> this is available only in US and not other countries such as AUS?
Backblaze ships USB restores anywhere in the world. Finland, Australia, France, UK, we ship to these places literally every day! We absorb all the cost of shipping to free you from worrying about it.
> the return shipping cost will be expensive
You can return by the slowest boat shipping you like, and remember you are returning a small form factor 2.5" drive or even a USB thumb drive. I think you can put a thumb drive in a normal envelope with 49 cent stamp on it inside the USA and it will come back to us. But yes, you would have to check what it costs from Australia.
> There really don't seem to be any alternatives that support Linux.
Duplicity runs on Linux (ships built into Ubuntu and Debian) and people seem to like it and you can point it at Backblaze B2 storage which is very low cost (usually lower than $5/month). If you need a GUI, Deja Dup is getting rave reviews and it is a GUI on top of Duplicity.
> I want to be able to send ZFS snapshots, encrypted, to a remote location.
This is a REALLY common request and there are TONS of solutions. I think most of them were originally crafted to send your ZFS snapshots to Amazon S3 and/or Microsoft Azure, but now they work for Backblaze B2 also (and it is a LOT cheaper on Backblaze B2). If you look through the "integrations" list on this page you can choose your favorite: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i...
If you don't have any favorites, one of the Backblaze IT people here uses "Duplicity Linux" to do EXACTLY what you describe. I'm not that familiar with Duplicity but their website claims they ship as a native part of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. More info here: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
> I also tried the free tests of Backblaze and IIRC, they allowed only one machine
Backblaze has evolved quite a bit in the last couple years, I don't know when you last tried it. First of all, you can backup several computers under one email address in Backblaze. Second of all, Backblaze recently released "Groups" which is where one IT admin can administrate and monitor backups of hundreds of different users each with one or more computers.
For Backblaze Groups, there are two security models (both valid depending on your situation): 1) where the group administrator can prepare restores on behalf of the group members, or 2) the group members have absolute privacy yet the group administrator can monitor the backups and make sure they are healthy and up to date and get alerts if one client has not backed up recently, etc.
> I am genuinely considering using CloudBerry Backup and backing up to an S3 bucket
CloudBerry's standard client can backup to an Amazon S3 bucket, or just as easily to a Backblaze B2 bucket. The advantage of Backblaze B2 is that it is less than 1/4th the cost of Amazon.
> They will necessarily cost more than doing it yourself.
This may or may not be true. Backblaze purchases up to 10,000 hard drives at a time DIRECTLY from the manufacturer at a discount of list price. You pay list price. You also have to pay for unused hard drive space, while Backblaze sells the unused hard drive space to other customers. Then Backblaze locates our datacenter in an area with cost effective electricity. If you live in Hawaii you are paying 50 cents/kWh, at Backblaze we get electricity for about 10 cents/kWh. On the other hand you might be beating our price on electricity if you live in Oregon (3 cents/kWh). Backblaze does charge an (extremely small) profit. Anyway, the point is this calculation is a little subtle. My goal would be to actually save our customers money over doing it themselves even while pocketing a small profit for ourselves. That's nothing but good business for all of us.
> It's not like they have magic disks.
We use the same hard drives as the you do but with two important twists:
1) We Reed Solomon encode your data replicated across 20 *separate* hard drives in 20 *separate* computers in 20 *separate* locations in our datacenter. We can lose 3 entire computers and your data is FINE.
2) We monitor every hard drive, and when one hard drive goes bad we send a datacenter technician over to replace it 7 days a week. We care DEEPLY about the health of your files. If two computers fail in the same logical Reed Solomon group of 20 computers we have pager systems that wake people up in the middle of the night and they start driving towards the datacenter (maybe 15 minutes away) to get it fixed NOW. And it is a "dead man's switch" in that if our datacenter techs do not "silence the page" (acknowledging they are going to fix the problem) we keep paging more and more and more people at Backblaze up to and including the CEO. When you backup to a single local hard drive, how many employees get paged when some of the sectors go bad?
Anyway, at Backblaze we have been doing storage for over 10 years and we really care deeply. It is all we care about. My goal is to get the price down below where you can be free to solve other problems.
> I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days
If you are using Backblaze, make sure you "Check for Updates" (menu option) and make sure you are running the 5.0 client we just released last week. Then if you want to make faster progress, turn off all power savings modes on your computer so it won't sleep, and then go into Backblaze "Settings..." menu and turn off "Automatic Threads/Throttle" and manually set the number of threads high enough to saturate your network. Let it run all night long for several nights in a row then check the time estimates again.
> I'd love to see some hard data on the chance of data loss on those cloud services vs. typical home set-ups.
Backblaze uses a Reed Solomon encoding where every file is replicated across 20 different hard drives in 20 different locations in our datacenter. We can lose up to three full computers out of the 20 and your data is still both safe AND available. And a really good feature is we monitor EVERY SINGLE DRIVE and have datacenter employees replacing drives that have gone bad 7 days a week.
However, a counter point is that if you forget to pay Backblaze your monthly bill for as little as 60 days we delete your data to make room for paying customers. I really think people underestimate how easily this can occur purely by accident. For example, the credit card on file expires, and the employee who was signed up to get alerts retired the year before and the emails are not being read anymore.
For all of the reasons above, to my closest friends I recommend BOTH for data you would be really bummed out to lose. Keep the live copy, plus a backup at home on a hard drive, and a copy in Backblaze for when your house burns down. This is what I do, and it lets me sleep at night.
> if your out of touch with the server for 30 days it's deleted
Some clarification: For any computer that does not "phone home" we allow up to 6 months before even threatening to delete your backup, and we warn you first quite a bit (after that).
However, if the computer is backing up every day but you have an external hard drive (like a Drobo) and you leave the Drobo unplugged for more than 30 days, we warn you profusely by BOTH email and by popup dialogs and then we delete the data. If at some later date you plug the Drobo back in you need to repush the contents from scratch.
We are actively researching whether we (Backblaze) can extend this to be longer (like 60 days or 90 days) without losing too much money, but if you install today you have to live with "external drives must be plugged into the laptop host at least once every 30 days".
For Linux, Backblaze offers "B2 Object Storage" with a large list of established Linux clients supporting it. You can see the list on this web page: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i... (for Linux, look for the little pictures of a penguin).
Solutions that backup to Backblaze B2 include: Duplicity, HashBackup, Transmit (by Panic), and rclone
However, I looked into it for my aging parents in Oregon and Safeway did not "officially" do deliveries there, but the checkout clerk I was talked with said she shopped and delivered for several older people in town. If Safeway won't deliver in your area you might setup something informal with a Safeway checkout clerk?
> If it were really that cheap and easy to do I would expect that some company would have already done so and charged everyone a few Euro...
They have, it's called cellular data services (LTE). In Europe it would be Vodafone, Telekom, Orange, etc. Sure, the frequency and protocol is slightly different than 802.11 WiFi, but it is wireless, it is already everywhere, it already works, you can surf web pages on your phone or tablet wirelessly TODAY, and the data rates are a usable 50 Mbits/sec now and they are rolling out upgrades to 100 Mbits/sec and higher. LTE has some European deployments at 450 Mbits/sec today: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/ind...
I wonder what the tradeoff of 802.11 WiFi vs LTE is. While cell phone data plans are a little bit expensive the cellular providers seem to be making steady progress with faster and faster services.
> If the hard drive can survive in the environment provided by Backblaze, then they will certainly do better in a home computer properly built
I suppose it matters. The pods are in a professional datacenter with air filters and sticky paper that we step on before entering the clean datacenter. When we open pods in the datacenter they are NEVER filled with dust bunnies. But when I open up my "properly built" gaming computer at home there are ALWAYS dust bunnies, air in homes with pets and carpets is simply going to have some dust.
Backblaze also monitors everything and fixes every problem, a home computer usually monitors nothing. Recently I was editing video on my laptop and it just shut off (I lost 10 minutes of edits). Turns out it was overheating due to a bad fan, but nothing WARNED me about this so I was subjecting all the components in the laptop to dangerously high levels of heat before the CPU shut down to protect itself. That won't happen in the Backblaze datacenter where we monitor everything, including the temperature of every last one of the 68,813 drives and go fix it when they deviate from normal for any reason.
One of the main things Backblaze does which may or may not occur in a home office is that we do leave the drives powered up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you leave your computer shut down half the time, there may be situations where that extends it's life in your home. For example, if the drives bearings inherently are built for 2 years of continuous run time and you only have the computer turned on 1/2 the time then your drive will last 4 years at home and only 2 years in the Backblaze datacenter.
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they had seen increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celsius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and in all but a few unusual conditions (such as some fans have failed) most drives are really running cool at around 25 degrees Celsius.
> What's the typical drive temperature in Backblaze's cases in their environment?
Short answer: the coolest drives are 21.92 Celcius and the hottest drive was 30.54 degrees.
I wrote this up above in response to a temperature question, copy and pasted here. The raw data dump from Backblaze includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a complete set of historical data of all drive temperatures in the Backblaze datacenter here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celcius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.
Originally (up until 3 years ago) that was true, but all new pods have 10 GbE interfaces, and 100% of the pods in our "Backblaze 20 pod Vaults" have 10 GbE interfaces. And there are some really strange (and wonderful) performance twists on using 20 pods to store each file: when you fetch a 1 MByte file from a vault, we need 17 pods to respond each supplying only 60k bytes to reassemble the complete file from the Reed Solomon. So the actual bandwidth when fetching just one medium size file can reach more like 170 Gbit/sec theoretical bandwidth. However, if you tried to fetch ALL the files from a pod all at once, the raw 7200 RPM drive performance is our current limiting factor.
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to cause failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.
> Perhaps they don't keep the temperature as cool as they should in order to save a few bucks?
The colocation datacenter is SunGard in Rancho Cordova California and there are other tenants. I assume the temperature of the datacenter is industry standard? But even better, in the raw data dump it includes all the temperatures of all the hard drives, so you (or anybody) could check the correlation. We looked into it in 2014 and didn't find much correlation between temperature and hard drive failure as long as we kept the temperature of any one hard drive well below a tipping point (which we do). Here is the blog article and stats behind our analysis: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
> back blaze... only reports numbers that they determine are significant.
That's not true. We provide a COMPLETE dump of the raw data for anybody who wants to download it. Here is a link for the lazy: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
> Protection against data loss is done with backups, not RAID.
RAID helps against data loss for some causes of data loss (like hard drives going bad).
However, RAID doesn't protect against human error or software bugs - if you tell a RAID system to delete a file it is deleted - RAID does not mean you can roll back time. If you have a "backup" from a few days ago, if you realize you just destroyed some data with user error, you can use the backup to recover most of the data you just lost.
Just to be absolutely clear - Backblaze does not use RAID inside each pod anymore, we use our own Reed-Solomon encoding across 20 drives in 20 different pods in 20 separate locations inside the datacenter. We open sourced the Reed-Solmon we use here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog... and you can read about how we organize the 20 different pods into a "Backblaze Vault" here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
I think the kaur (the user you were responding to) is wrong, buses and airplanes have windows you can open to watch the interesting and colorful world go by - in addition to window shades if you want to watch Netflix - it will be your choice. But you are also wrong, you already surrender control to a computer when it lands the commercial aircraft you are riding in. You even surrender control to your ABS brakes (occasionally) in your car which make better and faster decisions than you can about which ONE of your four car wheels to brake 10 times a second.
I see a bright happy future where I am actively enjoying the scenery and actively suggesting to the car where to go, but the car will "kick in" and avoid running over a small child or deer in the road faster than my human reflexes could manage. In my 35 years of driving (every day commuter here) I still managed to let my attention waiver once and got in a minor accident (my fault).The average driver gets in 3 or 4 accidents, so I think I'm still "above average" in my driving, but some day a computer will be able to do better than I can in avoiding accidents. I look forward to the help.
I think you guys hit all my favorites except: Threshold. Anybody else with gray hair remember it?
I directly attribute my current career as a software developer to the time in my mid teens that I played (and loved) those Apple ][ video games. I'd rather be lucky than good, and those games coming out just at the right moment in my life luckily pulled me into a ridiculously lucrative career doing something that I love - working with computers.
> By chance do you guys sell the hardware for the storage boxes?
You are in luck! Backblaze does NOT sell the hardware, but we give the design away entirely for free (and others sell it unassembled or assembled for a tiny markup). You can review the latest design here including downloading schematics and specs and parts lists to assemble your own: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
It sounds like you only want one, and you may not want to worry about assembling it yourself, so you should definitely check out: http://www.45drives.com/ who will sell you a completely assembled storage pod without drives, or may still even sell you a "kit" of the parts that you have to build yourself to save some money.
Backblaze doesn't get anything at all from this, so you might ask why it is all this way. Two things: first of all, we aren't in the business of making and selling hardware, we sell raw storage as a service (our B2 product line) and also we sell online backup. It doesn't HURT Backblaze to release the designs and we get a little free press and good will about it and people hear our name and might want to purchase the OTHER products we actually charge money for. Also, the very nice people at "45 drives" helped us when we were starting out by prototyping our sheet metal and helping with industry cad drawings and such (we were mostly software people, don't know much about manufacturing) so we simply want good things for them. Finally, Backblaze benefits by a larger ecosystem of people using this design. Some of the past improvements have been contributions from OTHER companies and people improving our original design and giving back the improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> this is available only in US and not other countries such as AUS?
Backblaze ships USB restores anywhere in the world. Finland, Australia, France, UK, we ship to these places literally every day! We absorb all the cost of shipping to free you from worrying about it.
> the return shipping cost will be expensive
You can return by the slowest boat shipping you like, and remember you are returning a small form factor 2.5" drive or even a USB thumb drive. I think you can put a thumb drive in a normal envelope with 49 cent stamp on it inside the USA and it will come back to us. But yes, you would have to check what it costs from Australia.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> I have a Synology NAS.... because S3 is so cheap for me, but if you have a lot of data, Glacier is definitely preferred
Synology NAS supports Backblaze B2 in much the same way it supports Amazon S3 except Backblaze is less than 1/4 the price.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> There really don't seem to be any alternatives that support Linux.
Duplicity runs on Linux (ships built into Ubuntu and Debian) and people seem to like it and you can point it at Backblaze B2 storage which is very low cost (usually lower than $5/month). If you need a GUI, Deja Dup is getting rave reviews and it is a GUI on top of Duplicity.
> I want to be able to send ZFS snapshots, encrypted, to a remote location.
This is a REALLY common request and there are TONS of solutions. I think most of them were originally crafted to send your ZFS snapshots to Amazon S3 and/or Microsoft Azure, but now they work for Backblaze B2 also (and it is a LOT cheaper on Backblaze B2). If you look through the "integrations" list on this page you can choose your favorite: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i...
If you don't have any favorites, one of the Backblaze IT people here uses "Duplicity Linux" to do EXACTLY what you describe. I'm not that familiar with Duplicity but their website claims they ship as a native part of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. More info here: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> I also tried the free tests of Backblaze and IIRC, they allowed only one machine
Backblaze has evolved quite a bit in the last couple years, I don't know when you last tried it. First of all, you can backup several computers under one email address in Backblaze. Second of all, Backblaze recently released "Groups" which is where one IT admin can administrate and monitor backups of hundreds of different users each with one or more computers.
For Backblaze Groups, there are two security models (both valid depending on your situation): 1) where the group administrator can prepare restores on behalf of the group members, or 2) the group members have absolute privacy yet the group administrator can monitor the backups and make sure they are healthy and up to date and get alerts if one client has not backed up recently, etc.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-)
> I am genuinely considering using CloudBerry Backup and backing up to an S3 bucket
CloudBerry's standard client can backup to an Amazon S3 bucket, or just as easily to a Backblaze B2 bucket. The advantage of Backblaze B2 is that it is less than 1/4th the cost of Amazon.
We have many happy customers using CloudBerry.
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> They will necessarily cost more than doing it yourself.
This may or may not be true. Backblaze purchases up to 10,000 hard drives at a time DIRECTLY from the manufacturer at a discount of list price. You pay list price. You also have to pay for unused hard drive space, while Backblaze sells the unused hard drive space to other customers. Then Backblaze locates our datacenter in an area with cost effective electricity. If you live in Hawaii you are paying 50 cents/kWh, at Backblaze we get electricity for about 10 cents/kWh. On the other hand you might be beating our price on electricity if you live in Oregon (3 cents/kWh). Backblaze does charge an (extremely small) profit. Anyway, the point is this calculation is a little subtle. My goal would be to actually save our customers money over doing it themselves even while pocketing a small profit for ourselves. That's nothing but good business for all of us.
> It's not like they have magic disks.
We use the same hard drives as the you do but with two important twists:
1) We Reed Solomon encode your data replicated across 20 *separate* hard drives in 20 *separate* computers in 20 *separate* locations in our datacenter. We can lose 3 entire computers and your data is FINE.
2) We monitor every hard drive, and when one hard drive goes bad we send a datacenter technician over to replace it 7 days a week. We care DEEPLY about the health of your files. If two computers fail in the same logical Reed Solomon group of 20 computers we have pager systems that wake people up in the middle of the night and they start driving towards the datacenter (maybe 15 minutes away) to get it fixed NOW. And it is a "dead man's switch" in that if our datacenter techs do not "silence the page" (acknowledging they are going to fix the problem) we keep paging more and more and more people at Backblaze up to and including the CEO. When you backup to a single local hard drive, how many employees get paged when some of the sectors go bad?
Anyway, at Backblaze we have been doing storage for over 10 years and we really care deeply. It is all we care about. My goal is to get the price down below where you can be free to solve other problems.
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days
If you are using Backblaze, make sure you "Check for Updates" (menu option) and make sure you are running the 5.0 client we just released last week. Then if you want to make faster progress, turn off all power savings modes on your computer so it won't sleep, and then go into Backblaze "Settings..." menu and turn off "Automatic Threads/Throttle" and manually set the number of threads high enough to saturate your network. Let it run all night long for several nights in a row then check the time estimates again.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> I'd love to see some hard data on the chance of data loss on those cloud services vs. typical home set-ups.
Backblaze uses a Reed Solomon encoding where every file is replicated across 20 different hard drives in 20 different locations in our datacenter. We can lose up to three full computers out of the 20 and your data is still both safe AND available. And a really good feature is we monitor EVERY SINGLE DRIVE and have datacenter employees replacing drives that have gone bad 7 days a week.
However, a counter point is that if you forget to pay Backblaze your monthly bill for as little as 60 days we delete your data to make room for paying customers. I really think people underestimate how easily this can occur purely by accident. For example, the credit card on file expires, and the employee who was signed up to get alerts retired the year before and the emails are not being read anymore.
For all of the reasons above, to my closest friends I recommend BOTH for data you would be really bummed out to lose. Keep the live copy, plus a backup at home on a hard drive, and a copy in Backblaze for when your house burns down. This is what I do, and it lets me sleep at night.
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> if your out of touch with the server for 30 days it's deleted
Some clarification: For any computer that does not "phone home" we allow up to 6 months before even threatening to delete your backup, and we warn you first quite a bit (after that).
However, if the computer is backing up every day but you have an external hard drive (like a Drobo) and you leave the Drobo unplugged for more than 30 days, we warn you profusely by BOTH email and by popup dialogs and then we delete the data. If at some later date you plug the Drobo back in you need to repush the contents from scratch.
We are actively researching whether we (Backblaze) can extend this to be longer (like 60 days or 90 days) without losing too much money, but if you install today you have to live with "external drives must be plugged into the laptop host at least once every 30 days".
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> it doesn't sound like they have a Linux client
For Linux, Backblaze offers "B2 Object Storage" with a large list of established Linux clients supporting it. You can see the list on this web page: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i... (for Linux, look for the little pictures of a penguin).
Solutions that backup to Backblaze B2 include: Duplicity, HashBackup, Transmit (by Panic), and rclone
> I can't wait for a grocery chain (local, national, Amazon, I don't care) to carry a full store's worth of food and let me decide when I want it.
In some areas (I'm in the San Francisco area) Safeway will deliver. http://shop.safeway.com/
However, I looked into it for my aging parents in Oregon and Safeway did not "officially" do deliveries there, but the checkout clerk I was talked with said she shopped and delivered for several older people in town. If Safeway won't deliver in your area you might setup something informal with a Safeway checkout clerk?
> If it were really that cheap and easy to do I would expect that some company would have already done so and charged everyone a few Euro...
They have, it's called cellular data services (LTE). In Europe it would be Vodafone, Telekom, Orange, etc. Sure, the frequency and protocol is slightly different than 802.11 WiFi, but it is wireless, it is already everywhere, it already works, you can surf web pages on your phone or tablet wirelessly TODAY, and the data rates are a usable 50 Mbits/sec now and they are rolling out upgrades to 100 Mbits/sec and higher. LTE has some European deployments at 450 Mbits/sec today: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/ind...
I wonder what the tradeoff of 802.11 WiFi vs LTE is. While cell phone data plans are a little bit expensive the cellular providers seem to be making steady progress with faster and faster services.
Brian from Backblaze here.
> If the hard drive can survive in the environment provided by Backblaze, then they will certainly do better in a home computer properly built
I suppose it matters. The pods are in a professional datacenter with air filters and sticky paper that we step on before entering the clean datacenter. When we open pods in the datacenter they are NEVER filled with dust bunnies. But when I open up my "properly built" gaming computer at home there are ALWAYS dust bunnies, air in homes with pets and carpets is simply going to have some dust.
Backblaze also monitors everything and fixes every problem, a home computer usually monitors nothing. Recently I was editing video on my laptop and it just shut off (I lost 10 minutes of edits). Turns out it was overheating due to a bad fan, but nothing WARNED me about this so I was subjecting all the components in the laptop to dangerously high levels of heat before the CPU shut down to protect itself. That won't happen in the Backblaze datacenter where we monitor everything, including the temperature of every last one of the 68,813 drives and go fix it when they deviate from normal for any reason.
One of the main things Backblaze does which may or may not occur in a home office is that we do leave the drives powered up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you leave your computer shut down half the time, there may be situations where that extends it's life in your home. For example, if the drives bearings inherently are built for 2 years of continuous run time and you only have the computer turned on 1/2 the time then your drive will last 4 years at home and only 2 years in the Backblaze datacenter.
Brian from Backblaze here.
> most reliability studies on electronics overall curiously do not equate temperature with average failure rates.
Backblaze looked into it in 2014 and we found no correlation: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they had seen increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celsius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and in all but a few unusual conditions (such as some fans have failed) most drives are really running cool at around 25 degrees Celsius.
Brian from Backblaze here.
> What's the typical drive temperature in Backblaze's cases in their environment?
Short answer: the coolest drives are 21.92 Celcius and the hottest drive was 30.54 degrees.
I wrote this up above in response to a temperature question, copy and pasted here. The raw data dump from Backblaze includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a complete set of historical data of all drive temperatures in the Backblaze datacenter here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
We analyzed the failures correlated with temperature in this blog post in 2014: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures (somewhere up near 40 degrees Celcius) but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to correlate with failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.
Brian from Backblaze here.
> I think their pods only have GigE interfaces
Originally (up until 3 years ago) that was true, but all new pods have 10 GbE interfaces, and 100% of the pods in our "Backblaze 20 pod Vaults" have 10 GbE interfaces. And there are some really strange (and wonderful) performance twists on using 20 pods to store each file: when you fetch a 1 MByte file from a vault, we need 17 pods to respond each supplying only 60k bytes to reassemble the complete file from the Reed Solomon. So the actual bandwidth when fetching just one medium size file can reach more like 170 Gbit/sec theoretical bandwidth. However, if you tried to fetch ALL the files from a pod all at once, the raw 7200 RPM drive performance is our current limiting factor.
Here is a link to a blog post on the 20 pod Backblaze Vault architecture: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Here is a link to the Reed Solomon encoding we open sourced that we use on the 20 pod Vaults: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Brian from Backblaze here.
... power these drives lived through.
> I also wonder if we'll ever get numbers from Backblaze on things like the actual temperature
The raw data dump includes drive temperatures as reported by "smartctl". You can find a dump here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
We analyzed the failures correlated with temperature in this blog post in 2014: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
In a conversation with some of the Facebook Open Storage people, they said hard drives have increased failure rates at extremely high temperatures but our drives never get anywhere NEAR the temperatures required to cause failures. We monitor every drive for temperature, taking readings once every 2 minutes, and we have had situations where the drive temperatures caused our internal warning alerts to go off (well below those catastrophic levels Facebook saw failures at). When we go to investigate, the most common cause of rising pod drive temperature is that some of our fans in that pod have died. We used to have 6 gigantic fans to keep it cool, but we reduced it to 3 with no increase in drive temperature. If one of the fans dies it doesn't get warm enough to set off any alerts, but if 2 out of 3 fans die it can't move enough air to keep the pod within reasonable operating temperatures. We don't monitor the fans directly, but drive temperature has been such a good proxy for it we don't feel any pressing need to figure out how to monitor the fans.
Brian from Backblaze here.
> Perhaps they don't keep the temperature as cool as they should in order to save a few bucks?
The colocation datacenter is SunGard in Rancho Cordova California and there are other tenants. I assume the temperature of the datacenter is industry standard? But even better, in the raw data dump it includes all the temperatures of all the hard drives, so you (or anybody) could check the correlation. We looked into it in 2014 and didn't find much correlation between temperature and hard drive failure as long as we kept the temperature of any one hard drive well below a tipping point (which we do). Here is the blog article and stats behind our analysis: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Brian from Backblaze here.
... only reports numbers that they determine are significant.
> back blaze
That's not true. We provide a COMPLETE dump of the raw data for anybody who wants to download it. Here is a link for the lazy: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/h...
> Protection against data loss is done with backups, not RAID.
RAID helps against data loss for some causes of data loss (like hard drives going bad).
However, RAID doesn't protect against human error or software bugs - if you tell a RAID system to delete a file it is deleted - RAID does not mean you can roll back time. If you have a "backup" from a few days ago, if you realize you just destroyed some data with user error, you can use the backup to recover most of the data you just lost.
Just to be absolutely clear - Backblaze does not use RAID inside each pod anymore, we use our own Reed-Solomon encoding across 20 drives in 20 different pods in 20 separate locations inside the datacenter. We open sourced the Reed-Solmon we use here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog... and you can read about how we organize the 20 different pods into a "Backblaze Vault" here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Is it heart breaking to program a robot to do your job? Because that happens much more than H1B replacements.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-new-generation-of-robots-for-manufacturing-1433300884
"[The new robots] are nimbler, lighter and work better with humans. They might even help bring manufacturing back to the U.S...."
> will not surrender control to a computer
I think the kaur (the user you were responding to) is wrong, buses and airplanes have windows you can open to watch the interesting and colorful world go by - in addition to window shades if you want to watch Netflix - it will be your choice. But you are also wrong, you already surrender control to a computer when it lands the commercial aircraft you are riding in. You even surrender control to your ABS brakes (occasionally) in your car which make better and faster decisions than you can about which ONE of your four car wheels to brake 10 times a second.
I see a bright happy future where I am actively enjoying the scenery and actively suggesting to the car where to go, but the car will "kick in" and avoid running over a small child or deer in the road faster than my human reflexes could manage. In my 35 years of driving (every day commuter here) I still managed to let my attention waiver once and got in a minor accident (my fault).The average driver gets in 3 or 4 accidents, so I think I'm still "above average" in my driving, but some day a computer will be able to do better than I can in avoiding accidents. I look forward to the help.
I think you guys hit all my favorites except: Threshold. Anybody else with gray hair remember it?
I directly attribute my current career as a software developer to the time in my mid teens that I played (and loved) those Apple ][ video games. I'd rather be lucky than good, and those games coming out just at the right moment in my life luckily pulled me into a ridiculously lucrative career doing something that I love - working with computers.
> By chance do you guys sell the hardware for the storage boxes?
You are in luck! Backblaze does NOT sell the hardware, but we give the design away entirely for free (and others sell it unassembled or assembled for a tiny markup). You can review the latest design here including downloading schematics and specs and parts lists to assemble your own: https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
It sounds like you only want one, and you may not want to worry about assembling it yourself, so you should definitely check out: http://www.45drives.com/ who will sell you a completely assembled storage pod without drives, or may still even sell you a "kit" of the parts that you have to build yourself to save some money.
Backblaze doesn't get anything at all from this, so you might ask why it is all this way. Two things: first of all, we aren't in the business of making and selling hardware, we sell raw storage as a service (our B2 product line) and also we sell online backup. It doesn't HURT Backblaze to release the designs and we get a little free press and good will about it and people hear our name and might want to purchase the OTHER products we actually charge money for. Also, the very nice people at "45 drives" helped us when we were starting out by prototyping our sheet metal and helping with industry cad drawings and such (we were mostly software people, don't know much about manufacturing) so we simply want good things for them. Finally, Backblaze benefits by a larger ecosystem of people using this design. Some of the past improvements have been contributions from OTHER companies and people improving our original design and giving back the improvements.