Backblaze, Inc. is an American

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is ty ...

and

data backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", ...

company based in

San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster ...

. Founded in 2007 by Gleb Budman, Billy Ng, Nilay Patel, Brian Wilson, Tim Nufire, Damon Uyeda, and Casey Jones, its two main products are their B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup services, targeted at both business and personal markets.

History

Backblaze was established in 2007 in San Mateo, California. In 2008, the company released online backup services to support PCs running Apple's macOS and Microsoft Windows. In October 2021, Backblaze filed to go public on the

Nasdaq The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

under the symbol BLZE. In November, the company launched its public IPO. Backblaze and Catalogic, a data protection vendor, announced their partnership in March 2022.

Products

Cloud backup

Backblaze's first product was its computer backup, offering users to back up their computer data continuously and automatically with a monthly

subscription service The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, and ...

. The service makes use of

AES encryption The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

for security, and uses

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...

and bandwidth optimization to reduce upload and download times. Files that need to be restored can be delivered in the form of a digital download or on an external hard drive. File versioning and history is available with a 30-day cap or an additional cost per month.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

In September 2015, Backblaze launched a new product, B2 Cloud Storage. Being an infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it is targeted at software integration for different kinds of businesses. It directly competes with similar services, such as

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

and Google Cloud. In April 2018, Backblaze announced cloud computing partnerships that directly connect Backblaze's data centers with its partners, Packet and ServerCentral. In May 2022, Backblaze released its cloud replication services, which allow customers to back up and store data in a location that is geographically separate from the data’s primary location.

Technology

Data centers

Backblaze has four data centers; three in the United States and one Europe. Two U.S. data centers are in Northern California near Sacramento, and one is in

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ; nv, Hoozdo; es, Fénix or , yuf-x-wal, Banyà:nyuwá) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona, with 1 ...

. Backblaze's data center in the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

is located in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. In September 2022, Backblaze contracted 1MW of capacity at Nautilus's floating data center in

Stockton, California Stockton is a city in and the county seat of San Joaquin County in the Central Valley of the U.S. state of California. Stockton was founded by Carlos Maria Weber in 1849 after he acquired Rancho Campo de los Franceses. The city is named after R ...

Redundancy

In order to increase redundancy, data uploaded onto Backblaze's

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommun ...

is sharded into 17 data pieces and three parity shards for each file. Parity shard bits are computed by the

Reed–Solomon error correction Reed–Solomon codes are a group of error-correcting codes that were introduced by Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon in 1960. They have many applications, the most prominent of which include consumer technologies such as MiniDiscs, CDs, DVDs, ...

algorithm. The shards are stored in 20 different drives, each in a separate cabinet to increase

resilience Resilience, resilient, resiliency, or ''variation'', may refer to: Science Ecology * Ecological resilience, the capacity of an ecosystem to recover from perturbations ** Climate resilience, the ability of systems to recover from climate change * ...

to a power loss to an entire cabinet, or other physically based issue. Backblaze states that its 'Vault' architecture is designed with 99.999999999% annual durability.

Encryption

For Computer Backup, Backblaze uses a combination of AES and SSL encryption to protect user data. Data is stored in Backblaze storage using Reed-Solomon erasure coding and encrypted with the user's private key, which is secured with the user's password and username. The default encryption of private keys is done server side, which is unlikely to protect against government subpoena or serious data breach. Users desiring additional security and privacy can use the optional private encryption key (PEK), but the PEK passphrase is sent to the server when it is initially set, and must be sent again to restore any data. Encryption for their B2 storage is handled entirely by the user and client software to manage the stored data, making it immune to government subpoena or data breach and protecting the data during transfer and ultimate storage in Backblaze's data centers.

Storage Pod open design

In 2009 and 2011, the company released CAD drawings of the computer case used by the storage servers in its datacenters. With

commercial off-the-shelf Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of ...

components such as x64 processors, disks, and motherboards, high-density storage servers can be built at a lower cost than commercial ones. The company has since made six iterations of the design over the years.

References

External links

Official website

Forbes: Backblaze Undercuts All Cloud Storage Competitors (2015)

The Register: Interview with Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (2018)

Fortune Magazine: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Aren't the Only Cloud Innovators Around (2017)

Review in The Sweet Setup (2017)

{{Backup software Backup software Web hosting Cloud storage File hosting for Windows Online backup services Companies listed on the Nasdaq 2021 initial public offerings Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 2007 American companies established in 2007 Companies based in San Mateo, California Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area