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metadaddy

28 karma · joined March 3, 2011

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metadaddy··on Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2025
Hi - Pat from Backblaze here - we got the same heads up from a couple of folks, and corrected the graph already. Thanks for noticing!
metadaddy··on Show HN: Open-source alternative to Loom that only requires S3
I submitted some fixes to make it work in Backblaze B2: https://github.com/goshops-com/clipshare/pull/1
metadaddy··on Show HN: Open-source alternative to Loom that only requires S3
Funnily enough, I stumbled on the hardwired name bug. I submitted a fix: https://github.com/goshops-com/clipshare/pull/1
metadaddy··on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)
No need to give your file an obscure name, or use a public bucket. You can use a private bucket and create a presigned URL with an expiration of up to one week.
metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
> Do you put official, expensive Dell drives in there

Absolutely not! The Dell servers have a similar mix of drives as we use in the Backblaze pods and SMC servers.

We added a 'datacenter' field to the Drive Stats data in Q3 2023, so you can download the CSV files and see exactly what's deployed in ams5. See https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...

metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

We use Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 rack servers in our Amsterdam data center.

metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Yep - we explained it all here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-storage-pod-story-innovat...

metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

> I heard that Backblaze occasionally has weird gotchas that surprise people, like auto-deleting files from your backups that you delete locally, so I just feel cautious.

We have two similar products, and it's easy to mix them up. To clarify:

Backblaze Computer Backup (a different product from Backblaze B2) deletes old versions of files from your backup either 30 days or 1 year (you choose which) after you delete them locally. You also have the option to enable "Forever Version History", which costs $6/TB per month once your files age out of the backup.

Backblaze B2 (S3-compatible cloud object storage) will never delete anything unless you tell it to do so, either via the API or a lifecycle rule.

metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Backblaze B2 does include deletion prevention (object lock) and lifecycle management to automatically hide (soft delete) or (hard) delete objects according to a schedule.

metadaddy··on The drive stats of Backblaze storage pods
Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Pulling the egress costs from the hyperscalers' storage pricing pages:

* Amazon S3 ranges from $50-$90/TB depending on monthly volume.

* Google Cloud Storage ranges from $80-$230/TB depending on monthly volume and where you're transferring data to/from.

* Azure Blob Storage ranges from $40-$181/TB (with the First 100GB/month free) depending on monthly volume and whether you route data via the Microsoft Premium Global Network.

Cloudflare published a blog post a couple of years ago explaining just how much money AWS makes on egress - customers are paying up to 80x Amazon's costs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress

> I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage.

It depends on what "very low" means. We have a capacity-based pricing option, Backblaze B2 Reserve, starting at 20 TB, that includes all egress and transaction fees.

metadaddy··on Drive Stats Data Deep Dive: The Architecture
Every quarter, Backblaze publishes its Drive Stats report, but where does that data come from? In this blog post, David Winings, a senior infrastructure software engineer at Backblaze, explains how the company collects SMART attributes from each of its 250,000 or so hard disks and collates the data into a single file per day, and how he's getting started improving the process.
metadaddy··on Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right
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