Backblaze
More info
- Creator
- Gleb Budman et al.
- Released
- 2007
- Type
- Cloud storage
Backup and storage company better known for its hard drive statistics than for anything it sells.
Founded in California in 2007 on a simple pitch: unlimited backup of one computer for a low flat price. To make the numbers work it built its own storage servers, the Storage Pod, and published the designs in 2009. During the 2011 Thailand floods, when drive prices spiked, staff bought external drives at retail and pulled the disks out of their enclosures.
Since 2013 Backblaze has published Drive Stats, failure rates for hundreds of thousands of drives broken down by model. It is the closest thing to independent reliability data there is, since manufacturers keep theirs to themselves. B2 (2015) is object storage with an S3-compatible API and has become a common cheaper alternative to AWS. The company went public in 2021.