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Slices of Apple episode 6: Core Values part 2
Slices of Apple is a documentary series exploring the success of Apple as a company. It seeks to educate business leaders, entrepreneurs and laypeople about how Apple keeps delivering consistently great products. In this episode I'm talking to Tim Nufire, VP of Engineering with Backblaze, a comprehensive online backup solution for your computers. Tim left Apple the day Steve Jobs returned, but says Steve's vision of delivering amazing products never left the company. Tim worked in several different departments at Apple, and talks a bit about the culture of taking on new challenges. He also shares some good advice when it comes to listening to naysayers as you build a business, something he's been intimately involved in with the creation and growth of Backblaze. If you want to know what it was like to work at Apple in the 90's, this will provide a glimpse of that world. Also see last week's episode with CTO of Backblaze, Brian Wilson.
Slices of Apple episode 5: Core Values
Slices of Apple is a documentary series exploring the success of Apple as a company. It seeks to educate business leaders, entrepreneurs and laypeople about how Apple keeps delivering consistently great products. In this episode we're talking to Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze, one of the easiest backup solutions for your data. Brian was at Apple in-between the first and second Steve Jobs eras, so you might be wondering what relevance his experience would have. In fact, not everything Apple did in the 1990's was bad. The company still strove to deliver quality products, and in Brian's case there were a number of "skunkwork" projects that kept people like him employed. Brian worked on the A/UX team at Apple. It was an effort to make a memory-protected OS for Apple servers, like UNIX or NeXTStep. Of course, in the end Apple scrapped A/UX and just bought NeXT for its OS. Brian discusses some important concepts, like shipping great products even as a company is in decline, working on projects that ultimately pay off even when management questions their viability in the present and he tells us about the Mac emulator that was built on vacation but would become massively important when Apple moved to Intel chips.
How to get Backblaze backups for free, forever
Many of the crew here at TUAW are fans of online backup company Backblaze, which offers unlimited space for backups for just a piddling US$5 monthly charge. But as we always tend to find out, even that small amount is too much for some folks and they'd much rather lose all of their data than shell out the cost of a Starbucks Venti Latte in Boston once a month. Backblaze now has a way for you to get all of that online backup love for free for as long as you'd like -- a refer-a-friend program. The program is quite simple: when you sign into Backblaze, you have a link to send to friends from the "Get Free Months" page. That friend gets a free month of Backblaze service right off the bat. If your friend decides to sign up for Backblaze, then you get a free month of service. If you have a lot of friends and you can get 'em all to sign up for Backblaze, then you could theoretically end up with online backup service forever. It's a great way to make sure all of you are keeping your data safe, and saving a friend from losing his or her data is worth a lot of karma points.
Backblaze: Hard drive temps don't affect failure rates
The storage wizards at Backblaze have been analyzing the statistics on drive failures in their huge storage facilities, then posting the results on their blog. Today's stats are rather interesting, taking a look at how drive temperatures affect failure rates. The bottom line? Contrary to the long-standing belief that hot drives fail sooner, their statistics show that only hot-running drives from one manufacturer seem to have a higher than usual failure rate. Brian Beach of Backblaze took a look at the data, which comprises results from more than 34,000 drives. Their Backblaze Storage Pods use big fans so that the drives are usually quite cool, but the study showed absolutely no correlation between temperature and failure rates for the entire population of varied drives from a number of manufacturers. It was when the company started looking at individual drive models that a correlation appeared. Beach notes that the average temperatures for drives used in the Storage Pods run from 21.92°C (71.45°F) for the "green" Seagate Barracuda LP drives to a relatively steamy 30.54°C (86.97°F) for Seagate's Barracuda XT drives. Digging even further, Backblaze was able to show that only one drive model -- the Seagate ST31500541AS 1.5 TB drive -- shows an increase in failure rate as temperatures rise. The overall result was that "As long as you run drives well within their allowed range of operating temperatures, keeping them cooler doesn't matter."
Ask TUAW Live is on the air at 5 PM ET today!
Yesterday was World Backup Day. Just in case you missed it, today Ask TUAW will be dedicated to getting your data in a safe place so you can be confident when and if your storage malfunctions you'll be able to get it back. "Ask TUAW Live" happens today, Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 5:00:00 PM EDT. You can check here for showtimes in your area. We're taking your questions now via the Ask Tuaw feedback form, Twitter, Facebook or Google+. To watch the live feed and participate in the chat, jump over to the TUAW page on Google+. There you will find links to this Google Hangout. Bring your questions, ideas, tips and tricks or recipes for craft cocktails to share with the rest of the TUAW community. NOTE: Due to the way Google handles Hangouts for Pages, you will need to add the TUAW page on Google+ to your circles so we can circle back. Is that what they call it these days?
World Backup Day: Let's be careful out there
On the old 1980s cop drama "Hill Street Blues", Sergeant Phil Esterhaus started off each episode with a briefing ending with the line "Let's be careful out there." While he was showing concern for his team of police officers, the same line is very applicable to anyone who is using a Mac, iPad or iPhone. Each year on World Backup Day, TUAW -- and most other Apple web sites -- would like to remind you of just how important it is to back up your data. I'm often asked what my backup strategy is, and I tell people that I use a three-tiered plan. Here's the plan: Tier 1: Local backup onto a hard drive Tier 2: Online backup of everything Tier 3: Cloud storage of important documents Tier 1 isn't that expensive to accomplish, folks. A quick look at Amazon showed a number of 4 TB external hard drives that were available for less than $160. These can be set up with Apple's very own Time Machine, or you can do nightly backups with Mac apps like Carbon Copy Cloner or my personal favorite, SuperDuper! For Tier 2, there are a number of online backup companies that add that layer of physical separation you'll want in case your home or office is destroyed by some calamity. Backblaze charges just $5 a month for unlimited online storage, while Crashplan offers the same unlimited plan for as low as $3.96 a month. Tier 3 is just the icing on the cake. I use Dropbox to store any important documents in the cloud, while I know other bloggers who are more happy with Google Drive. In either situation, you're ending up with one more copy of your data just in case... That's my plan for my Macs. For my iOS devices, I use iCloud to make sure that my settings, apps, and a growing number of documents are stored off the device. iCloud makes it incredibly simple to re-load a device with your apps and settings should it be lost or need to be restored. So, what's your backup story? How do you go about backing up your Mac or iOS devices? Let us know in the comments.
TUAW at Macworld/iWorld 2014 - Backblaze
In this short video interview, we visit the Backblaze booth at Macworld/iWorld 2014 and chat with Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman about their backup service and storage service. You'll see the insides (drive-free) of one of their 180 terabyte storage pods in which the company stores 100 petabytes of data for its customers.
Backblaze now storing 100 petabytes of data, announces Storage Pod 4.0
When it comes to storing large amounts of data inexpensively, Backblaze is a leader. The online backup company just announced that they're now storing 100 petabytes -- that's one hundred million gigabytes -- of data from both Mac and Windows users around the globe. To put the number in perspective, Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman published some fun figures on the company's blog. That 100 petabytes is about a quarter of what Facebook stores for its over 1 billion customers, or equivalent to storing 33 billion songs -- that's all of the songs on iTunes, 1,270 times over. You could store 11,415 years of HD video for viewing 24/7. The 31,954 hard drives in the Backblaze data center stacked on end would reach 9,941 feet (over 3,000 meters) in height, almost as tall as California's Mt. Shasta measured from its base. To be able to offer unlimited storage at an affordable rate, Backblaze created the Storage Pod, an open source project using off-the-shelf components to cram as much storage into a rack-mounted module as possible. The company today announced the fourth generation of the Storage Pod, bringing the cost of mass storage down to a piddling $0.051 per gigabyte. Backblaze buys its components in bulk, so they can build a Storage Pod 4.0 for about US$9,305. If you try to make your own 180 TB Storage Pod 4.0, it's going to cost you about $10,587 plus the cost of your labor. Backblaze VP of Engineering Tim Nufire recorded a video outlining the details of this speedy new Storage Pod, which we present in its entirety for your nerdly viewing pleasure. We're still waiting to hear from a TUAW reader who has built one of these in his or her basement...
Backblaze stats on 27,000 hard drives show which ones keep on ticking
When your business value proposition is delivering inexpensive, reliable cloud backup for thousands of customers, you're going to learn a thing or two about drive reliability. The Backblaze team has been sharing that HDD savvy (gleaned from several years' experience and more than 75 petabytes of storage) in a series of blog posts over the past couple of months, and we've been fascinated to note their discoveries. Now Brian Beach at Backblaze has addressed the eternal question: What hard drive should I buy? BB's StoragePods are packed with consumer-grade hard drives just like the ones you'd buy at Costco or Best Buy, so it's reasonable to use Backblaze's failure stats as a proxy for how these drives might perform on your very own desk with your very own Mac. Granted, drives in a StoragePod are in more continuous use and subject to more vibration than a home-use drive, so your mileage may vary. Of the 27,000-plus drives running in Backblaze's server racks, the vast majority (almost 13,000 each) are Seagate or Hitachi models. There are only a couple of drives that Backblaze won't buy or try -- WD's Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB models -- because the BB StoragePod environment doesn't agree with them, possibly due to vibration sensitivity on spin-down/spin-up. Other than that, the company buys drives on a commodity basis, going with the best GB/$ ratio available at a given point in time. Best of the BB batch? Hitachi/HGST's Deskstar 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB models. Beach says, "If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate." At the moment, due to price fluctuations, the drives of choice are a Seagate HDD.15 4 TB unit and the Western Digital 3 TB Red. As Beach notes, however, Hitachi's storage unit (originally purchased from IBM in 2002) has been bought (and split) in the past two years, with the 3.5-inch business going to Toshiba and the 2.5-inch product line going to WD. Although HGST is still marketing and making the Deskstar line, it's likely that technology will settle under the Toshiba brand in the future.
Backblaze stats show most/least reliable hard drives: Hitachi leads the pack with lowest annual failure rate
Online backup firm Backblaze has a lot of consumer-grade hard disk drives spinning away in their open-source Backblaze Storage Pods -- 27,134 at the end of 2013, to be exact. Over the past several months they've been providing us with statistics generated by keeping an eye on all of those drives. First they told us how long a hard disk drive should last, followed by some info on whether or not those pricey enterprise-grade drives really last longer than cheap consumer-grade drives. Now they're back with a blog post on what company makes the most reliable hard drives. With the caveat that these are consumer-grade drives being used in a very high-vibration environment under stressful conditions, Backblaze's Brian Beach noted that they've excluded the Western Digital Green 3 TB and Seagate LP (low power) 2 TB drives. These drives tend to spin down when not in use and then spin right back up, which causes a lot of wear and tear and a high failure rate in the Backblaze environment. It's not that they're bad drives -- they're just not suited for the high-stress environment of a storage farm. As you can see in the graphic at the top of this post (taken from the Backblaze study), Hitachi drives tend to have the lowest annual failure rates for Backblaze, followed by Western Digital drives. Seagate drives have a much higher failure rate, although the larger 3 and 4 TB drives tend to be more reliable than the 1.5 TB model. Of the 1.5 TB Seagate drives, the Barracuda LP is the most reliable, but the Barracuda Green drives are -- to quote Beach -- "dropping like flies." Beach notes that "if the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate." I've always been a fan of Western Digital drives, so I was happy to see that they also tend to be survivors in the Backblaze world. You can see the relative survival rates for Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate drives in the graphic at the bottom of this post. For a more detailed look, be sure to read Beach's blog post over on the Backblaze site.
Do enterprise-rated drives really hold up better? Backblaze finds the truth
Last month we covered a study by online backup provider Backblaze in which the company looked at statistics for all of the hard drives used in their storage facilities and determined -- among other things -- that the median lifetime of a hard drive is about six years. There were a number of other fascinating tidbits, like the fact that the consumer-grade drives used in Backblaze's Storage Pods show three distinct failure rates over their lifetimes. Now the company has revealed statistics showing that more expensive enterprise-rated drives actually have a higher failure rate than much less expensive consumer drives. Backblaze uses many more consumer-grade drives than those enterprise drives, but it does have a number that are used in server and in one Backblaze Storage Pod that was specifically set up to test enterprise drives. When the company looked at the annual failure rate of drives, enterprise drives failed at a rate of 4.6 percent per year, while consumer drives showed a rate of 4.2 percent. It should be pointed out that Backblaze does not have data on enterprise drives older than two years, so they're not sure if the failure remains constant or begins to increase (as with consumer drives) as time passes. The bottom line? When the question "are enterprise drives worth the cost?" is asked, Backblaze's answer is that from a reliability perspective, the answer is no. The company's report points out that enterprise drives do have longer warranties, which is a benefit only if the higher price of the drive and its longer warranty is less than the drive replacement price. Backblaze concludes that "If you're OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives."
Daily Update for November 12, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Backblaze answers the question 'How long do hard drives last?'
Backblaze knows storage. The online backup company uses more than 25,000 spinning hard drives at any one time, stuffed into the proprietary Storage Pods it developed and made an open-source design. Well, with that many hard drives working away, the company has been able to keep track of failure rates and Backblaze's Brian Beach wrote a wonderful post on the life cycle of hard drives for the company blog. There are some interesting tidbits in the post. For example, all hard drives exhibit three different failure rates during their lifetimes. Early on, there are failures due to infant mortality -- those drives that might have made it through testing but had some fault that caused them to fail shortly after installation. That failure rate is about 5.1 percent of all drives per year during the first year and a half. After that period, the failure rate flattens out to about 1.4 percent for the next year and a half, and then diving to an 11.8 percent annual failure rate after three years. On average, 80 percent of all hard drives are still in use after four years. Through extrapolation, Beach posits that the median life span of a hard drive -- the point at which 50 percent of drives will have failed -- is about six years. The important thing about the Backblaze study is that it doesn't look at specialized data center-grade hard drives. Instead, the company uses consumer-grade drives just like you and I would purchase. Why does Backblaze use these cheap drives? It allows the company to store 75 petabytes of data at extremely low cost through the use of these drives in racks full of RAID Storage Pods. More than anything, the numbers prove what we've said all along -- if your hard drive hasn't failed yet, it probably will soon. Be sure to back up early and often.
Backblaze Mobile for iPhone provides on-the-go access to file backups
Backblaze, the online backup company that has made TUAW headlines with its innovative open-source 180 TB Storage Pods and drop-dead simple Mac backups, today announced a way to get mobile access to your backed-up data. Backblaze Mobile for iPhone (free) works for any current or future Backblaze customers running an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with iOS 5.1 or later. After logging into a Backblaze account with user credentials, users are presented with stats for each computer backed up on the service, including the number and size of files stored and when the last backup was performed. There's a browser for going through backups to look for specific files, and any file can be downloaded to the iOS device to be used or shared with others. The Backblaze service is priced from as low as US$3.96 per month when pre-purchased for a year or more, or can be subscribed to on a monthly billing basis.
Transporter: Network attached storage with flair
The Transporter from Connected Data offers a new generation of network-attached storage (NAS). This technology allows you to connect a hard drive to your router, access it from anywhere and share its stored files. It is a bring-your-own drive alternative to the cloud. Units cost US$199 for a supply-your-own drive system (the company recommends any major brand 2.5" drive) or ships with 1 TB ($299) or 2TB ($399) ready-to-go drives. The drives sit inside the Transporter enclosure, making the system both compact and clean. Just connect to your Ethernet router and power, and you're ready to rock and roll. Net-connected drives offer all the cloud-like convenience of data-anywhere without the monthly or yearly costs you'd fork over to Dropbox, Google, Box.net, Amazon or SkyDrive. You supply the disk, so accessible storage expands as much as needed. What you get is privacy. Many users cannot use Dropbox-style storage due to HIPAA or legal concerns. Sending data to third-party sites in the cloud can contravene security. With NAS, you own and control your data, ensuring you limit who can access it remotely. There are drawbacks to these systems as well. Because they physically sit near your home computer, they're not really suitable for cloud backup. A fire that destroys your computer will also destroy your Transporter. (You can, of course, buy one for your office and another for your home, sharing data and helping to mitigate this limitation.) And, they don't offer the kind of server-based redundancy guarantees that many online services like Dropbox provide. That's why I was so disappointed that the feature I was most hoping to use the Transporter for has not yet shipped, specifically buddy-based private offsite backups. Mark Fuccio of Connected Data Marketing told me that while the company is definitely committed to rolling out encrypted folders, the option won't be available for at least three to six months. With encrypted off-site folders, you'd be able to share, say, half your drive, with a friend. You could then store data there providing the offsite component that's missing from most NAS installs. Right now, if someone physically steals a drive, all bets are off -- the data is readable. What's more, any data you place on a buddy's Transporter is also readable, making you rely on, as Fuccio put it, the "honor system" for the near future. The Transporter is not meant for use as a Time Machine destination. Its focus is on providing a turnkey solution with a well-controlled sharing experience. If you're looking for an offsite backup solution, you'll probably do better subscribing to one of the dedicated services like Mozy, Crashplan, Carbonite or Backblaze. In our testing, the Transporter basically did what it promised. We easily shared data locally and remotely, with a dedicated web interface to manage the drive. The software felt a bit first-generation, but that's what you normally expect from early access. We ran into one major problem when files I shared to Steve Sande initially overwhelmed his network -- but we quickly found the online bandwidth limitation options and restored his network to reasonably working order. Transporter seemed to measure up well against the NAS field and I particularly liked the unit with the built-in drive enclosure. Anyone looking for this kind of off-site data access should be pleased with the hardware and performance it offers.
Backblaze announces 180 TB Storage Pod 3.0 open source design
So, you take a few hundred thousand RAW photos and capture a couple thousand hours of HD video, and before you know it you're out of storage space. Wouldn't it be nice to have 180 TB available to store all of those bits? Never fear, online backup company Backblaze has just announced the third generation of their open-source Storage Pod design, now new and improved for up to 180 TB of safe storage at a cost of less than US$0.06 per GB. The first-generation Storage Pod was designed for Backblaze's need for reliable mass storage on the cheap. That first design back in 2009 provided 67 TB of storage at a cost of $7,867. The latest incarnation can handle 45 4 TB drives for a total of 180 TB of storage at a cost of $10,718 -- almost triple the storage for about $3,000 more initial cost. Backblaze's design is free and open, and there are even full plans, parts lists and build books that are freely available. If you decide that building a Storage Pod 3.0 is out of the question due to time or lack of assembly skills, there are companies that sell you one or more.
Backblaze supports Lion, updates Storage Pod project
A couple of years ago, the folks at cloud backup provider Backblaze made their Backblaze Storage Pod design an open source project. For around US$7900, you could make your own 67 TB RAID 6 array, and combining 15 of the arrays would give you about a petabyte of storage at a cost of around $117,000. Now Backblaze has updated their project for even more storage at a lower cost. In a post on the Backblaze blog, the company has announced version 2.0 of the Storage Pod. It now provides 135 TB of storage for only $7384, making a petabyte of storage a relative bargain at only $56,696. Add in the space and power for the pods for three years, and you're still looking at less than $95,000 per petabyte. Sounds like a fun weekend project, doesn't it? It may be time to put in those racks in my basement and take out a loan... In other Backblaze news, the company has a Lion-compatible update available. Version 1.5.5.402 is downloadable from the Backblaze website now. Competitor Carbonite sent users an email alerting them that a Lion-compatible version of its backup tool is coming soon.
Backblaze adds free Locate My Computer service to backups
Backblaze is adding a new feature to its US$5/month online backup service that adds another level of protection to your Mac or PC -- locating the computer in case of loss or theft. This morning at 6 AM PDT, Backblaze launched Locate My Computer, a free addition to the company's backup service that determines the location of your computer, displays the location on a map, provides the name of the internet service provider and the IP address being used by the thief or finder, and shows you any changes that the "new owner" has made to your computer. Gleb Budman, the co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, said that the company decided to add the Locate My Computer service after several customers used cloud-based backup information to view changes that thieves had made to their machines. One customer was able to see that the thief had taken a Photo Booth portrait of himself and also made a bad video of himself dancing to Tyga's "Make It Rain." The customer, Mark Bao, promptly posted the video of the thief's impromptu dance solo on YouTube and was later able to recover his MacBook Air. If you're already a Backblaze user, switching on the Locate My Computer service is as simple as logging into your account and then clicking the "Turn On" button on a special Locate My Computer page. It takes up to a few hours for the location to appear, but the ISP and IP address info show up almost immediately, and you can begin your quest to recover your Mac.
World Backup Day: Mozy app puts backed-up files at your fingertips
Here's another product for World Backup Day. Mozy, a well-respected and veteran cloud backup solution for Mac and PC, has delivered Mozy to the App Store. This app, which is a free download that works with any iOS device, gives you access to all of those files from your computer that have been backed up to Mozy's servers. If you're a subscriber to Mozy's service, you can view files from any of the computers backed up to your account. The app tells you when the last backup was completed, and navigating to the individual folders is a matter of a few taps. Once you've found a file that you're interested in using, numerous actions are available -- with a tap, the file can be emailed or opened in a compatible application on your iPhone or iPod touch. Photos stored on your computer can be published to Facebook, viewed in high resolution, or saved to your local camera roll as well. What's cool about this is that it provides much of the functionality of Dropbox (cloud storage) while ensuring that your Mac or PC is being backed up at the same time. Of course, the Mozy app doesn't provide the offline access that Dropbox for Mac and PC does, but neither does the actual Dropbox iOS client. (Update: According to commenter Rdnymllnsktr, it is possible in the Dropbox app simply by tapping the star below a viewed file. That downloads the file as a Favorite, and it is then available to open in a compatible app.) If you have 2 GB or less of critical data that you need to back up, Mozy provides a free account. This is also a great way to try out the backup service. Paid accounts are available over the 2 GB limit for US$5.99 a month for 50 GB (and one computer) or 125 GB (and up to three computers) for $9.99 monthly. Here at TUAW, we're trying to get out the word about World Backup Day to make sure that you're not part of the estimated 80% of computer users who don't have current backups of data. As I always tell computer users, if you haven't lost data yet, you will. "Set and forget" backup services such as Mozy, Backblaze, BackJack, CrashPlan and Carbonite are a low-cost and simple way to keep a copy of your data offsite in case of a local catastrophe.
Mac 101: Backup basics with Time Machine and more
Did you get a new Mac for Christmas? Before you go too far in loading your Mac with software and files, make sure that you have a backup strategy. As a certified Mac consultant, I can tell you that there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data through error, hardware failure, or accident, and those who are going to lose data in the future. Most of the bloggers at TUAW are backup fanatics, and many of us have multiple backups using Time Machine (the backup app built into Mac OS X), cloning applications like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!, and online backup services like Carbonite, Mozy, and BackBlaze. In this edition of Mac 101, I'll take you through the basics of setting up your Time Machine backup to a local hard drive, explain the power of cloning apps, and tell you why off-site backups are a good idea.
