started with Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud today.

Back Up Your Twitter Data (Not Free, But Super Easy)

In addition to an archive copy, it’s important to use a secure backup strategy so all of those Tweets and memories will be preserved and kept safe from accidental deletion, equipment failure, or disasters (whether they’re natural or Musk-made). This is where a 3-2-1 backup strategy comes in handy. Using a 3-2-1 approach means keeping one copy of your data locally, one copy on a different type of media like an external hard drive, and one off-site (the cloud is a great place to keep it!).

You’ll need to manually download your Twitter data periodically, but once you have it on your machine, you can ensure it’s backed up with Backblaze Computer Backup—it automatically backs up all of your files, including documents, photos, music, movies, and, yes, all of that Twitter data you downloaded.

Click here to sign up for a 15-day trial of Backblaze Computer Backup, and save those Tweets.

While You’re At It…

We’ve gathered a handful of guides to help you protect social content across many different platforms. We’re working on developing this list—please comment below if you’d like to see another platform covered.

The post How to Download and Back Up Your Twitter Account appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Download and Back Up Dropbox Data

2022-10-13 Lora Maslenitsyna

Post Syndicated from Lora Maslenitsyna original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-download-and-back-up-dropbox-data/

If you’ve ever told an IT professional that you’re using Dropbox to back up files and were greeted with a side eye and a stifled “well, actually…” it’s because Dropbox isn’t actually a backup. It’s for syncing data. The distinction is subtle, but critical.

If you’re reading this post, you probably already know that data is always at risk of loss to accidental deletion, system updates, or even if you forget your password and get locked out of your account. The difference between backing up and syncing is that syncing your data will not protect it from these risks.

It’s easy to accidentally lose access to a sync service where you might be keeping files or images that no longer live on your computer. Many colleges and universities now even offer file hosting service subscriptions to students for free—until they graduate. After students earn their diplomas and leave the dorms, these services graduate, too, and students either get locked out of their accounts or have to choose between switching to a free tier and compromising on storage space or paying the fees to keep their existing subscription tier.

To make sure your data stays safe and secure, you’ll want to make sure you have a copy of it on your local device as well as a copy backed up to the cloud. A 3-2-1 backup strategy is always your best bet for securely storing your data. In this post, we’ll walk you through downloading your data from Dropbox and some strategies for backing up your downloaded files.

Back Up Everything But the Kitchen Sync

As we mentioned earlier, saving your data to a sync service is not the same as backing it up. Sync and backup services are complimentary, but only a backup will save a copy of your data and keep it safe against accidental deletion, updates, a ransomware attack, and more.

To help you save your synced computer data, we’re developing a series of guides to downloading and backing up your data across different sync services, like OneDrive. Comment below to let us know what other sync services you’d like to see us cover.

How to Download Files From Dropbox

Note: If you are using the Dropbox client to sync the files that are on your computer, the option to download your files may be replaced by an option to open them, instead. Clicking on “Open” will open up the files directly from the file on your computer where they are saved.

To download a file or folder from Dropbox, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Dropbox account. (We know, this is pretty self-evident. We’re just trying to be thorough here).
2. Find the file or folder you’d like to download and hover your cursor over it.
3. Click on the three dots.
4. Select Download. Your files will appear in the Downloads folder on your computer, and folders will be downloaded as .zip files.
It’s also important to note that Dropbox only supports downloads of folders that are less than 20GB and contain fewer than 10,000 total files.

How to Back Up Your Dropbox Data

Now that you have all of your Dropbox files downloaded to your computer, you’ll want to follow through with the next steps of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. By saving a copy of your data on an external or secondary device (like a hard drive), and a third copy in an off-site location (like the cloud) your data will be protected from any number of possible risks. Backblaze Personal Backup automatically and continuously backs up a copy of all of the data on your computer to the cloud, making it that much easier to fulfill the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

Bonus: How to Export a File From Dropbox to an App on Your Phone or Mobile Device

If you want to send a portion of your files elsewhere for safekeeping, or to share with another app, you can follow the set of instructions below. Just remember that downloading your files to your phone or emailing them to yourself isn’t the same as keeping a full copy of your data on an external device—your data is still susceptible to damage or loss.

First, you’ll need to download the Dropbox mobile app to access your synced files on your mobile device.
1. Open the app and select the three dots next to the file or folder you’d like to export. On an iPhone or iPad, the dots will appear horizontal, and on an Android device they’ll be vertical.
2. Select Share.
3. Select Export file, which will show a list of apps that can open the file. Choose the app you’d like to open the file. Note: once you export the file, if you make any changes to that file in the other app, those changes may not be saved back to your Dropbox account unless the app integrates with Dropbox.
Back Up Your Dropbox Before It’s Too Late

Have a lot of Dropbox data you don’t want to take up space on your computer? Upload and store your data in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage as a part of your 3-2-1 approach. Also, let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more guides to downloading and backing up the data saved to other sync services.

The post How to Download and Back Up Dropbox Data appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Welcoming Chief Human Resources Officer Robert Fitt to Backblaze

2022-10-06 Patrick Thomas

Post Syndicated from Patrick Thomas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/welcoming-chief-human-resources-officer-robert-fitt-to-backblaze/

Backblaze is happy to announce that Robert Fitt has joined our team as our first Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). Robert will lead the company’s strategic advancement for all aspects of human resources (HR), including hiring, people management and development, engagement, health and wellness initiatives, and outreach to the community.

We’re Growing—But We’re Still The Same Backblaze

Backblaze is recognized for talent retention and company culture—in the past few years we’ve received numerous awards for culture, diversity, and leadership from places like Comparably, Inc., Great Place to Work, and others. The addition of a seasoned CHRO will help us to continue this excellent trend as well as enabling our next phase of growth initiatives following our recent IPO in November 2021.

“Culture is critical in times of rapid growth and we want to continue scaling our world-class organization and great team alongside our growth as the leading independent storage cloud.” Gleb Budman, our CEO and Chairperson commented. “Robert is an experienced leader with the skills to help us do that. We are excited to welcome him to Backblaze.”

The Skills Robert Brings to Backblaze

Robert has a long track record of success in helping organizations scale rapidly while also championing healthy company culture. His executive experience includes leading HR functions at Turntide Technologies, 360 Behavioral Health, Mobilite, Broadcom Corporation and others. Additionally, Robert founded and managed Green Talent Co, an independent talent and HR advisory firm. Robert has scaled and led HR teams across the US, Canada, Asia, and Europe in software, hardware, telecomms, and healthcare industries. He brings a people first philosophy to everything he does, and is fiercely passionate about the employee and candidate experience.

“I’m proud to be joining a company that is committed to developing talent at all levels of the organization,” Robert said in reference to joining Backblaze. “I’m looking forward to working with leaders who have been recognized for promoting diversity, culture, and inclusion as we continue to focus on people and culture as a strategic priority.”

Robert earned his bachelor’s degree in Human Resources Management from Staffordshire University, and his Master’s degree in employment law from the University of East Anglia. He also volunteers as a pro bono HR consultant for Catchafire, a social good platform that matches professionals with nonprofits to volunteer their services.

Originally from the UK, Robert and his family hit the road 14 years ago and he is now based in Los Angeles, where he resides with wife, three boys, (ages 8, 17, 20) and two dogs. Taking advantage of the wonderful Southern California weather, Robert enjoys keeping fit, cycling, and sharing his eclectic music taste.

Backblaze Is Hiring

From day one, Backblaze has worked hard to bring our values to life, creating a transparent, sustainable, innovative (and dare we say flat-out good) place to work. Want to join the team? Check out our open opportunities.

The post Welcoming Chief Human Resources Officer Robert Fitt to Backblaze appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The Storage Pod Story: Innovation to Commodity

2022-10-05

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-storage-pod-story-innovation-to-commodity/

It has been over six years since we released Storage Pod 6.0. Yes, we have improved that system since then, several times. We’ve added more memory, upgraded the CPU, and of course deployed larger disks. I suppose we could have written blog posts about those improvements, a Storage Pod 6.X post or two or three, but somehow that felt a bit hollow.

About 18 months ago, we talked about The Next Backblaze Storage Pod. We had started using Dell servers in our Amsterdam data center, although we were still building and deploying the version 6.X storage pods in our U.S. data centers. That changed about six months ago and we haven’t built or deployed a Backblaze Storage Pod since that time. Here’s what we’ve done instead.

A Backblaze-Worthy Storage Server

In September of 2019, we wrote a blog post to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of open sourcing our Storage Pod design. In that post we mused about the build/buy decision and stated the criteria we needed to consider if we were going to buy storage servers from someone else: cost, ease of maintenance, the use of commodity parts, ability to scale production, and so on. Also in that post, we compiled a list of storage servers on the market at the time which were similar to our Storage Pod design.

We then proceeded to test several different storage servers from the list and elsewhere. The testing was done over a period of about a year using the criteria noted earlier. The process progressed and one server, a 60-drive Supermicro server, was selected to move on to the next stage, production performance testing.

Here we would observe the server’s performance and test its compatibility with our operational architecture. We built a vault of 20 Supermicro servers and placed it into production, and at the same time we placed a standard Storage Pod vault into production. The two vaults ran the same software and we would track each vault’s performance throughout.

When a Backblaze Vault enters production, 60 tomes of storage come online at the same time joining thousands of other tomes ready to receive data. Each vault has the same opportunity to load data, but this will vary depending on the performance of the vault to process the requests received. In general, the more performant the vault, the more data it can upload each day.

The comparison of how much data each vault uploaded each day is shown below. Vault 1084 is composed of 20 Supermicro servers and Vault 1085 is composed of 20 Backblaze Storage Pods.

The Supermicro vault (1084) started with a limit of 2,500 simultaneous connections allowed for the first seven days. Once that limit was lifted and both vaults were set to 5,000 simultaneous connections, the Supermicro vault generally outperformed the Backblaze vault over the remainder of the observation period.

What happened to the data once the test was over? It stayed in the Supermicro vault and that vault became a permanent part of our production environment. It is still in operation today, joined by over 1,100 additional Supermicro servers. Safe to say, we moved ahead with using the Supermicro servers in our environment in place of building new Storage Pods.

The Server Model We Use

The Supermicro model we order from Supermicro is the PIO-5049P-E1CR60L (PIO-5049). That model is not sold via the Supermicro website. That said, model SSG-6049P-E1CR60L (SSG-6049) is similar and is widely available. Both models have 60 drives, but the chassis is slightly different, and the motherboards are different with the PIO-5049 model having a single CPU slot, and the SSG-6049 model having two CPU slots. Let’s compare the basics of the two models below.

In practice, the Supermicro SSG-6049 model supports newer components such as the latest CPUs and allows more memory versus the Supermicro PIO-5049 model, but the latter is more than capable of supporting our needs.

Can You Build It?

A little over 13 years ago, we wrote the Petabytes on a Budget blog post introducing Backblaze Storage Pods to the world and open sourcing the design. Since then, many individuals, organizations, and businesses have taken the various storage pod designs we published over the years and built their own storage servers. That’s awesome.

We know building a Storage Pod was not easy. Oh, the assembly was simple enough, but getting all the parts you needed was a challenge: searching endlessly for 5-port backplanes (minimum order quantity 1,000-ouch, sorry) or having to build your own power supply cables. While many of you enjoyed the challenge; many didn’t.
For the Supermicro system, let’s work with the Supermicro SSG-6049 model as it is available to everyone and see what it would take for you to acquire/assemble/build a single Supermicro storage server.

Option One: Go Standard

The easiest thing to do is to order a pre-configured SSG-6049 model from Supermicro or you can try one of their online reseller sites such as Canada Computers & Electronics or ComputerLink, which offer the same “complete system”. In these cases, the ability to customize the server is minimal and requires direct contact with the vendor for most changes. If that works for you, then you’re all set.

Option Two: Configure

If you want to design your own system you can try Supermicro resellers such as IT Creations (US) and Server Simply (EU) which have configurators that allow you to select your CPU, motherboard, network cards, memory, and various other components. This is a great option but given the number of different options and the possibility of incompatibilities between components, you need to be careful here. Don’t rely on the configurator to catch a component mismatch.

Option Three: Create

Here you might buy the most stripped-down server you can find and replace nearly everything inside—motherboard, CPU, fans, switches, cables and so on. You’ll probably void any warranty you had on the system, but we suspect you knew that already. Regardless, you can take the base system and stuff it full of smoking-fast everything so that your copy of “Ferris Buellers Day Off” downloads in picoseconds. That’s the fun part of building your own storage server, when you are done it is uniquely yours.

Which option you choose is, of course, your choice, and while ordering a standard system from Supermicro may not be as satisfying as soldering heat sinks to the motherboard or neatly tying off your SATA cable runs, it will give you more time to watch Ferris, so there’s that.

FYI, Supermicro has an extensive network of resellers around the world. While the options above fall neatly into three categories, each reseller has their own way of working with their clients. If you are going to buy or build your own Supermicro storage server or have already done so, share your experience with your colleagues in the comments below or on your favorite forum or community site.

What About Pricing

Supermicro does not publish prices and we are not going to out them here, but we wanted to see if we could determine the street price for the Supermicro SSG-6049 system by surveying reseller websites. It was not pretty. In our research, we saw prices for the Supermicro SSG-6049 model range from $6K to 40K on different reseller sites. On the website with the $6K price they started with a fictitious base system that you could not order, and then listed the various components you were required to add, such as CPU, memory, hard drives, etc. At the $40K website the reseller didn’t bother to list any of the components; it just had the model and the price—no specs or technical information. Classic buyer beware scenarios in both cases.

The other variable that made the street price hard to determine was that resellers often bundled other services into the price of the system such as installation, annual maintenance, and even shipping. All are reasonable services for a reseller to offer, but they cloud the picture when trying to determine the actual cost of the product you are trying to buy. At best, we can say that the street price is somewhere between $20K and $30K, but we are not very confident with that range.

Storage Server Pricing Over Time

Since 2009 we have tracked the cost per GB of each Storage Pod version we have produced. We’ve updated the chart below to add both Storage Pod version 6.X, our most current Storage Pod configuration, and the Supermicro storage server we are buying, model PIO-5049.

The cost per GB is computed by taking the total hardware cost of a storage server, including the hard drives, and dividing by the total storage in the server at the time. When Storage Pod 1.0 was released in September 2009, the system cost was about $0.12/GB, and as you can see that has decreased over time to $0.02/GB in the Supermicro systems.

One point to note is that both the Storage Pod 6.X ($0.028/GB) and Supermicro ($0.020/GB) servers use the same 16TB hard drive models. We believe the difference between the cost per GB of the two cohorts ($0.008) is primarily based on the operational efficiency obtained by Supermicro in making and selling tens of thousands of units a month versus Backblaze assembling a hundred 6.X Storage Pods on our own. In other words, Supermicro’s scale of production has enabled us to get performant systems for less than if we continued to build them ourselves.

What’s Next for Storage Pods

No one here at Backblaze is ready to write the obituary for our beloved red Backblaze Storage Pods. Afterall, the innovation that was the Storage Pod created the opportunity for Backblaze to change the dynamics of the storage market. Now that the Storage Pod hardware has been commoditized, our cloud storage software platform is what enables us to continue to deliver value to businesses and individuals alike.

All that means is that our next Storage Pod probably won’t be an incremental change, but instead something completely new, at least for us. It may not even be a Storage Pod—who knows? That said, we will continue to upgrade our existing Storage Pods with new CPUs, memory, and such, and they’ll be around for years to come. At which point we may give them away or crush them (again). In the meantime, we’ll probably do another blog post or two so we can post a few pictures and tell a few stories. Or maybe we’ll just move on. Hard to say right now.

Thanks to all our Storage Pod readers for your comments and suggestions over the years. You’ve made us better along the way and we look forward to continuing to hear from you as our journey continues.

The post The Storage Pod Story: Innovation to Commodity appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Download and Back Up OneDrive Data

2022-09-22 Lora Maslenitsyna

Post Syndicated from Lora Maslenitsyna original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-download-and-back-up-onedrive-data/

On the Backblaze blog, we’ve been sharing tips for backing up and doing more with your data, especially when it comes to data digitally scattered across social media platforms. We asked what you, our readers, wanted to know about protecting your data online and you responded with this question: How do you download and back up data on Microsoft OneDrive?

OneDrive is an online file hosting service that many users take advantage of to sync the data on their computer. Although it offers 5GB of storage space for free, users pay a fee to store data that exceeds tiers of 100GB, 1TB, and 6TB. OneDrive even notes on their website that to free up space on your OneDrive account, you should download that file or folder to a location outside of your OneDrive folders, and then delete the OneDrive copy of the file or folder to reduce your storage amount. Of course, this means that the document is no longer syncing. And by doing so, you’re forced to constantly juggle the amount of data saved in OneDrive to stay under the free limit. Worse yet, the data you remove from OneDrive is no longer protected using the 3-2-1 backup method.

This guide walks you through ensuring your data on OneDrive is safely backed up and how to keep your data safe using the 3-2-1 backup strategy. So, read on to learn how to save your OneDrive data, including:

A step-by-step guide to accessing and downloading your data.
What to do with your downloaded OneDrive data to ensure it stays protected.

Back Up Everything But the Kitchen Sync

If you’re reading this blog post, you probably already know that saving your data to a sync service is not the same as backing it up. Sync and backup services are complimentary, but only a backup will save a copy of your data and keep it safe against accidental deletion, updates, a ransomware attack, and more.

To help you save your synced computer data, we’re developing a series of guides to downloading and backing up your data across different sync services. Below is a list of our other guides, and comment below to let us know what other sync services you’d like to see us cover.

How to Download Data From Microsoft OneDrive

1. Open your OneDrive account and select the files or folders you want to download. You can select individual items by clicking the circle check box next to each item. You can also select several files at once by clicking on one file, scrolling down the list, then left-clicking while holding down the Shift key on the last item in the list you want to select. To select all of the files in a folder, click the circle to the left of the top row, or simply press CTRL + A (or COMMAND + A on a Mac).
2. In the top menu, select Download. You can also right-click an individual file and select Download. If you choose multiple files or folders and then select Download, your browser will download a ZIP file containing all the data you selected. If you’re in a folder and you select Download without selecting any files or folders, your browser will download everything saved in that folder.
3. Save your OneDrive data on your computer. Your browser will download your files to the Downloads folder of your computer. Select the files and save them to a permanent location. For some users, your browser may prompt you to choose the location where you want to save the download.
Now that you’ve downloaded your OneDrive data, keep reading to find out how to ensure that data is safely backed up.
The 3-2-1 Method in a Nutshell

Back up your data based on these principles:
1. Redundancy. Have several copies of your data.
2. Geographic Distance. Have those copies in different locations.
3. Access. Have different types of access to your backup data. A good example here: you don’t want all of your data to be connected to the internet to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. You also don’t want all copies of your data stored in your home in case of disaster or theft.
How to Back Up OneDrive Data

Once you have all of your OneDrive data downloaded on your computer, you’ve fulfilled the first step of the 3-2-1 backup strategy by storing your data on your local device. Next, you should make sure to follow the next steps and save your data on a secondary, external device and in a third, off-site location. Cloud storage is the one of the best options for easily securing your data off-site.

If you’re using Backblaze Personal Backup to protect all of the data on your computer and external drives, you’re all set! Backblaze automatically and continuously backs up a copy of all of your data to the cloud.

Another option to consider when you want to securely store your data and offload some of it from your local device is to upload your data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage directly. As long as you are still keeping a copy of that data on other local drives or devices, you’re still fulfilling the 3-2-1 backup method. You can learn more about the difference between using Personal Backup and B2 Cloud Storage and how to save and organize your data in cloud storage by reading this blog post.

Read On to Get the Most Out of Backblaze and OneDrive

Our help section is filled with useful guides on maximizing the integration of Backblaze and OneDrive. Check out our guides for Windows or Mac to learn more.

Don’t Rely on Sync Services to Secure Your Data

Chances are, the data you have saved in your OneDrive folders is data you want to keep. Don’t wait until you accidentally get locked out of your account or a software update wreaks havoc on your synced data. Back up your data today, and comment below to let us know what else you’d like to know about to help you keep your data safe.

The post How to Download and Back Up OneDrive Data appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Announcing: Backblaze Computer Backup v8.5

2022-09-20

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/announcing-backblaze-computer-backup-v8-5/

Announcing Backblaze Computer Backup 8.5! Our latest release builds on version 8.0’s speed boosts and brings with it not only a redesigned application for Mac and PC, but an improvement to our Safety Freeze feature, which prevents your backups from becoming corrupted. Here’s a brief overview of what’s new for this release:

macOS and Windows:

Safety Freeze enhancements: improved efficiency and reduced false-positives.
Visual refresh: We’ve completely refreshed both of our client apps.
Minor text, bug, and performance improvements: We’ve cleaned up some of the language to make things easier to understand and have tightened up some of the code.

macOS:

SwiftUI redesign: the macOS app has been completely redesigned from the ground up using SwiftUI.

Update Today

In More Detail

Safety Freeze Enhancements

Our Safety Freeze feature is designed to protect your backups and prevent them from being corrupted if something goes wrong on your computer. Over the years we’ve updated the feature based on feedback and tried to make it more transparent to the end user. With the updates in version 8.5, we’ve added a self-healing component which attempts to fix some of the false positives that caused an erroneous Safety Freeze to occur, especially when a user is moving from one computer to another.

Visual Refresh

With the Swift redesign on macOS, we felt now would be the perfect time to also change some of the visuals in our apps. We’ve updated both of our client apps to make them better looking, simpler to use, less cluttered, and easier to understand.

SwiftUI Redesign

In preparation for macOS Ventura, we’ve rewritten the macOS app in SwiftUI. There’s nothing but good news here. This refresh helps future-proof our macOS app and also keeps the same system efficiency you know and love from Backblaze-built applications.

General Performance Improvements

Everyone’s favorite: “general bug fixes and performance improvements.” We’ve also updated and simplified a lot of our client text to go along with the visual refresh and deliver a better, easier-to-understand overall app.

Backblaze v8.5 Is Available Today: September 15, 2022

We hope you love this new release! We will be slowly auto-updating all users in the coming weeks, but if you can’t wait and want to update now on your Mac or PC:

Right click on the Backblaze icon in your menu or taskbar.
Select Check for Updates.
Download v8.5 from the Backblaze Updates page.

Also, this version is now the default download on www.backblaze.com. Please reach out to support if you have any questions or if you want to give feedback—we always like to know how things are going.

The post Announcing: Backblaze Computer Backup v8.5 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review

2022-09-13

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-review/

Welcome to the midyear SSD edition of the Backblaze Drive Stats report. This report builds on the 2021 SSD report published previously and is based on data from the SSDs we use as storage server boot drives in our Backblaze Cloud Storage platform. We will review the quarterly and lifetime failure rates for these drives and, later in this report, we will also compare the performance of these SSDs to hard drives we also use as boot drives. Along the way, we’ll offer observations and insights to the data presented and, as always, we look forward to your questions and comments.

Overview

Boot drives in our environment do much more than boot the storage servers: they also store log files and temporary files produced by the storage server. Each day a boot drive will read, write, and delete files depending on the activity of the storage server itself. In our early storage servers, we used HDDs exclusively for boot drives. We began using SSDs in this capacity in Q4 2018. Since that time, all new storage servers, and any with failed HDD boot drives, have had SSDs installed.

Midyear SSD Results by Quarter

As of June 30, 2022, there were 2,558 SSDs in our storage servers. This compares to 2,200 SSDs we reported in our 2021 SSD report. We’ll start by presenting and discussing the quarterly data from each of the last two quarters (Q1 2022 and Q2 2022).

Notes and Observations

Form factors: All of the drives listed above are the standard 2.5” form factor, except the Dell (DELLVOSS VD) and Micron (MTFDDAV240TCB) models each of which are the M.2 form factor.

Most drives added: Since our last SSD report, ending in Q4 2021, the Crucial (model: CT250MX500SSD1) lead the way with 192 new drives added, followed by 101 new DELL drives (model: DELLBOSS VD) and 42 WDC drives (model: WDS250G2B0A).

New drive models: In Q2 2022 we added two new SSD models, both from Seagate, the 500GB model: ZA500CM10003 (3 drives), and the 250 GB model: ZA250NM1000 (18 drives). Neither has enough drives or drive days to reach any conclusions, although they each had zero failures, so nice start.

Crucial is not critical: In our previous SSD report, a few readers took exception to the high failure rate we reported for the Crucial SSD (model: CT250MX500SSD1) although we observed that it was with a very limited amount of data. Now that our Crucial drives have settled in, we’ve had no failures in either Q1 or Q2. Please call off the dogs.

One strike and you’re out: Three drives had only one failure in a given quarter, but the AFR they posted was noticeable: WDC model WDS250G2B0A – 10.93%, Micron – Model MTFDDAV240TCB – 4.52%, and the Seagate model: SSD – 3.81%. Of course if any of these models had 1 less failure their AFR would be zero, zip, bupkus, nada – you get it.

It’s all good man: For any given drive model in this cohort of SSDs, we like to see at least 100 drives and 10,000 drives-days in a given quarter as a minimum before we begin to consider the calculated AFR to be “reasonable”. That said, quarterly data can be volatile, so let’s next take a look at the data for each of these drives over their lifetime.

SSD Lifetime Annualized Failure Rates

As of the end of Q2 2022 there were 2,558 SSDs in our storage servers. The table below is based on the lifetime data for the drive models which were active as of the end of Q2 2022.

Notes and Observations

Lifetime annualized failure rate (AFR): The lifetime data is cumulative over the period noted, in this case from Q4 2018 through Q2 2022. As SSDs age, lifetime failure rates can be used to see trends over time. We’ll see how this works in the next section when we compare SSD and HDD lifetime annualized failure rates over time.

Falling failure rate?: The lifetime AFR for all of the SSDs for Q2 2022 was 0.92%. That was down from 1.04% at the end of 2021, but exactly the same as the Q2 2021 AFR of 0.92%.

Confidence Intervals: In general, the more data you have, and the more consistent that data is, the more confident you are in your predictions based on that data. For SSDs we like to see a confidence interval of 1.0% or less between the low and the high values before we are comfortable with the calculated AFR. This doesn’t mean that drive models with a confidence interval greater than 1.0% are wrong, it just means we’d like to get more data to be sure.

Speaking of Confidence Intervals: You’ll notice from the table above that the three drives with the highest lifetime annualized failure rates also have sizable confidence intervals.

Conversely, there are three drives with a confidence interval of 1% or less, as shown below:

Of these three, the Dell drive seems the best. It is a server-class drive in an M.2 form factor, but it might be out of the price range for many of us as it currently sells from Dell for $468.65. The two remaining drives are decidedly consumer focused and have the traditional SSD form factor. The Seagate model ZA250CM10003 is no longer available new, only refurbished, and the Seagate model ZA250CM10002 is currently available on Amazon for $45.00.

SSD Versus HDD Annualized Failure Rates

Last year we compared SSD and HDD failure rates when we asked: Are SSDs really more reliable than Hard Drives? At that time the answer was maybe. We now have a year’s worth of data available to help answer that question, but first, a little background to catch everyone up.

The SSDs and HDDs we are reporting on are all boot drives. They perform the same functions: booting the storage servers, recording log files, acting as temporary storage for SMART stats, and so on. In other words they perform the same tasks. As noted earlier, we used HDDs until late 2018, then switched to SSDs. This creates a situation where the two cohorts are at different places in their respective life expectancy curves.

To fairly compare the SSDs and HDDs, we controlled for average age of the two cohorts, so that SSDs that were on average one year old, were compared to HDDs that were on average one year old, and so on. The chart below shows the results through Q2 2021 as we controlled for the average age of the two cohorts.

Through Q2 2021 (Year 4 in the chart for SSDs) the SSDs followed the failure rate of the HDDs over time, albeit with a slightly lower AFR. But, it was not clear whether the failure rate of the SSD cohort would continue to follow that of the HDDs, flatten out, or fall somewhere in between.

Now that we have another year of data, the answer appears to be obvious as seen in the chart below, which is based on data through Q2 2022 data and gives us the SSD data for Year 5.

And the Winner Is…

At this point we can reasonably claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs, at least when used as boot drives in our environment. This supports the anecdotal stories and educated guesses made by our readers over the past year or so. Well done.

We’ll continue to collect and present the SSD data on a regular basis to confirm these findings and see what’s next. It is highly certain that the failure rate of SSDs will eventually start to rise. It is also possible that at some point the SSDs could hit the wall, perhaps when they start to reach their media wearout limits. To that point, over the coming months we’ll take a look at the SMART stats for our SSDs and see how they relate to drive failure. We also have some anecdotal information of our own that we’ll try to confirm on how far past the media wearout limits you can push an SSD. Stay tuned.

The SSD Stats Data

The data collected and analyzed for this review is available on our Hard Drive Test Data page. You’ll find SSD and HDD data in the same files and you’ll have to use the model number to locate the drives you want, as there is no field to designate a drive as SSD or HDD. You can download and use this data for free for your own purpose. All we ask are three things: 1) you cite Backblaze as the source if you use the data, 2) you accept that you are solely responsible for how you use the data, and 3) you do not sell this data to anyone—it is free.

You can also download the Backblaze Drive Stats data via SNIA IOTTA Trace Repository if desired. Same data; you’ll just need to comply with the license terms listed. Thanks to Geoff Kuenning and Manjari Senthilkumar for volunteering their time and brainpower to make this happen. Awesome work.

Good luck and let us know if you find anything interesting.

The post The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Packing Up and Backing Up: It’s Time for School

2022-09-01 Josephine Quock

Post Syndicated from Josephine Quock original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/packing-up-and-backing-up-its-time-for-school/

Note from the Editor: When students head off to college, they take their data and computers with them. We wanted to dig into what students and other young tech users are doing to save and protect their data, so we invited our intern, Josephine, to develop some resources for you before she heads off to college.

Apart from discovering the outside world and learning more about who you are as a person, the university experience is, at its core, about the pursuit of knowledge. In years past, students would store that knowledge in spiral-bound notebooks or scattered sheets of loose leaf, but today it’s all digital. While there’s no doubt that computers have changed everything from how we research to how assignments are turned in, technology comes with its own set of challenges. I wondered: how much are students taught about how to keep their data safe? My experience at Backblaze has taught me a lot about the importance of backing up your data, and I want to share that with other college students.

Lesson One: Syncing is Not Backing Up

If students do think about how to preserve their data, most are content to let services like iCloud or OneDrive handle it. What they may not realize (and I didn’t) is that these sync services are completely different from a true backup. Before interning at Backblaze, I didn’t even think about backing up, let alone understand the importance of it or the best strategies to back up my data. I couldn’t tell you the difference between backup and sync services. Because my photos and contacts were synced on my iPhone, iPad, and even my MacBook, I assumed all this data was saved and in good hands. However, working at Backblaze taught me the importance of backing up to prevent losing my data.

For example, if I were to delete a photo on my iPhone, syncing means that it would also delete on my other devices. Backing up gives you an additional copy of the data that doesn’t follow the same rules as your syncing services. If I accidentally delete something or get a virus, a backup with version history means that I could restore an earlier version of my files or library. This is why ensuring the safety of your data is proactive, as backing up can provide security in the event of hardware failure, cyber attack, natural disaster, or even a careless mistake.

Lesson Two: You Might Need Your Old Data

Let me provide an example that we college students have experienced at least once throughout our time in university: the frustration and annoyance of endlessly searching through the deepest corners of our devices to find an important document, only to not find it in the end.

A few months ago, I was given the option to select a prompt for an essay of my choosing from a couple of short stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe immediately caught my eye because I had read it and written a paper on it in high school. I enjoyed the story in high school and liked the idea of comparing my new paper with my old to see how much I’d grown as a writer. I browsed and inspected every possible drive on multiple email accounts—no luck.

Looking back, I wished that I had saved all the files and emails from middle and high school. But since I didn’t, I wasn’t able to review what I had written and couldn’t see the progress and improvement in my writing. Had I backed up all the data of my high school years, I could have read my essay on “The Tell-Tale Heart” and expanded on my original ideas. I was warned many times that all my documents from my account would be deleted. I knew this information and yet I still didn’t do anything about it.

Lesson Three: There Are Easy Answers

As a college student, I need a backup service that’s easy to use and affordable. Since Backblaze first started offering consumer backup, they’ve prioritized both of those things. According to an internal Backblaze’s Customer Survey in 2022, users love using the service because of the price, unlimited data backup, and most importantly ease of use. Backups are automatic, and 45% of Backblaze users spend less than $100 per year on all their backup services (including Backblaze).

Now that I will be going into my fourth year in college, I will have other important documents beyond my school work since I am going to be applying for more internships and jobs when I graduate. My resume, job applications, school projects, and essays are all things that I can’t risk losing. Additionally, lots of my photos are saved to social media accounts, and I want to save them somewhere besides my phone or on those platforms.

Lesson Learned!

After college, I plan on purchasing a new computer and will need to back everything up on my current computer to transfer over to my new laptop. Not only will that make sure that I don’t lose data when I change devices, but (rather than buying an external drive that I need to keep track of) I can use my Backblaze account. I will be using multiple devices to access my single Backblaze account. Once I have my new laptop, I just have to log in from my new device and restore all my files. I won’t have to worry about losing an external hard drive or making sure the files on a hard drive are updated.

With school back in session and the end of my university experience approaching, my social media, school work, and job search exist on all my devices. I can’t imagine losing any of it. After interning at Backblaze and hearing so many disaster stories, I will definitely be backing up my data, and I recommend that other students do too. That’s why services like Backblaze are really helpful.

The post Packing Up and Backing Up: It’s Time for School appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Keeping Passwords Secret and Your Data Safe

2022-08-18 Laura Debney

Post Syndicated from Laura Debney original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/keeping-passwords-secret-and-your-data-safe/

Even if you’ve heard about the 3.27 billion email and password combinations made public on an English language hacker forum in 2020, you may not have heard the worst of it.

Anyone could buy the list for $2 a download.

You’d think that was the scariest part of what became known as the Compilation of Many Breaches (COMB) leak–but it’s not.

The scariest and most preventable part of this breach is that people reuse their passwords and cybercriminals know it.

You may have read Backblaze’s post about credential stuffing attacks. Briefly, it’s a brute force attack using credentials from a list like COMB to unlock an account, most likely with a weak and common password like 123456 or “passwort” (if you’re German).

Is there a better reason than COMB to stop reusing passwords for multiple devices, apps and websites? That alone should do it, but if you need more reasons, they are legion.

There’s no denying how hard it can be to remember 12 to 15 pieces of information in length. After all, our telephone numbers are only seven digits long by design–which happens to be the length of any sequence of numbers we humans can easily recall.

While we each have responsibility for implementing password best practices, the COMB attacks show us that personal password protection isn’t enough. Cloud service providers (CSP) are also responsible for protecting the data entrusted to them. Backblaze uses a sophisticated security approach to protect access.

Regardless, user verification is just more effective with strong passwords, so here are a few tips on keeping your password secret and your data safe.

What Is a Password?

First and foremost, a password is a secret authenticator, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They have a lot to say about the strength of passwords by complexity, length, and manner of creation. We’ll get into details a little later.

The string of letters, numbers, and symbols used in a password can’t be easy to guess or forget. This is tougher to achieve than it sounds, and typically users choose short, memorable passwords for convenience.

If you want to eliminate the possibility of being the next victim of credential stuffing, here are some things you shouldn’t do:

Use the same password for more than one online account or website.
Recycle or rotate passwords.
Store passwords where anyone can access them (e.g. on a piece of paper or as an autofill setting in your browser).

The reality is that hackers can (and have) released accurate email and password combinations, and the best way to render that old information utterly useless is never to use those passwords again. (Also, stop adding a “2” at the end of “Password1.” You’re not fooling anyone.)

How Does a Strong Password Help Keep Your Data Safe?

You should know that verifying a digital identity with an email and a password isn’t as straightforward as presenting your photo ID at the airport. And, password authentication isn’t as safe as it once was, thanks to cybercrimes resulting in lists like COMB. In light of the security risks hackers pose, new authentication guidelines were created to help CSPs ensure the authenticity of a user.

The Three Authenticators

There are three types of authenticators.

1. Something you know (e.g. password).
2. Something you have (e.g. a cellphone).
3. Something you are (e.g. biometric data).

CSPs or verifiers can employ different combinations of authenticators to achieve different levels of assurance that will ultimately help to reduce successful cybersecurity attacks. The different combinations of authenticators create an authentication assurance level (AAL). For example, when you log in, a CSP might use a combination of your password and a code generated by an authenticator app.

A strong password is essential to each authentication level. Each AAL meets the recommended privacy controls and relies on something that only you know and is difficult to estimate. Cyber criminals only need to guess one reused email and password combination to make a costly mess of things for you or your business.

Strong Passwords Defined

This may sound too simplistic, but the NIST (SP 800-63-3 Appendix A) qualifies a password’s strength by its length. In the case of brute force attacks, shorter passwords are too easy to uncover before rate limitings results in a lockout. Passwords of sufficient length reduce the success of credential stuffing or denial-of-service attacks. The NIST recommends that CSPs allow passwords or password phrases of almost any length so long as it doesn’t demand excessive time to disguise with a salting of random letters, numbers, and hashing algorithm.

The next thing to consider when creating a strong password is complexity. That said, the NIST recommends that password complexity not impede memorability, which would defeat the purpose of using a password to authenticate something you know. Too complex of a password leads people to writing down passwords or storing them in unsafe places rather than forgetting them. This vulnerability has to be addressed when CSPs provide instructions for creating passwords for users.

Unfortunately, analysis of breached data reveals that combining complexity and length isn’t a foolproof deterrent. However, a sufficiently long password is harder to guess, and an adequately complex one will improve the masking efforts like salting and hashing.

One more way to ensure you’re using a strong password is to use a tool to randomly generate one based on a set of standards, like length, type of character, readability, etc.. Randomly produced passwords are harder to brute force attack or guess. While there are a few different places you can find a random password generator, we love password managers like BitWarden, 1Password, and LastPass, which generate, organize, and secure passwords.

Remember that breached data can provide insights into what an old password might be for the same account or similar type because cybercriminals know that we are creatures of habit. Not only that, but some facts are immutable. A great example is when you always select the same challenge question. If that data has been breached, it’s likely known to cybercriminals; also, your mother’s maiden name is not going to change. As another layer, you can use randomly generated answers to security questions the same way you use randomly generated passwords, meaning those answers won’t be able to be reused (or easily gleaned from dumb Facebook quizzes).

Next, let’s get into how you can keep hackers from guessing your strong passwords.

How to Create a Strong Password

To review, strong passwords are long, complex, and secret. These days you can take advantage of a password generator and save it to your password manager. However, there are times you need to come up with a strong password.

Consider these two steps for making a password strong:

Step one: Use a memorable phrase that’s 12 to 15 characters long (e.g. she sells seashells).

Step two: Lightly salt your version with some random characters (e.g. sHe sellz seasHells).

A few ideas for memorable phrases are to use a song lyric, a poetic verse or a line from a movie.

Pro Tip: When you lightly salt your memorable phrase, try not to use @ for the letter ‘a’ or the number zero for the letter ‘o’.

Avoid being predictable. Also, avoid the temptation to use sensitive information like your child’s birthdate or your first and last name or 12345678. Trust me, using this type of information is uber common worldwide.

Another way to check that you’re using a unique password is by culling breached data records. According to Troy Hunt’s pwned.com site, the password Qwerty was used 71,219 times before I typed it into Have I Been Pwned Password API. As Hunt points out, the NIST recommends that CSPs compare user-generated passwords with unacceptable ones. A blocklist should have passwords from previous breaches and predictable options that include the service name, like using the password ‘G000gle’ for your Gmail account.

What Else Can You Do to Protect Against Credential Stuffing Attacks?

In the battle against brute force attacks from hackers that can compute ridiculous numbers of hashes without rate limiting, users play a critical role in protecting your data with strong passwords.

Here are a few other ways to keep your data safer:

1. - Enable Two Factor verification when you can.
  - Use a Time-based One-Time Password (ToTP) authentication app.
  - Use a third-party verification method called Single Sign-On via G-Suite or Office 365. (Although beware the persistent glut of single sign-on through social media channels, which can get somewhat dicey).

The good news is that even as cybercriminals get more ingenious, new and innovative tools have been created to make personal data security easier than ever. And, as data nerds ourselves, Backblaze takes your cybersecurity seriously. Check out some of the ways we secure your data here.

The post Keeping Passwords Secret and Your Data Safe appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

2022-08-08

Post Syndicated from original https://backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

A lot has changed since the 3-2-1 backup rule was first introduced in the late aughts. At the time, the iPad was just a glimmer in Apple’s eye. Facebook had a quaint 500 million users. Taylor Swift had only released two albums. Blockbuster Video still existed, and Netflix shipped DVDs to your door.

Unlike most things in technology, the rule has held up over the years. It’s still the de facto standard for keeping your data safe. But some of the particular best practices have evolved as data storage has changed. Today, I’ll explain the 3-2-1 rule, what’s changed, and how you can easily achieve a 3-2-1 backup to keep your data safe and protected.

What Is the 3-2-1 Backup Rule?

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a simple, effective strategy for keeping your data safe. It advises that you keep three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site. Let’s break that down:

Three copies of your data: Your three copies include your original or production data plus two more copies.
On two different media: You should store your data on two different forms of media. This means something different today than it did in the late 2000s. I’ll talk a little more about this in a bit.
One copy off-site: You should keep one copy of your data off-site in a remote location, ideally more than a few miles away from your other two copies.

If you want to protect your personal information, photos, work files, or other important data, the 3-2-1 backup strategy is the way to go. It helps you avoid having a single point of failure that’s vulnerable to human error, hard drive crashes, theft, natural disasters, or ransomware.

How Does the 3-2-1 Backup Rule Work?

Let’s say you took a picture of your social security card for your tax accountant years ago—that file is called “socialsecurity.jpg” and it lives on your computer at home. That’s the first “copy” of your data.

You also have an external hard drive at home, used to back up your go-to Mac or gaming PC. That external hard drive will back up socialsecurity.jpg as part of its backup process. That’s a second copy on a different device or medium.

In addition to that external hard drive, you also have an online backup solution (we recommend Backblaze; go figure!). The online backup continuously scans your computer and uploads your data to the cloud (which, in layman’s terms, is an off-site data center). Socialsecurity.jpg is included in this upload, becoming the third copy of your data.

Oh! And, your paper social security card is hopefully stored in a fire-proof safe (not your wallet) as a bonus.

What’s Changed About the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy?

When the 3-2-1 rule was first introduced, there were a lot more types of media to choose from when storing your data—the humble floppy disk, CDs, Blu-ray discs, USB sticks, external hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), network attached storage (NAS), tape libraries, etc. Some of those have fallen out of favor (CDs and DVDs, I’m looking at you).

Some types of media are not practical or affordable for a typical home computer user looking to back up their data (tape libraries, for example). Some of the technologies were prohibitively expensive back then, but are much more affordable now (SSDs). And one big one wasn’t mainstream yet: The Cloud (you might have heard it referred to as “other people’s computers”). So, what does this mean for the 3-2-1 backup strategy? Do you still need to keep your data on two different media?

Two Different Media, Really?

The short answer is: yes, but no. Today, you don’t need to keep your data on two different types of media, but you do need to keep your data on two different devices.

The long answer is a bit more complicated. There are a couple reasons folks recommended keeping your data on two different types of media in the first place. One, it protects you from one of those forms of media becoming obsolete in the face of new storage technology (still looking at you, CDs) and your data becoming unreadable. And two, it’s wise to keep your backup copy on a separate device so that a hardware failure doesn’t take out both local copies. For example, if your computer all of the sudden doesn’t want to hold a charge, you can still recover data from your hard drive.

While obsolescence is always a concern, the advent of cloud storage for backups all but eliminates it. The cloud service provider is responsible for maintaining the physical storage devices and keeping your data accessible at all times. So, if you use a cloud backup service, you only need to worry about keeping your data on two devices, not two separate kinds of media. What does that look like?

The Easiest 3-2-1 Backup

If you back up your home computer to an external hard drive and back both of those devices up to the cloud using something like Backblaze Computer Backup, congratulations: You have achieved a 3-2-1 backup.

You have three copies of your data: One on your computer, one on your hard drive, and one in the cloud.
You store your data on two different devices: Your computer and your external hard drive. (Technically, three devices, since your data is also stored in the cloud).
One of those copies is off-site: The cloud copy.

Is the 3-2-1 Strategy Still the Standard?

If you aren’t backing up at all, achieving a 3-2-1 backup strategy is still the best thing you can do to protect your data. But, the 3-2-1 rule is becoming more of a starting point rather than the finish line in today’s world.

The rise in ransomware attacks calls for strengthening the basic principles of the 3-2-1 strategy—redundancy, geographic distance, and access—with added protections. Cybercrimes targeting networked machines and capturing all data, including backups, is a growing problem.

New versions of the tried-and-true backup strategy have emerged, such as the 3-2-1-1-0 or 4-3-2 backups. Sounds like overkill? It isn’t. The good news is that companies like Backblaze exist to make at least the off-site component less stressful—we do the work and keep up with security best practices for you.

Why Do I Need Both an On-Site and an Off-Site Backup?

Whether you are interested in backing up a Mac or a PC, an on-site backup is a simple way to access your data quickly should anything happen to your computer. If your laptop or desktop’s hard drive crashes, and you have an up-to-date external hard drive available, you can quickly get most of your data back or use the external drive on another computer while yours gets fixed or replaced. If you remember to keep that external hard drive fairly up to date, the exposure for data loss is negligible, as you might only lose the uncopied files on your laptop. Most external hard drives even come with software to ensure they’re readily updated.

Having an on-site backup is a great start, but having an off-site backup is a key component in having a complete backup strategy, including cloud storage. The newer backup strategies build on the cloud’s strengths:

Convenience: Backing up large volumes of data in the cloud is fast.
Durability and reliability: Your data is protected against fires, natural disasters, and more.
Collaboration: Sharing with permissions is intuitive and effortless in the cloud.

Is the 3-2-1 Backup Rule Perfect?

There is no such thing as a perfect backup system, but the 3-2-1 approach is a great start for most people and businesses. Even the United States government recommends this approach. In a 2012 paper for the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), Carnegie Mellon recommended the 3-2-1 method in their publication: Data Backup Options.

Backing Up Is the Best Insurance

The 3-2-1 plan is great for getting your files backed up. If you view the strategy like an insurance policy, you want one that provides the coverage needed should the unthinkable happen. Service also matters; having a local, off-site, and offline backup gives you more options for backup recovery.

Backblaze Backup in 3-2-1…

While Backblaze can’t help with power outages, computer encryption, or anti-theft technologies (though we can locate a computer), we can help make backing up your files a no-brainer. And (at least to our most recent survey) with only 11% of respondents who own a computer backing up daily, folks need the help!

Getting started with Computer Backup for your personal or business computers helps take care of that crucial “1” in your complete 3-2-1 backup strategy. And, with our included one year Version History feature (or Forever Version History if you want to upgrade), you have additional layers of protection should anything happen to your physical devices.

The post The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup

What Is Extended Version History?

2022-07-26

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-is-extended-version-history/

Our recent Backup Awareness Survey showed that 61% of Americans who own a computer and back it up are not very confident that all of their data is being backed up. That just goes to show how complicated some backup solutions are.

And what good is a backup service if it’s hard to get your data back when you need it?

The Backblaze Computer Backup client is designed to stay out of the way and back up your data, while making restoring that data a walk in the park. One of the popular ways of enhancing our backup service is a feature called Extended Version History. But, we’ve found that some people still don’t quite understand what it does. With that in mind, I wanted to write an overview of the feature, how it works, and why it’s useful for anyone that uses our Computer Backup service, whether it’s for personal use or for their company or family group.

Extended Version History Explained

First, we need to define two key terms, “retention” and “version,” to help explain Extended Version History.

What Is Retention?

In simple terms, retention is how long something in your backup is kept backed up.

What Is a Version?

It seems simple enough, but it’s worth explaining what we mean by a “version.” Without getting in the weeds, whenever a file is added or created on your computer, that is a version. Whenever you change a file on your computer, whether you add more lines to a spreadsheet or edit your recent vacation photos, those changes also create another version of the file.

When you understand what retention is and what a version is, it’s easy to understand Extended Version History. It’s a feature that allows you to set a retention timeframe that specifies how long all the older versions—the version history—of your files should be kept as part of your backup.

How Long Is Backblaze’s Retention?

The standard Backblaze Computer Backup service comes with 30 days of Version History for the files that are backed up. This means that you can go back in time (using our roll back time feature) and access older versions of files for 30 days from the date they were last changed or deleted. After that 30-day mark, the version of the file that’s 30 days old will leave your backup, but any newer files will remain.

Note: If you last changed or added a file more than 30 days ago, but have not made any changes to it, it will remain in your backup as long as it remains on your computer (or is unchanged). If it gets removed or changed, that’s when the 30-day retention period starts.

What Does Extended Version History Do?

With Extended Version History, you can increase that 30-day period to one year or even forever. This essentially increases the duration for which you can roll back time when going to access your data.

A Very Simple Example (With Babies!)

As a new uncle, I have babies on the brain. Let’s say that a baby was born on July 1st and our family creates a spreadsheet to chart the growth of the baby. Every single day, we add a row to the spreadsheet to add in the baby’s weight, height, and maybe a cute note. The previous rows don’t get deleted, and so the spreadsheet grows by one row every single day.
On July 30th, our spreadsheet will have 30 rows (one per day). If that spreadsheet was being backed up by Backblaze, I could go back in time to July 1st and get a copy of that spreadsheet from the very first day, with just a single row of baby information. However, if I tried to do that on July 31, that original version would be gone, but I could go back and get a copy from July 2nd, the version with the first two rows of baby data. If I tried to go back on, say, August 30th, I could get a copy from August 1, which would have all of July’s rows of baby data.

To illustrate the point, here’s me as a Soviet baby.

With Extended Version History, using that same example, I have more time (a year or forever) to go back and retrieve that original copy of the spreadsheet created on July 1 with just the first row.

Why would you want the spreadsheet with just one row? Who knows, it’s an example!

Why Extended Version History? Because Mistakes Happen!

Our Backup Awareness Month survey found that 67% of respondents have reported accidentally deleting a file. 44% reported losing data, or access to data, because a shared or synced drive or folder was deleted. Having Extended Version History turned on for your Backblaze backup helps avoid data loss because of accidental deletions.

You may not always realize right away (or within 30 days) that you deleted a file accidentally. Or you may not regularly check that shared drive until it’s too late and your older versions are gone. With Extended Version History, you can go back in time up to a year later or forever later and get those files back.

How to Get Extended Version History?

I encourage everyone I know to enable Extended Version History as soon as they install Backblaze on their computer.
Step 1: Click “Upgrade.”

Step 2: Select how long you want to keep files—one year or forever.

One thing to keep in mind is that simply turning on Extended Version History won’t automatically extend the “life” of your files retroactively. For example, if you open your account on July 1 and enable Extended Version History on July 28, only the versions from July 28 onward will have Extended Version History, not the versions created between July 1 and July 28. Once enabled, any new or changed files will have their retention rate increased, which is why doing so when you first install Backblaze is the best policy.

Consider Extended Version History as getting additional “mistake insurance” for your data. If something happens, or you lose access to shared files and that goes unnoticed, we’ll have your back!

The post What Is Extended Version History? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

2022-07-20

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-life-expectancy/

For the last several years, we have written about drive failure, or more specifically, the annualized failure rates for the hard drives and SSDs we use for our cloud storage platform. In this post, we’ll look at drive failure from a different angle: life expectancy.

By looking at life expectancy, we can answer the question, “How long is the drive I am buying today expected to last?” This line of thinking matches the way we buy many things. For example, knowing that a washing machine has an annualized failure rate of 4% is academically interesting, but what we really want to know is, “How long can I expect the washing machine to last before I need to replace it?”

Using the Drive Stats data we’ve collected since 2013, we have selected 10 drive models that have a sufficient number of both drives and drive days to produce Kaplan-Meier life expectancy curves we can use to easily visualize their life expectancy. Using these life expectancy curves we’ll compare drive models in cohorts of 4TB, 8TB, 12TB, and 14TB to see what we can find.

What Is a Kaplan-Meier Curve?

Kaplan-Meier curves are most often used in biological sciences to forecast life expectancy by measuring the fraction of subjects living for a certain amount of time after receiving treatment. That said, the application of the technique to other fields is not unusual.

Comparing 4TB Drives

The two 4TB drive models we selected for comparison had the most 4TB drives in operation as of March 31, 2022. The Drive Stats for each drive model as of March 31, 2022 is shown below, followed by the Kaplan-Meier curve for each drive.

MFG	Model	Drives in Operation	Lifetime Drive Failures	Lifetime Drive Days	Lifetime AFR
HGST	HMS5C4040BLE640	12,728	343	30,025,871	0.40%
Seagate	ST4000DM000	18,495	4,581	68,104,520	2.45%

What Is the Graph Telling Us?

If you purchased an HGST drive at time zero, there is a 97% chance that drive would still be operational after six years (72 months).
If you purchased a Seagate drive at time zero, there is an 81% chance that drive would still be operational after six years.

Case closed—we were stupid to buy any Seagate 4TB drives, right? Not so fast, there are other factors at work here: cost, availability, time, and maintenance, to name a few. For example, suppose I told you that the HGST drive you wanted was 1.2 to 1.5 times as expensive as the Seagate drive. In addition, the Seagate drive was readily available while the HGST drive was harder to get, and finally, at the time of purchase there was over an 80% chance that the Seagate drive would still be alive after six years. How does that change your perception?

In the case of buying one or two drives, you may find a single factor like, “how much do you have to spend” is the only thing that matters. In our case, these factors are intertwined. We explain some of the thinking behind our decision-making in our “How Backblaze Buys Hard Drives” post.

Was It Worth the Savings?

In the simple case, if the time and effort we spent replacing the failed Seagate drives was more than the savings, we failed. So, let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope math to see how we landed.

We replaced a little over 4,200 more Seagate drives over a six year period than HGST drives. That is 700 drives a year or about two Seagate drives per day we had to replace. That’s 30-40 minutes a day someone spent doing that task spread across multiple data centers. Yes, it’s work, but hardly something you would need to hire a person specifically to do.

Why Buy HGST Drives at All?

Fair question. At the time we were purchasing these Seagate and HGST drive models back in 2013 through 2015, there were no life expectancy curves and Drive Stats was just starting. We had anecdotal information that the HGST drives were better, but little else. In short, sometimes, the pricing and availability of the HGST was good enough so we bought them.

Comparing 8TB Drives

The two 8TB drives we’ve chosen to compare using life expectancy curves have done battle before. The 8TB Seagate model: ST8000DM002 is classified as a consumer drive, while the 8TB Seagate model: ST8000NM0055 is classified as an enterprise drive. Their lifetime annualized failure rates tell an interesting story. All data is as of March 31, 2022.

Type	Model	Drives in Operation	Lifetime Drive Failures	Lifetime Drive Days	Lifetime AFR
Consumer	ST8000DM002	9,678	628	19,815,919	1.13%
Enterprise	ST8000NM0055	14,323	915	24,999,738	1.35%

Let’s take a look at the life expectancy curves and see what else we can learn.

Observations

If you purchased either drive, the life expectancy is nearly the same for early on, but starts to separate at about two years and the difference increases over the next three years.
For the consumer model (ST8000DM002) you would expect nearly 95% of the drives to survive five years.
For the enterprise model (ST8000NM0055) you would expect 93.6% of the drives to survive five years.

These results seem at odds with the warranties for each model. Consumer drives typically have two-year warranties, while enterprise drives typically have five-year warranties. Yet at five years, the consumer drives, in this case, are more likely to survive, and the trend starts at two years—the end of the typical consumer drive warranty period. It’s almost like we got the data backwards. We didn’t.

Even with this odd difference, both drives performed well. If you wanted to buy an 8TB drive and the salesperson said there would be a 93.6% chance the drive would last five years, well, that’s pretty good. Regardless of the failure rate or life expectancy, there are other reasons to purchase an enterprise class drive, including the ability to tune the drive, tweak the firmware, or get a replacement via the warranty for three more years versus the consumer drive. All are good reasons and may be worth the premium you will pay for an enterprise class drive, but in this case at least, long live the consumer drive.

A Word About Drive Warranties

One of the advantages we get for buying drives in bulk from a manufacturer or one of their top tier resellers is that they will honor the warranty period ascribed to the drive. When you are buying from a retailer (typically an online retailer, but not always), you may find the warranty terms and conditions to be less straightforward. Here are three common situations:

The retailer purchases the drive or takes the drive on consignment from the manufacturer/distributor/reseller/etc., and that event triggers the start of the manufacturer warranty. When you buy the drive six months later, the warranty is no longer “X” years, but “X” years minus six months.
The retailer replaces the warranty with their own time period. While this is usually done for refurbished drives, we have seen this done by online retailers for new drives as well. In one case we saw, the original five-year warranty period was reduced to one year.
The retailer is only a storefront while the actual seller is different. At that point, determining the warranty period and who services the drive can be, shall we say, challenging. Of course, you can always buy the add-on warranty that’s offered—it’s always nice to pay for something that was supposed to be included.

As a drive model gets older, these types of shenanigans are more likely to happen. For example, a given drive model gathers dust awaiting shipment while new models are coming to market at competitive prices. The multiple players on the path from a drive’s manufacture to its eventual sale are looking for ways to “move” these aging drives along that path. One option is to lower or eliminate the warranty period to help reduce the cost of the drive. The warranty becomes a casualty of the supply chain and you, as the last buyer, are left with the results.

Comparing 12TB Drives

If you are serious about storing copious amounts of data, you’re probably looking at 12TB drives and higher. Your Plex media server or eight-bay NAS system demands nothing less. To that end, we selected three 12TB models for which we have at least two years worth of data to base our life expectancy curves upon. The Drive Stats data for these three drives is as of March 31, 2022.

MFR	Model	Drives in Operation	Lifetime Drive Failures	Lifetime Drive Days	Lifetime AFR
HGST	HUH721212ALN604	10,813	148	11,813,149	0.48%
Seagate	ST12000NM001G	12,269	104	6,166,144	0.63%
Seagate	ST12000NM0008	20,139	449	14,802,577	1.12%

Observations and Thoughts

For any of the three models, at least 98% of the drives are expected to survive two years. I suspect that most of us would take that bet. While none of us wants to own the one or two drives out of 100 that will fail in that two years period, we know there are no 100% guarantees when it comes to hard drives.

That brings us to asking: What is the cost of each drive, and would that affect the buying decision? As we’ve noted previously, we buy in bulk and the price we pay is probably not reflective of the price you may pay in the consumer market. To that end, below are the current prices, via the Amazon website, for the three drive models. We’ve assumed that these are new drives and they have the same warranty coverage of five years.

HUH721212ALN604 – $413
ST12000NM001G – $249
ST12000NM0008 – $319

The Seagate model: ST12000NM001G and the HGST model: HUH721212ALN604 have about the same life expectancy after two years, but their price is significantly different. Which one do you buy today? If you are expecting the drive to last (i.e., survive) two years, you would select the Seagate drive and save yourself $164, plus tax. Some of you will disagree, and given we know nothing beyond the two-year point for the Seagate drive, you may be right. Time will tell.

One thing that may be perplexing here is why the Seagate model: ST12000NM0008 is more expensive than the Seagate model: ST12000NM001G even though the ST12000NM008 fails more often and has a lower life expectancy after two years? The reason is simple: Drive pricing is basically driven by supply and demand. We suspect that annualized failure rates and life expectancy curves are not part of the pricing math done by the various companies (manufacturers/distributors/resellers/etc.) along the supply chain.

By the way, if you purchase the 12TB HGST drive, it may say Western Digital (WDC) on the label. For the first couple of years when these drives were produced, they had HGST on the label, but that changed somewhere in the last couple of years. In either case, both “versions” report as HGST drives and have the same model number, HUH721212ALN604. The new Western Digital label is part of the continuing rebranding effort being done by WDC to update the HGST assets they purchased a few years back.

Comparing 14TB Drives

We will finish up our look at hard drive life expectancy curves with three models from our collection of 14TB drives. While the data ranges from 14 to 41 months depending on the drive model, this is the one cohort where we have comparable data on drives from all three of the major manufacturers: Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC. The Drive Stats data is below, followed by the life expectancy curves for the same models.

MFR	Model	Drives in Operation	Lifetime Drive Failures	Lifetime Drive Days	Lifetime AFR
Toshiba	MG07ACA14TA	38,210	454	19,834,886	0.83%
Seagate	ST14000NM001G	10,734	123	4,474,417	1.00%
WDC	WUH721414ALE6L4	8,268	35	3,941,427	0.33%

Observations and Thoughts

All three drives have a life expectancy of 99% or more after one year. Previously, we examined the bathtub curve for drive failure and made the observation that the early mortality rate for hard drives, those that failed during their first year in operation, was now nearly the same as the random failure rate. That seems to be the case for this collection of drives as the observed early mortality effect is nominal.

When considering the bathtub curve, the Toshiba model seems to be an outlier beginning at 22 months. At that point, the downward curvature in the line suggests an accelerating failure rate when the failure rate should be steady, as seen below.

The projected life expectancy curve line is derived by extending the random failure rate from the first 22 months. That said, 97% of the Toshiba drives survived for three years while the projected number was 98%, or simply put, the failure rate was one drive per hundred more over a three-year period.

Interested in More Drive Stats Insights?

Physical disk drives remain essential elements of business and personal tech. That’s why Backblaze publishes performance data and analysis on 200,000+ HDDs: to offer useful insights into how different drive models stack up in our data center. As SSDs increasingly become the norm in many computers and servers, Backblaze is now also sharing data for the thousands of SSDs we use as boot drives.

Check out our 2021 Year-end Drive Stats Report.
Read our first SSD-based Drive Stats Report.

Methodology

The raw data comes from the Backblaze Drive Stats data and is based on the raw value of SMART attribute 9 (power on hours) for a defined cohort of drives. After removing outliers, we basically compared the number of drives which failed after a specific number of months versus the number of drives which managed to survive that many months. The math is absolutely more complex than that and I want to thank Dr. Charles Zaiontz, Ph.D. for providing an excellent tutorial on Kaplan-Meier curves and, more specifically, how to use Microsoft Excel to do the math.

Refresher: What Are SMART Stats?

SMART stands for Self-monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring system included in hard drives that reports on various attributes of the state of a given drive. Each day, Backblaze records the SMART stats that are reported by the hard drives we have in our data centers. Check out this post to learn more about SMART stats and how we use them.

Standing on the Shoulders

Using our Drive Stats data in combination with Kaplan-Meier curves has been done previously in various forms by others including Ross Lazarus, Simon Erni, and Tom Baldwin. We thank them for their collective efforts and for providing us with the inspiration to produce the current curves that enabled the comparisons we did in this post.

The post Hard Drive Life Expectancy appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The 2022 Backup Survey: 54% Report Data Loss With Only 10% Backing Up Daily

2022-06-16

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-2022-backup-survey-54-report-data-loss-with-only-10-backing-up-daily/

Every June, for Backup Awareness Month, we work with The Harris Poll to gauge the state of backups in the U.S. This is the 14th year of that survey, where we ask simply: “How often do you back up all the data on your computer?”

On occasion, we’ll throw some additional questions into the mix as well, and this year we focused on the confusion we often see between sync and backup services, along with respondents’ history of data loss. The backup frequency results of this year’s survey show that trends are holding pretty steady, but the rest of the results…very interesting!

First Things First: Are YOU Backing Up?

If you’re not backing up, start now and increase the stats for 2023.

How Backup Frequency Is Trending in 2022

When looking solely at backup frequency, the results are mostly neutral this year when compared to 2021. We see a slight 1% increase in computer owners that are backing up on a yearly basis, but that same 1% decrease in those that are backing up daily. The rest of the results were pretty consistent from year to year.

The main issue we’re seeing here is that the number of computer owners who have never backed up their computer appears to have stopped decreasing, meaning that about 20% of people are still at risk of losing all of their data in the event of a computer crash or loss.

Some people aren’t into reading charts, so we also have this handy table:

If you’re not a fan of tables, but do like pie, here’s a comparison of the 2022 data compared to when we first started in 2008:

It’s nice to see the mix changing so much over time, especially with the “never” category fading. While the number of daily backups is still not anywhere close to where we’d like it, the data indicates that:

Overall, computer owners are backing up more frequently than a decade ago. However, as our astute readers know, the longer you go without creating a backup, the more data you are prone to losing should disaster strike.

Who’s “Best” at Backing Up?

Last year, we pored through the data to try and build a “profile” of the person who was most likely to be a “backer upper,” which we had defined as a person who owns a computer and backs it up at least once a day. What we found is that we were looking for:

A woman between 35-44 years of age (21% likely to back up versus 9% of those 18-34 and 6% of those 55-64)…
Who lives in the Western United States (17% more likely to back up vs. the South and Midwest at 9% and 7%, respectively)…
With a household income of over $100K (13% likely to back up their data versus those households of $50K-$74.9K which are at 6%).

Has that changed over the last year? Well, in 2022, the data suggest no statistically significant deviations that we can pull out, so maybe that’s good news across the spectrum?

Is Confusion a Cause for Concern?

While the number of people backing up at least once is good, we think there might still be some confusion in the world about how exactly they are backing up their data and what is getting backed up. We wanted to dive a bit deeper. When looking at the Americans who own a computer:

80% backed up all the data on that computer at least once.
- 41% of those folks fully back it up once a month or more often.

57% who have ever backed up use a “cloud-based” system as their primary backup.
12% of computer owners use a cloud backup service like Backblaze as their primary backup, and among those who do:
- 52% say their service automatically backs up all the data on their computer.
- 25% say it backs up only the data they select with no limitations.
- 9% say it backs up only the data they select but with some limits.
- 3% marked “other” and more concerningly…
- 10% are not sure at all.

With 57% of computer owners using “the cloud” to back up their data, but only 12% of those using a cloud backup service, we’re left to wonder, what are the others using? In many cases, it’s a cloud drive or cloud sync service which may not actually be performing basic automated backup tasks.

Refresher: Backup vs. Sync

We’ve often discussed the differences between sync and backup—how both of them are useful tools, but very different. While sync services are great for collaborating on and sharing data, they are not true backup services in that they’re typically not automated, and don’t provide the same level of protection as dedicated backup services can. And, be careful about only having data in one location—44% lost access to their data when a shared or synced drive was deleted. For more information, read our cloud backup vs. cloud sync blog post!

Even of those using a proper cloud backup solution, 48% may not be backing up all their data, and 10% of folks aren’t sure at all what their cloud backup service is doing. Yikes.

We then asked those who use one of the listed backups (i.e., “the cloud,” external hard drive, or NAS) about their confidence level that the service they use is set up to protect all the data on their computer, and 61% of people were not very confident. The numbers are broken down below:

39% were very confident.
48% were somewhat confident.
13% were not at all or not very confident.

That’s not a ton of confidence, and maybe now is a good time to remind folks to check their backups and to test a restore!

Why Is Backing Up Important?

This year’s survey results continue to show us that having a good backup strategy in place, whether for a business or an individual, is a great way to mitigate against different data disasters. Especially when you consider that of Americans who own a computer:

67% report accidentally deleting something.
54% report having lost data.
53% were affected by a security incident.
48% had an external hard drive crash.
- 21% of those crashes have happened in the last year.

44% lost access to their data when a shared drive or synced drive was deleted.

External hard drives are a great local backup method, and we recommend them when we discuss having a 3-2-1 backup strategy, but as our own Hard Drive Stats indicate, even in our professional environment, they do fail. And with 48% of computer owners reporting that they experienced a similar failure on their home device, it underscores the importance of having an off-site backup like Backblaze, just in case.

With over half of computer owners reporting a security incident as well and ransomware on the rise, there’s never been a more appropriate time to start backing up your computer. At Backblaze, we’re on a mission to make storing and using your data astonishingly easy, and we invite you to give our services a try!

Survey Method:
This year’s survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Backblaze from May 19-23, 2022, among 2,068 adults ages 18+, among whom 1,861 own a computer. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the sample data is accurate to within +2.8 percentage points using a 95% confidence level.

Prior year’s surveys were conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of Backblaze among U.S. adults ages 18+ who own a computer in May 12-14, 2021 (n=1,870); June 1-3, 2020 (n=1,913); June 6-10, 2019 (n=1,858); June 5-7, 2018 (n=1,871); May 19-23, 2017 (n=1,954); May 13-17, 2016 (n=1,920); May 15-19, 2015 (n=2,009); June 2-4, 2014 (n=1,991); June 13–17, 2013 (n=1,952); May 31–June 4, 2012 (n=2,176); June 28–30, 2011 (n=2,209); June 3–7, 2010 (n=2,051); May 13–14, 2009 (n=2,154); and May 27–29, 2008 (n=2,723).

For complete survey methodologies, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact Backblaze.

The post The 2022 Backup Survey: 54% Report Data Loss With Only 10% Backing Up Daily appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How Mastodon Works: The Nuts and Bolts

Download Your Mastodon Data

While You’re At It…

Why Back Up Your Mastodon Archive?

Mastodon Users Are On Top of Back Up

In Theory, It’s Easier to Lose Your Data on Mastodon

A Countdown of Top Blog Posts from 2022

10. How to Wipe a Windows SSD or Hard Drive

9. Don’t Get Trapped in iCloud

8. The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-Year Review

7. SSD 101: How to Upgrade Your Computer With an SSD

6. What’s the Diff: NAS vs. SAN

5. How to Wipe a Mac Hard Drive

4. Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022

3. What’s the Diff: SSD vs. NVMe vs. M.2 Drives

2. Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2022

1. The Python GIL: Past, Present, and Future

Thanks for Reading the Backblaze Blog in 2022

1. Set Yourself Up for Success

2. Keep Your Account Secure

Like Librarians, We Work Quietly

3. Bring Your Drive to the Table

4. Check In

5. On Restoration: The Sooner, The Better

Backup and Beyond

Why It Matters

Who Owns the Phishing Problem?

What Can You Do?

Tip 1: No trust and not useful.

Tip 2: No trust, but you’re not sure.

Tip 3: Trust, but verify.

Spam or Phish?

Tip 4: Trust, but still verify.

Downloading Email Attachments?

What to Do When You’re Forced to Click

Newsletters

Tell Us More…

2FA or MFA

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Moving Forward

Select Phishing Resources

Cozy Reads for Your Winter Needs

Jeremy Milk, Head of Product Marketing

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

Andy Klein, Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Yev Pusin, Computer Backup Steward

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Kari Rivas, Product Marketing Manager

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Nicole Gale, Marketing Operations Manager

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Caitlin Bryson, Marketing Events Manager

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist

Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore

Stephanie Doyle, Associate Editor and Writer

Cost of Living by Emily Maloney

Patrick Thomas, Head of Publishing

All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon

Molly Clancy, Senior Content Editor

Happy Reading from Backblaze

Tech and Gadgets

Toys and Fun Stuff

Stuff You Can Wear

Food and Drink

Give the Gift of Backblaze

Happy Gift-Giving From Backblaze

Downloading Your Twitter Data

Archive Your Twitter Data for Free

Back Up Your Twitter Data (Not Free, But Super Easy)

While You’re At It…

Back Up Everything But the Kitchen Sync

How to Download Files From Dropbox

How to Back Up Your Dropbox Data

Bonus: How to Export a File From Dropbox to an App on Your Phone or Mobile Device

Back Up Your Dropbox Before It’s Too Late