Tag Archives: ConsumerBackup

How Interns Can Help Your Business and the World

Post Syndicated from Jason Knight original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-interns-can-help-your-business-and-the-world/

My name is Jason Knight and I lead the Growth team here at Backblaze. There are certain annual events you experience working in tech: fiscal year budgeting, conferences, and when HR asks if you want summer interns, and you say “No.”

2020 was a different year, and as everyone knows, a lot of the difference wasn’t good. So when HR and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee reached out asking who would take interns over the summer of 2021, the stakes seemed higher. Backblaze is the most diverse company I’ve ever worked for. For me, especially in the broader context of what is happening in society today, the importance of helping to create a more inclusive and diverse workplace felt more vital than ever.

And yet, when HR came knocking, it was hard to see how having interns was going to be additive to the team. I was the only member of a new team (Growth) being spun up within the Marketing department. We had ambitious goals, and a lot to do to achieve them. I was skeptical that taking on interns would be constructive for driving results.

I was also hearing from some of my peers that they didn’t believe having interns would or could be beneficial to the company. They had come to the same conclusion I had year after year, and that was the problem. We were the problem—the company was willing to provide the resources, but a bottom line mentality was preventing us from risking our short-term success.

The choice seemed to be whether or not to risk personal and team success for the opportunity to help young people gain access to exciting and potentially lucrative careers. I wish I could say the answer was clear, but it wasn’t. My peers and I were all considering this same question, and our collective response was going to have a meaningful impact on the nature of the society we live in.

Building Internships That Work…for Everyone

After a lot of thought, I acknowledged that the primary reason I didn’t want interns was my assumption that they couldn’t create value. But as any good marketer knows, assumptions and received wisdom are often wrong. I didn’t have any real evidence on hand that interns didn’t create value. It made me wonder: What if the real opportunity was to challenge received wisdom and create a compelling argument for my peers within and outside of Backblaze to take the risk and provide a bigger on-ramp for interns across the industry?

I took a step back and organized my thoughts: What do we really want in an internship program right now?

  1. A program that adds value and makes the company money.
  2. More importantly, a model that encourages others to bring on more interns.

The Growth-positive Internship

This was an intriguing proposition, so I started to think about the internships from a “Growth” perspective. I sketched out an approach:

  1. Source candidates who have the potential to be A players.
  2. Give interns goals that can deliver clear ROI.
  3. Don’t defocus team leads with the program.
  4. Publish learnings in the hopes that other firms and leaders will also be inspired to take the plunge.

I told HR we’d take three interns. Three because for some reason, three people can generally help each other out better than one or two. I also thought the success of a program was a lot of weight to put on one intern.

It was still the middle of the winter, and we weren’t expecting the interns to join us until summertime. So I went back to work and hoped that in six months we would be in position to deliver a useful program that would improve both our bottom line and people’s lives. Which—if you know Backblaze—is right in line with our company values.

Assembling an ROI-oriented Intern Team

And suddenly, the interns’ arrival was just a month away. As I considered how to achieve my goal of a growth-positive internship, I tried to zero in on the clearest way to link their effort to value. For my team, the most attributable ROI is closest to the transaction, so I decided to start with the fantastic Sales Development Representative (SDR) team led by SDR Manager, Adam.

My thought was for the interns to spend a full six weeks working as full-time SDRs. Then maybe three weeks on, they could work on paid user acquisition putting a campaign together, and then three weeks on SEO launching a campaign. I talked to Anna, Senior Manager of Data and Analytics, about helping the interns quantify the value they were creating for their resumes, and she enthusiastically agreed to pitch in. In my mind, I could see the bullet points and action verbs filling up their incipient resumes.

This was the plan. No ramp up, straight into the deep end of the pool. Everyone was fully on board. It was time to interview some candidates.

Adam joined me, and we very quickly identified that interns fell on a spectrum with two ends:

  1. Students from elite schools with a history of relevant internships.
  2. Students from non-elite schools with few internships on their resume.

Given that the whole point of our program was to help students access opportunities that otherwise would not be available to them, I made the choice to rule out candidates who already had experience or access to our field. My fantastic HR partner, our Marketing and Sales Recruiter, Desiree, explained that this was a fairly typical experience sourcing candidates. On the HR team, they have long been focused on expanding DEI efforts in our internship program, so they have plenty of experience encouraging hiring managers to look past the brand halo elite colleges confer to applicants.

As Adam, Desiree, and I synchronized our efforts and filters, we eventually identified three people we wanted to work with: Roland, Javier, and Katie. Offers were extended, start dates and pay agreed to, and they were on their way (virtually, for all the obvious reasons).

Turning Interns Into Teammates

We also reached out to senior leaders in the Marketing department who agreed to be mentors to our interns, so VP of Marketing, Nick, worked with Roland; Director of Marketing Operations, Shannon, worked with Katie; and Senior Director of Marketing, Yev, worked with Javier. The interns started work as junior SDRs and launched their outbound sequences within a week of starting. They joined all of the Growth team meetings, and I scheduled a weekly sync meeting with them. Other than that, they functioned exactly like a junior SDR team.

The interns understood that success for them was converting our leads into sales accepted leads (SALs). To do this, they used our Growth stack: ZoomInfo, Outreach, Salesforce, Calendly, and Slack. They learned from expert SDRs what it means to be creative, work with fortitude in a rejection-based environment, and to find a way to succeed.

It took about a month before the first SALs started rolling in, but it happened, and then it happened again, and again, and again. Six weeks into their work and the program was clearly a success in every dimension we could wish. They fit into the team, they helped us achieve our SAL goals, and the whole of the Growth team enjoyed sharing their knowledge and skills with our interns.

It is probably worth taking a moment to contextualize the historical moment they were working with us: The Delta variant was spreading throughout the U.S. and political and social divisions were on the nightly news. The ambient stress level, in other words, was high for everyone. Add to that the fact that we were a new team with big goals and high expectations. All this to say: The interns could easily have been perceived as an unnecessary distraction.

But it turned out the opposite was true: In the midst of stress and ambiguity, the ability to share and help others bonded our team. Our Slack channel was 💥 filled with jokes, encouragement, and laughter. The interns were a ray of sunshine for the team, and I will never forget how relieved I was halfway through the internship that we had made this commitment.

Where the Rubber Hit the Road With the Intern Team

As we reached the halfway point, I asked the interns to think about whether they wanted to continue to work as SDRs or if they were interested in exploring what the other team members were doing: paid user acquisition, customer journey marketing, and SEO. All three requested to continue to work as SDRs, and while it was a surprise on some levels, it also made sense: The interns were doing critical work, learning skills, having success, and clearly making a difference.

Oh yeah, and they also generated $1,500,000.00 in the SAL pipeline.

Ultimately, they worked as SDRs for the whole of their internship. We will have to wait and see how much of their pipeline ends up being closed with wins, but they generated enough leads that it is hard to imagine they didn’t pay for all the internships the company provided. In other words, the program exceeded our wildest expectations, and I’m happy to report back that internships, if structured properly, can in fact add enormous value to the companies that provide them.

Looking Forward, and Thanks

I’m already looking forward to meeting next year’s interns. As a team, we will do our very best to show them why we love marketing at Backblaze.

I’d like to end by thanking Roland, Javier, and Katie for spending their summer with us. We are incredibly proud of the SALs our colleagues generated, and happy to call them friends. I remember when I was interviewing Javier and I asked him why he wanted to work at a cloud storage company, and he said “I worked at a deli near the Salesforce headquarters, and every day, all the employees would come to order food, and I couldn’t imagine what they did for the company. This is my chance to find out what it is to work in a company like that.” Now Javier knows not only what they do, but that he can succeed at doing it as well.

The post How Interns Can Help Your Business and the World appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How Long Do Disk Drives Last?

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated since it was originally published in 2013 to provide the latest information and statistics.

How long do disk drives last? We asked that question several years ago, and at the time the answer was: We didn’t know yet. Nevertheless, we did present the data we had up to that point and we made a few of predictions. Since that time, we’ve gone to school on hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state drive (SSD) failure rates. Let’s see what we’ve learned.

The initial drive life study was done with 25,000 disk drives and about four years of data. Today’s study includes data from over 200,000 disk drives, many of which have survived six years and longer. This gives us more data to review and lets us extend our projections. For example, in our original report we reported that 78% of the drives we purchased were living longer than four years. Today, about 90% of the drives we own have lasted four years and 65% are living longer than six years. So how long do drives last? Keep reading.

How Drives Are Used at Backblaze

Backblaze currently uses over 200,000 hard drives to store our customers’ data. Drives range in size from 4TB to 18TB in size. When added together, we have over two exabytes of hard drive space under management. Most of these drives are mounted in a storage server which accommodates 60 drives, plus a boot drive. There are also a handful of storage servers which use only 45 hard drives. The storage servers consist of Storage Pods (our own homegrown storage servers) and storage servers from external manufacturers. Twenty storage servers are grouped into a Backblaze Vault, which utilizes our own Reed-Solomon erasure coding algorithm to replicate and store customer data across the 20 servers in a Backblaze Vault.

Types of Hard Drives in the Analysis

The hard drives we use to store customer data are standard 3.5 inch drives you can buy online or in stores. The redundancy provided by the Backblave Vault software ensures the data is safe, while allowing us to use off-the-shelf drives from the three primary disk drive manufacturers: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. The following chart breaks down our current drive count by manufacturer. Note that HGST is now part of Western Digital, but the drives themselves report as HGST drives so they are listed separately in the chart.

Each of the storage servers also uses a boot drive. Besides the obvious function of booting the server, we also use these drives to store log files recording system access and activities which are used for analytics and compliance purposes. A boot drive can be either an HDD or an SSD. If you’re interested, we’ve compared the reliability of HDDs versus SSDs as it relates to these boot drives.

Number of Hard Drives

As stated earlier, we currently have over 200,000 disk drives we manage and use for customer data storage. We use several different disk drive sizes as the table below shows, with over 60% of those drives being 12TB or 14TB in size.

Drive Failure Rates

Before diving into the data on failure rates, it’s worth spending a little time clarifying what exactly a failure rate means. The term failure rate alone is not very useful as it is missing the notion of time. For example, if you bought a hard drive, what is the failure rate of a hard drive that failed one week after you purchased it? What about one year after you purchased it? Five years? They can’t all be the same failure rate. What’s missing is time. When we produce our quarterly and annual Drive Stats reports, we calculate and publish the annualized failure rate (AFR). By using the AFR, all failure rates are translated to be annual so that regardless of the timeframe (e.g., one month, one year, three years) we can compare different cohorts of drives. Along with the reports, we include links to the drive data we use to calculate the stated failures rates.

The Bathtub Curve

Reliability engineers use something called the bathtub curve to describe expected failure rates. The idea is that defects come from three factors: (1) factory defects, resulting in “infant mortality,” (2) random failures, and (3) parts that wear out, resulting in failures after much use. The chart below (from Wikimedia Commons) shows how these three factors can be expected to produce a bathtub-shaped failure rate curve.

When our initial drive life study was done, the Backblaze experience matched the bathtub curve theory. When we recently revisited the bathtub curve, we found the bathtub to be leaking, as the left side of the Backblaze bathtub curve (decreasing failure rate) was much lower and more consistent with the constant failure rate. This can be seen in the chart below which covers the most recent six years worth of disk drive failure data.

The failure rate (the red line) is below 2% for the first three and a half years and then increases rapidly through year six. When we plot a trendline of the data (the blue dotted line, a second order polynomial) a parabolic curve emerges, but it is significantly lower on the left hand side, looking less like a bathtub and more like a shallow ladle or perhaps a hockey stick.

Calculating Life Expectancy

What’s the life expectancy of a hard disk drive? To answer that question, we first need to decide what we mean by “life expectancy.”

When measuring the life expectancy of people, the usual measure is the average number of years remaining at a given age. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that the life expectancy of all newborns in the world is currently 73 years. This means if we wait until all of those new people have lived out their lives in 120 or 130 years, the average of their lifespans will be 73.0.

For disk drives, it may be that all of them will wear out before they are 10 years old. Or it may be that some of them last 20 or 30 years. If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful.

The number that should be able to compute is the median lifespan of a new drive. That is the age at which half of the drives fail. Let’s see how close we can get to predicting the median lifespan of a new drive given all the data we’ve collected over the years.

Disk Drive Survival Rates

To this day it is surprisingly hard to get an answer to the question “How long will a hard drive last?” As noted, we regularly publish our Drive Stats reports, which lists the AFRs for the drive models we use. While these reports answer the question at what rate disk drives will fail, they don’t tell us how long they will last. Interestly, the same data we collect and use to predict drive failure can be used to figure out the life expectancy of the hard drive models we use. It is all a matter of how you look at the data.

When we apply life expectancy forecasting techniques to the drive data we have collected, we get the following chart:

The life expectancy decreases at a fairly stable rate of 2% to 2.5% a year for the first four years, then the decrease begins to accelerate. Looking back at the AFR by quarter chart above, this makes sense as the failure rate increases beginning in year four. After six years we end up with a life expectancy of 65%. Stated another way, if we bought a hard drive six years ago, there is a 65% chance it is still alive today.

How Long WILL the Hard Drives Last?

What happens to drives when they’re older than six years? We do have drives that are older than six years, so why did we stop there? We didn’t have enough data to be confident beyond six years as the number of drives drops off at that point and becomes composed almost entirely of one or two drive models versus a diverse selection. Instead, we used the data we had through six years and extrapolated from the life expectancy line to estimate the point at which half the drives will have died.

How long do drives last? It would appear a reasonable estimate of the median life expectancy is six years and nine months. That aligns with the minimal amount of data we have collected to date, but as noted, we don’t have quite enough data to be certain. Still, we know it is longer than six years for all the different drive models we use. We will continue to build up data over the coming months and years and see if anything changes.

In the meantime, how long should you assume a hard drive you are going to buy will last? The correct answer is to always have at least one backup and preferably two, keep them separate, and check them often一the 3-2-1 backup strategy. Every hard drive you buy will fail at some point—it could be in one day or 10 years—be prepared.

The post How Long Do Disk Drives Last? appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

A Guide for the Family IT Manager

Post Syndicated from Juan Lopez-Nava original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-guide-for-the-family-it-manager/

Does everyone in your family turn to you to help them fix some tech issue or another? Your uncle ever come to your house in the middle of the day to help him set up his iCloud account on his new iPhone? If the Wi-Fi goes down in the house, are you the first person your family calls before they call their internet provider? If you answered yes to any of these questions, congratulations! You are the family IT department.

Being the family IT admin is a job that you never formally applied for. It just happened over time as you continued to fix all the tech issues that accumulated around the house. If you’re looking for ways to best help your family manage their data and backups, this post will share some tips and advice so you can avoid those panicked requests from your parents or grandparents when they can’t find that favorite family photo or have trouble getting online.

Getting Started as the Head of the Family IT Department

Although it might feel like you’re always on-call to help your family with tech issues, there are a few ways you can set up your family with simple tech solutions even your grandfather will be able to figure out.

How to Back Up Your Digital Life
To start, check out our series of guides to help you protect content across many different platforms—including social media, sync services, and more. This list is always a work in progress—please comment below if you’d like to see another platform covered.
 

Best Practices for Managing Family IT

As the family IT admin, I’ve been asked to fix many issues, like devices that won’t start up or work properly, slow or interrupted internet connections, and even data loss. There are a few best practices you can follow to help encourage your family members to handle these problems independently, or even set up automated solutions. These best practices include:

  • Using the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
  • Keeping systems updated.
  • Troubleshooting network connectivity issues.
  • Setting up automated backups and a Group to centralize your family’s data backups.

The 3-2-1 Backup Method

While I have fixed a lot of issues, there are some issues that I have not been able to resolve, like retrieving a file on a damaged computer without a backup. Data loss can happen at any moment, from accidentally spilling something on your computer to system upgrades or even just accidental deletion. It’s always best to practice backup etiquette with the 3-2-1 method. Using this method, you will have the document saved in three different places—two copies of your data on-site but on different devices, for example, on your computer and an external hard drive, and one copy off-site, for example, in the cloud. In case you lose one, you have two as backup. There is no such thing as a perfect backup system, but the 3-2-1 approach is a great start for the majority of people and businesses, so it’s definitely good enough for your great aunt.

Keeping Systems Up-to-date

As the family IT admin, one of the most common issues you’ll probably face is a malfunctioning device, or a device that needs to be updated. A straightforward way to get started is by resetting the system—yes, just turn it off and turn it back on again. But the best way to ensure your devices are working properly is to ensure that all system updates have been properly installed. By making sure that all of your family’s devices are running on the most recent versions of their software, you can avoid running into problems with apps not working or other issues.

For many devices, running a software update or checking for a new software version is a pretty straightforward process. Apple has made it easy for iOS users—you can set software updates to automatically run in the background while you charge your phone at night. For a PC, you select the Start button, then select Settings > Update & security > Windows Update. Select Advanced Options, and then under “Choose how updates are installed,” select Automatic. You can even think about walking your family members through a check for updates so they can handle any issues on their own in the future.

Nowadays, we all use many devices to store and access our data every day. We’ve created a few guides to help you make sure the data on your phone, computer, and hard drive is backed up or secured for whenever you plan to upgrade.
 

Troubleshooting Network Connectivity Issues

When you’re dealing with a network issue, it can be frustrating because they often feel like they happen at the most inconvenient times. You can be on a call for work and bam! Lost connection. You want to play your PS5 games with friends after a long day at work? Think again, your internet was disconnected. Well, let me walk you through some of my thought process when I want to fix the internet connection.

  • Check if other devices that are connected to your Wi-Fi are having the same issues.
    • If not, then you will need to go to your network settings for that device. You can disconnect and reconnect to the Wi-Fi there.
  • If you are using an Ethernet cable, make sure that it’s properly connected.
  • Most internet providers have a service where you can check if the servers are down in your area. Double check that your home was not hit with an internet outage.
  • Go directly to the router and hit the reset button. Sometimes restarting helps solve the problem.

Setting Up Automated Data Backups

Typically, our data is scattered across many platforms and many devices. Take that, and multiply it by each member of your family—that’s a lot of data that needs to be backed up and secured. I can’t just sit and back up my family’s files and photos on a daily or weekly basis. Personally, I needed something I could install onto my family’s computers and forget about it, all while still knowing that it would back up their data without me constantly monitoring it. And remember, syncing your data is not the same as backing it up.

Backup tools are great for keeping your family’s data protected and ensuring your work as the family IT admin is made easier. Look for a simple app that can automate data backups and make them accessible from anywhere via the web or mobile apps.

(Shameless plug) Backblaze Computer Backup does just that. I set it up in minutes on all of my family’s computers, and now it just runs in the background of all of our devices.

How to Set Up Groups to Manage Your Family’s Backups

One feature that’s particularly helpful with using backup tools for protecting your family’s device data is centralizing your backups into a group. Groups are the best way to manage your family’s backups in one place. With Computer Backup, it’s easy to create a Group and add members to your Group.

  1. First, go to your Backblaze account. If you don’t have Groups enabled, simply go to your Settings tab and check the box to enable Groups.
  2. Now you can start your first Group. Name it whatever you want—I’m a very simple person so I call mine “Family,” but be as creative as you want.

  3. After creating your Group, you can start inviting your family members. You can choose to share a direct link to the group or email them an invitation. Once they get the link, your family members can create an account and install the client on their own computer to start backing up their data.

How to Back Up Your Family’s Data

Once your family has the Backblaze client installed on their computer, you are set! The scheduling is automatically set to back up continuously, so you don’t have to worry if your family’s computers are getting backed up. You can sleep in peace now!

You’re not alone in being the family IT admin—even though it might not be an official job, we all take the responsibilities seriously because we care about our families. What are some of the technical problems that you have had to solve as the family IT admin? Let us know in the comments.

The post A Guide for the Family IT Manager appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Backblaze Holiday Gift Guide 2021

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-holiday-gift-guide-2021/

The holiday season is upon us, and here at Backblaze, we always love to see what cool, new things are out there for us to give to our friends and family. Every year, we ask our team members what gifts they’ll be giving (or treating themselves to) and share their ideas on our blog.

This year, our team’s gift ideas range from the latest in fitness trackers for the person who’s always on the go, to weighted blankets that keep you cozy, and helpful plant-rearing guides for blossoming green thumbs. Read on for some gift ideas that are sure to bring some holiday joy!

For Those Who Love Spending Time Outdoors

WHOOP

WHOOP is a fitness and health membership that offers a fitness tracker and an app that analyzes fitness, health, and sleep data as well as a way to connect with other WHOOP members. Their adjustable device can be worn with a range of garments or on their handy wristbands. And they’re stylish!

YETI Trailhead Camp Chair

Save yourself a seat wherever you are—the beach, the backyard, or the backcountry—with this lightweight camp chair.

ENO DoubleNest Printed Hammock

Don’t want to sit down after your hike? Lay down in this packable hammock instead!

Hidrate Spark 3 Smart Water Bottle

If you’re the type of person who needs to be reminded to drink water (me), this water bottle will glow when it’s time to hydrate. Luckily, it will not play obnoxious music.

And Those Who’d Rather Stay Home

Gravity Weighted Flannel Sherpa Blanket

Holiday season is also cozy season, and weighted blankets are arguably one of the best ways to enjoy it.

The New Plant Parent

If you or someone you know spent the early months of the pandemic transforming their home into a greenhouse (that also smelled of sourdough), this book provides all the houseplant tips and tricks they might need to keep their indoor garden thriving.

RENPHO Eye Massager

As many of us spend our days staring at screens that can strain our eyes over time, this eye massager is a great way to reduce tension and headaches. It even connects to your phone via Bluetooth so you can choose music to play as it works. Not to be confused with an
Oculus Quest 2.

TP-Link Kasa Smart Light Strip

Every kid will want one of these to decorate their room. You can light up your house with this multicolor light strip, which you can control from your phone.

For Your Foodie Friend

Anova Precision Cooker Pro

Treat the home chef in your life to this super precise and powerful sous vide tool that’s a fan favorite with over 100 million cooks.

Hot Ones 10 Pack Sauce Kit

Everything tastes better with hot sauce, and this kit includes the full lineup from season 16 of “Hot Ones.”

Koffie Inja

This small batch coffee roaster uses sustainable and ethically-sourced coffee beans and donates 20% of their proceeds to Muttville, a San Francisco-based senior dog rescue shelter.

Games and Game-related Accessories

Nintendo Game and Watch: The Legend of Zelda

Retro game fans will enjoy this collectible game and watch that includes three Legend of Zelda games.

Legendary Edition of Curse of Strahd

Strahd is a TTRPG favorite and this edition comes with bonus encounters, finger puppets, and lots more!

Glorious Modular Mechanical Keyboard

This is the world’s first RGB, modular mechanical keyboard. It’s easily customizable and needs no setup. For when you need your clanky keys to light up!

For the Practical Person

Wemo WiFi Smart Plug

This smart plug uses your home Wi-Fi connection to let you control plugged-in devices from your phone or tablet. Neat!

Tile Combo Pack

Have a friend or family member who’s constantly losing their keys or phone (or themselves)? Help them keep track of their items with this combo pack that works with Android or Apple devices.

Fuzzy Lined Crocs

Are they the most fashionable? Maybe not. But they might be the most comfortable, especially with the warm and fuzzy liner!

Give the Gift of Backblaze

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

We hope this gift guide has helped spark some ideas for your own holiday gift-giving! Comment below to tell us what gifts you’ll be giving your friends and family this year.

The post Backblaze Holiday Gift Guide 2021 appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Backblaze

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/who-ya-gonna-call-backblaze/

Halloween and its surrounding spooky season is my favorite time of the year. As the Computer Backup Steward at Backblaze, I often read people’s notes to us, which detail how we’ve helped them recover their files. As I was thinking about their experiences and our past Halloween blog posts detailing spooky data loss stories (Truly, what’s scarier than data loss?), I recalled a personal story that happened to my sister a few years ago when she was interning here at Backblaze. It reminded me that Backblaze Computer Backup doesn’t just recover people’s data, but we also help access it in times of need—which can be equally important. Like the Ghostbusters, when there’s something strange in your (data’s) neighborhood, who ya gonna call? …Backblaze, it’s Backblaze. So, on this, the Friday before Halloween, let me recount that tiny spooky tale for you today…

A long time ago, my sister Lisa was an intern with us here at Backblaze. It was just for a month, but she helped us build desks, digitized business cards (The horror!), and generally helped out around the office while getting a feel for working at a Silicon Valley tech startup. Like any good startup techie, after joining us for the summer, she started using Backblaze to back up her computer files, which makes sense because as a 19-year-old—a lot can happen to your computer.

My sister and I are really close, and we try to go on little trips together whenever possible. One of these opportunities arose in the form of a road trip from the San Francisco Bay to Los Angeles to see a comedy show. (For those curious, it was Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman recording their “Hollywood Babble-On” podcast.)

Driving down from the Bay Area to Los Angeles takes about five to six hours, sometimes longer depending on the traffic and where you’re headed. As we passed hour four, my sister turned to me and said, ”Hey, do I need my ID for this?” Cue: creepy forewarning music.

Now, this comedy show was held, oddly enough, in a comedy club (this sometimes happens when comedy is involved). An important thing to know about comedy clubs in general is that often they require people to be over 18, and are very serious about asking for ID so that underage people don’t imbibe, which makes sense—safety first.

So, yes. An ID was required, and yes she would need it, but no, she did not have it—nor her purse in general. Being an older brother is like that sometimes. I wasn’t about to turn around and drive back to San Francisco—partly because we had the show to go to that night, but also because I would get a bit of enjoyment from her having to sit outside while I enjoyed some comedy as a “lesson.” A sinister brotherly thought.

Luckily, I remembered that a few months back, my sister had to scan her passport as a PDF so that we could have a digital copy on another trip. I called up the comedy club and asked if they’d take a digital ID if we didn’t have a physical one, and while they were confused, they did say yes, so long as it was official. Good news! Once we arrived at the hotel, she logged on to Backblaze, found her backed up passport PDF, and we printed it out in the lobby. And we made it to the show on time. Happily ever after!

OK, so maybe it wasn’t really a horror story and the prospect of not making it to a comedy show may not seem scary to some people, but our family dynamic would mean that if she wasn’t able to attend and had to sit outside, she’d never have lived it down—low stakes slightly spooky (the best kind).

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How to Back Up Old Email Accounts

Post Syndicated from Nicole Perry original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-back-up-old-email-accounts/

Growing up, a common conversation I overheard between my mom and grandma went like this: “Do you have that recipe from our great aunt?”

“Sure, I do. Let me email it to you. Also, I have some funny jokes to forward along.”

My mom, and I’m guessing many others too, have kept every email they’ve ever received from their parents, family, and friends because they don’t want to lose the funny jokes, family recipes, announcements, and more that they’ve sent back and forth over the years. In the moment, our email accounts can feel like a day-to-day concern, or worse, a repository of spam. But for most of us, every email account holds some amount of treasured memories.

Nowadays, my mom has many different email accounts. But, she wanted to find a way to keep all of those emails she loved without having to keep the accounts themselves. She also found that she had so many emails in her inbox that she was running out of storage space.

Buying more storage can become expensive and doesn’t guarantee that those emails are safely backed up and remain accessible. One option is to download the emails, delete them in the client, and back them up somewhere reliable and accessible for the long term.

If you’re looking for a way to keep old emails or just want to clean up your inbox storage because you’re running out of space, this post walks you through the steps of how to download your data from various email platforms.

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

Getting Started: How to Download One Email

If you know the exact email you want to make sure you have a copy of, it’s very easy to download it from any client.

For this example, we are going to use Gmail, but this should work for most email clients. If you run into an email client that it does not work with, feel free to note it in the comments below and we’ll update the guidance.

  1. Log in to the email address you would like to download a copy of the email from. (I’m using Gmail.)
  2. Find the email you would like to download. For this example, I will be downloading a family recipe sent by my mom.

  3. Select “Print” in the top right corner.
  4. When the print screen appears, save the email as a PDF on to your computer.

  5. And presto, you have a copy of that email you would like to save forever.

This process can be a bit tedious as you would have to download each email one at a time. It also can be tough if you don’t remember how to find the email you would like to save. If this is true, there are also ways that you can download all of your email data.

While there are other file formats you can download individual emails in, we strongly recommend that—if you want to be able to manage or search your old emails—you download all of your emails (which we explain how to do below). This provides the data in easily manageable formats and is far more time efficient.

Getting Serious: How to Download All of Your Emails

Below, I explain how to download your email data from two top free email websites. Don’t see the email platform you use? Leave a comment below and we’ll work to add material to help you!

How to Download Outlook Emails

A lot of people use Outlook for various reasons, often for work or school. If you downloaded Microsoft 365, then you also have access to Outlook email. To export your email from Outlook and save it as a PST file (don’t worry about what a PST file is quite yet, we’ll explain below), do the following:

  1. Sign in to your Outlook account.
  2. Click the gear button in the upper right corner.
  3. Scroll down on the settings panel to “View all Outlook settings.”
  4. Click on the button with a gear symbol labeled “General.”

  5. Select “Privacy and data” on the second panel that appears.
  6. On the right side, there will be a button labeled “Export mailbox.” Select this button.
  7. The button will grey out and a status update will appear to let you know the download is in progress.

  8. When the export is complete, we’ve found that Outlook may not notify your inbox. If this is the case, you will need to repeat steps one through five and navigate to the “Download here” button. This button will only appear once your emails are ready to download.

  9. Click “Download here” to download your PST file with all of your email data. (Scroll past the section on downloading Gmail data to learn what to do with this file type.)

How to Download Gmail Emails

In a previous post, we explained how to download all of your data from Google Drive. But, if you are just looking to download your Gmail data, here is a more detailed way to just do that.

  1. Log in to the Google Account you’d like to download your emails from.
  2. Once signed in, you will want to go to: myaccount.google.com.

  3. Go to the “Privacy & personalization” section and select “Manage your data & privacy.”
  4. On the next screen it takes you to, you’ll want to scroll down to a section labeled “Data from apps and services you use.” Here, you’ll select “Download your data” in the “Download or delete your data” section.

  5. From here, it’ll take you to the Google Takeout page. On this page, you’ll be given the option to select to download all of your Gmail emails and also your Google Chrome bookmarks, transactions from various Google services, locations stored in Google Maps, Google Drive contents, and other Google-related products you may use.
  6. If you want to download all your Google data, keep everything selected. If you just want a copy of your emails, deselect all and only select Google Mail to be downloaded.

  7. Click the next step on the bottom of the page.
  8. On the next page, you’ll decide what file type you would like it sent as, the frequency you would like this action to happen (Example: If you would like your data to be downloaded every six months, this is where you can set that to happen.), and the destination you would like your data to be sent to. For this example, I picked a one time download.

  9. Select “Create export” and you’ll see an export in progress page.
  10. An email will appear in a few minutes, hours, or a couple of days (depending on the size of data you are downloading), informing you that your Google data is ready to download. Once you have this email in your inbox, you have a week to download the data. Click the “Download your files” button in the email and you will have a ZIP file or a TGZ file (depending on what type of file you picked) on your computer with your Google data.

  11. When you open the ZIP, you will have all of your emails (including spam and trash) in an MBOX file.

What Is a PST File? What Is a MBOX File? How Do I Open Them?

A PST file is used by Microsoft programs to store data and items such as email messages, calendar events, and contacts. By moving items to an Outlook Data File (also known as a PST file) saved to your computer, you can free up storage space in the mailbox on your mail server. If you would like to make this file usable by other email clients, here’s a guide on how to convert your newly downloaded PST file to a MBOX file type.

An MBOX file is an email mailbox saved in a mail storage format used for organizing email messages in a single text file. It saves messages in a connected order where each message is stored after another, starting with the “From” header.

To open a MBOX file, you will need a third-party email program, such as Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. We recommend Mozilla Thunderbird, as it’s a free email client and it’s supported by both Macs and PCs.

This step is helpful if you would like to view the emails you downloaded. It also helps if you were looking to take the emails you downloaded and move them to a new inbox. For example, if you are afraid the email account you’ve used to sign up for everything over the past 10 years is vulnerable, you can download the emails from that inbox and move them to a new inbox using Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird.

Great, now you’ve downloaded your emails. You’re not done yet! Read on to learn how to safely back up your emails so that you can hold on to them forever.

Use Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Buckets to Keep an Organized Archive of Your Emails

Once you have your email data downloaded to your computer, it’s best practice to make sure that you have at least one copy of your data stored off-site in the cloud. Storing it in the cloud alongside two local copies ensures you never lose all those important emails.

A simple way to do this is with Backblaze B2, where you can upload and organize your files in buckets. To upload your files to a bucket, follow the steps below.

  1. Sign in to your Backblaze account.
  2. In the left hand column, select “Buckets” under the section “B2 Cloud Storage.”
  3. Click on the button “Create a bucket.”

  4. In the next step, you will need to create a unique name for your bucket and select some settings for it, like if it will be public or private or if you would like to enable encryption.
  5. Once the bucket is created, it will take you to a page where you can upload your files. You will want to drag and drop the email files you want to upload to it. If the MBOX file is too large to drag and drop into the bucket, you can use a third-party integration like Cyberduck to facilitate the upload. You can read the guide to using Cyberduck for Backblaze B2 bucket uploads here.

Alternatively, if you’re not worried about organizing or working with your email archives and just want to know they’re stored away safely, you can keep your downloaded files on your computer. If you follow this route, remember to sign up for a backup service that makes a copy of all of your computer’s files in the cloud. In the case of any data loss, a service like Backblaze Computer Backup would have a copy of all of your data ready for you to restore. If your email applications are locally stored on your computer, Backblaze will automatically back up your emails. You can learn more about how this works here. This approach will take up more room on your computer, but it’s a simple path to peace of mind.

From here, your MBOX file with all your emails from your family, friends, and reminders to yourself (We all have those!) will be safe in the cloud. If you ever want to pull out the archive and read the emails you saved, remember to use the third-party tools mentioned above. What’s important is that you have all your memories stored, safely with a provider who will ensure their redundancy and reliability.

Have questions or want to see a guide for an email client we didn’t mention above? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

The post How to Back Up Old Email Accounts appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Back to School, Backup for School

Post Syndicated from original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/back-to-school-backup-for-school/

Students are starting to head back to the classroom all over the world and, while the timing might be the same, the way we’re thinking about school has changed a lot recently. Schoolwork and projects that previously would have been printed out and handed in have moved online along with classrooms and collaboration. The amount of flexibility this has allowed teachers, parents, students, and childcare professionals is great, but it also means that more schoolwork than ever is at risk of data loss.

As young folks are heading back to classrooms, especially those heading off to college farther afield, now is a great time to help teach the value of backing up their data.

Whether they are in person, online, or on a hybrid system, students will still be creating, collaborating, and consuming files on their computers. Setting them up with a backup service, or helping them install one can prevent them from calling you late at night in a panic after spilling Redbull or coffee on the machine they’re diligently (we’re sure) doing schoolwork on.

Backup Basics: The 3-2-1 Approach

Spilling something and frying the electronics inside of a computer is not the only way to lose data, so having an all-encompassing view to data care is important. At Backblaze, we recommend the 3-2-1 backup approach. That means keeping:

  • Three copies of your data.
  • Two copies of your data on-site but on different devices. (For example, on your computer and an external hard drive.)
  • One copy of your data off-site. (For example, in the cloud.)

Best Practices for Students

In addition to your basic 3-2-1 approach, there are a few best practices students can follow (and parents can encourage) to help them avoid scrambling to find their term paper the night before the final, including:

  • Instituting naming conventions.
  • Keeping data in a central repository.
  • Automating backups.
  • Creating archives.

Institute Naming Conventions

One common way of losing data is simply forgetting where it was created or saved, similar to misplacing a pair of keys. The easiest way to combat that is to have clear naming conventions for your folders and files and to use them consistently. Having a folder for every year of study, then semester, or quarter inside of it, then class inside of that, helps categorize data and is a great way to start building up good data hygiene.

Keep Data in a Central Repository

A typical student’s data is scattered across a variety of devices, apps, clouds, and computers—we call this “data scatter.” Even if they are using good data hygiene when naming and organizing these various locations, having a central repository—even if just for final documents—is important.

When they have their data in one centralized location, students can back it up frequently, so that even if work is lost from a collaborative place (like someone deleting a file or presentation from a shared folder), they’ll still have a copy locally and in an accessible location.

Automate Backups

Once the data is saved to the new location, the next best thing to do is make sure that there are automated backups running, so that—should anything happen to that machine or device—the data will still be accessible somewhere else (all part of the 3-2-1 strategy).

When selecting a backup tool, you want to look for something simple, affordable, and most importantly, accessible. That’s where apps like Backblaze really shine when it comes to computer backup, since they are designed to be unobtrusive, and the backed up data can be accessed anywhere in the world via web or mobile apps.

Create Archives

Creating archives is another tool in the fight to combat data loss and maintain good data hygiene. Archives differ from backups in that they tend to be permanent. Backups tend to be on a rolling basis (similar to an alarm system keeping a certain amount of video before it gets recycled—the thought being, if something happens you can recover the video for a certain period of time, but if nothing occurs it’s better to get that space back).

Archives, on the other hand, are more immutable in nature. Once you have an archive, it’s rare to remove it, unless you want to get rid of everything associated with it. There are many methods that people employ to archive their data, including having hard drives for every month or year that they create an archive for, but there are online tools as well. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage has an Object Lock feature which allows users to upload data and have it stay there until expressly deleted by the user.

Backing Up Your Student’s Social Life

It’s probably not your top priority, but your student is likely just as concerned with backing up their social profiles and photos as they are with backing up their Econ 101 homework. Fortunately, we’ve got both covered. To help your student back up their digital social life, we put together a few handy guides:

How to Get Started

The best time to start backing up is now. If Backblaze is a good choice for your family and school-aged kiddos, there’s a few ways to get started:

  • Here’s how to set up Backblaze on your kid’s computer before they head off to college:
    • Sign up for an account, and install Backblaze on your student’s computer. You can find our guides to installing on Mac here, and on Windows here.
    • Once you have installed the software, you can select what hard drives should be backed up, set your backup schedule, or change your performance settings. For more on how to do that, you can check out our Mac Settings Overview and Windows Settings Overview.
    • You can set up payment in the Billing section under My Account when you sign in to Backblaze.
    • If your student needs to restore a file, they can follow the steps here.
  • If your kid is more of a self-starter, send them a gift code—that way you’ll cover their first year, and after that it’s on them to handle the payment and maintenance (good for those who value their independence but maybe just need a jump-start): https://backblaze.com/gift.htm.
  • Consider using a Backblaze Group! A few years ago we wrote about how our Groups feature can help families maintain their digital lives, and you can read it here. This option is great if you have many family members, or if you just want one central place to manage billing for multiple accounts.
    • If you are a Backblaze customer, simply log in to Backblaze.com, go to the Settings page, and enable Business Groups. Once done, you can navigate to the Groups Management page and get started. More information on creating a Group can be found here.
    • If you are not yet a Backblaze customer and like the Groups approach, you can create a new Backblaze account with Groups enabled here.

Just like developing good habits for anything else, a strong understanding of data, where it lives, how it can be lost, and how to save it can be an incredibly important skill to develop. As the amount of data in the world increases and it increasingly becomes the digital world’s most precious resource, maintaining it will become one of the more important habits we can instill in our younger generations!

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Getting Rid of Your PC? Here’s How to Wipe a Windows SSD or Hard Drive

Post Syndicated from Molly Clancy original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-wipe-pc-ssd-or-hard-drive/

Securely Erasing PC Drives

Are you hanging on to an old PC because you don’t know how to scrub the hard drive clean of all your personal information? Worried there’s data lurking around in there even after you empty the recycle bin? (Yes, there is.)

You always have the option of taking a baseball bat to the thing. Truly, physical destruction is one way to go (more on that later). But, there are much easier and more reliable, if less satisfying, ways to make sure your Windows PC is as clean as the day it left the factory.

First Things First: Back Up

Before you break out the Louisville Slugger (or follow our simple steps below), make sure your data is backed up as part of a 3-2-1 backup strategy where you keep three copies of your data on two types of media with one off-site. Your first copy is the one on your computer. Your second copy can be kept on an external hard drive or other external media. And the third copy should be kept in an off-site location like the cloud. If you’re not backing up an off-site copy, now is a great time to get started.

Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11 all have basic utilities you can use to create a local backup on an external hard drive that you can use to move your files to a new computer or just to have a local backup for safekeeping. Once you’re backed up, you’re ready to wipe your PC’s internal hard drive.

How to Completely Wipe a PC

First, you’ll need to figure out if your Windows PC has a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD). Most desktops and laptops sold in the last few years will have an SSD, but you can easily find out to be sure:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Type “Defragment” in the search bar.
  3. Click on “Defragment and Optimize Your Drives.”
  4. Check the media type of your drive.

screenshot for selecting drive to wipe clean

How to Erase Your Windows Drive

Now that you know what kind of drive you have, there are two options for wiping your PC:

  1. Reset: In most cases, wiping a PC is as simple as reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows using the Reset function. If you’re just recycling, donating, or selling your PC, the Reset function makes it acceptably difficult for someone to recover your data, especially if it’s also encrypted. This can be done easily in Windows versions 8, 8.1, 10, and 11 for either an HDD or an SSD.
  2. Secure Erase Using Third-party Tools: If Reset doesn’t make you feel completely comfortable that your data can’t be recovered, or if you have a PC running Windows 7 or older, you have another option. There are a number of good third-party tools you can use to securely erase your disk, which we’ll get into below. These are different depending on whether you have an HDD or an SSD.

Follow these instructions for different versions of Windows to reset your PC:

How to Wipe a Windows 10 and 11 Hard Drive

  1. Go to Settings → System (Update & Security in Windows 10) → Recovery.
  2. Under “Reset this PC” click “Reset.” (Click “Get Started” in Windows 10.)
  3. Choose “Remove everything.” (If you’re not getting rid of your PC, you can use “Keep my files” to give your computer a good cleaning to improve performance.)
  4. You will be prompted to choose to reinstall Windows via “Cloud download” or “Local reinstall.” If you’re feeling generous and want to give your PC’s next owner a fresh version of Windows, choose “Cloud download.” This will use internet data. If you’re planning to recycle your PC, “Local reinstall” works just fine.
  5. In “Additional settings,” click “Change settings” and toggle “Clean data” to on. This takes longer, but it’s the most secure option.
  6. Click “Reset” to start the process.

How to Wipe a Windows 8 and 8.1 Hard Drive

  1. Go to Settings → Change PC Settings → Update and Recovery → Recovery.
  2. Under “Remove everything and reinstall Windows,” click “Get started,” then click “Next.”
  3. Select “Fully clean the drive.” This takes longer, but it’s the most secure option.
  4. Click “Reset” to start the process.

Secure Erase Using Third-party Tools

If your PC is running an older version of Windows or if you just want to have more control over the erasure process, there are a number of open-source third-party tools to wipe your PC hard drive, depending on whether you have an HDD or an SSD.

Secure Erase an HDD

The process for erasing an HDD involves overwriting the data, and there are many utilities out there to do it yourself:

  1. DBAN: Short for Darik’s Boot and Nuke, DBAN has been around for years and is a well-known and trusted drive wipe utility for HDDs. It does multiple pass rewrites (binary ones and zeros) on the disk. You’ll need to download it to a USB drive and run it from there.
  2. Disk Wipe: Disk Wipe is another free utility that does multiple rewrites of binary data. You can choose from a number of different methods for overwriting your disk. Disk Wipe is also portable, so you don’t need to install it to use it.
  3. Eraser: Eraser is also free to use. It gives you the most control over how you erase your disk. Like Disk Wipe, you can choose from different methods that include varying numbers of rewrites, or you can define your own.

Keep in mind, any disk erase utility that does multiple rewrites is going to take quite a while to complete.

If you’re using Windows 7 or older and you’re just looking to recycle your PC, you can stop here. If you intend to sell or donate your PC, you’ll need the original installation discs (yes, that’s discs with a “c”…remember? Those round shiny things?) to reinstall a fresh version of Windows.

Secure Erase an SSD

If you have an SSD, you may want to take the time to encrypt your data before erasing it to make sure it can’t be recovered. Why? The way SSDs store and retrieve data is different from HDDs.

HDDs store data in a physical location on the drive platter. SSDs store data using electronic circuits and individual memory cells organized into pages and blocks. Writing and rewriting to the same blocks over and over wears out the drive over time. So, SSDs use “wear leveling” to write across the entire drive, meaning your data is not stored in one physical location —it’s spread out.

When you tell an SSD to erase your data, it doesn’t overwrite said data, but instead writes new data to a new block. This has implications for erasing your SSD—some of your data might be hanging around your SSD even after you told it to be erased until such time as wear leveling decides the cells in that block can be overwritten. As such, it’s good practice to encrypt your data on an SSD before erasing it. That way, if any data is left lurking, at least no one will be able to read it without an encryption key.

You don’t have to encrypt your data first, but if Windows Reset is not enough for you and you’ve come this far, we figure it’s a step you’d want to take. Even if you’re not getting rid of your computer or if you have an HDD, encrypting your data is a good idea. If your laptop falls into the wrong hands, encryption makes it that much harder for criminals to access your personal information.

Encrypting your data isn’t complicated, but not every Windows machine is the same. First, check to see if your device is encrypted by default:

  1. Open the Start menu.
  2. Scroll to the “Windows Administrative Tools” dropdown menu.
  3. Select “System Information.” You can also search for “system information” in the taskbar.
  4. If the “Device Encryption Support” value is “Meets prerequisites,” you’re good to go—encryption is enabled on your device.

If not, your next step is to check if your device has BitLocker built in:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Type “BitLocker” in the search bar.
  3. Click “Manage BitLocker.”
  4. Click “Turn on BitLocker” and follow the prompts.

If neither of those options are available, you can use third-party software to encrypt your internal SSD. VeraCrypt and AxCrypt are both good options. Just remember to record the encryption passcode somewhere and also the OS, OS version, and encryption tool used so you can recover the files later on if desired.

Once you’ve encrypted your data, your next step is to erase, and you have a few options:

  1. Parted Magic: Parted Magic is the most regularly recommended third-party erase tool for SSDs, but it does cost $11. It’s a bootable tool like some of the HDD erase tools—you have to download it to a USB drive and run it from there.
  2. ATA Secure Erase: ATA Secure Erase is a command that basically shocks your SSD. It uses a voltage spike to flush stored electrons. While this sounds damaging (and it does cause some wear), it’s perfectly safe. It doesn’t overwrite the data like other secure erase tools, so there’s actually less damage done to the SSD.

The Nuclear Option

When nothing less than total destruction will do, just make sure you do it safely. I asked around to see if our team could recommend the best way to bust up your drive. Our Senior Systems Administrator, Tim Lucas, is partial to explosives, but we don’t recommend it. You can wipe an HDD with a magnet, otherwise known as “degaussing,” but a regular old fridge magnet won’t work. You’ll need to open up your PC and get at the hard drive itself, and you’ll need a neodymium magnet—one that’s strong enough to obliterate digits (both the ones on your hard drive and the ones on your hand) in the process. Not the safest way to go, either.

If you’re going to tear apart your PC to get at the HDD anyway, drilling some holes through the platter or giving it an acid bath are better options, as our CEO, Gleb Budman, explained in this Scientific American article. Drilling holes distorts the platter, and acid eats away at its surface. Both render an HDD unreadable.

Finally, we still stand by our claim that the safest and most secure way to destroy an HDD, and the only way we’d recommend physically destroying an SSD, is to shred it. Check with your local electronics recycling center to see if they have a shredder you can use (or if they’ll at least let you watch as giant metal gears chomp down on your drive). Shredding it should be a last resort though. Drives typically last five to 10 years, and millions get shredded every year before the end of their useful life. While blowing up your hard drive is probably a blast, we’re pretty sure you can find something even more fun to do with that old drive.

Still have questions about how to securely erase or destroy your hard drives? Let us know in the comments.

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