I’ve been a big fan of Backblaze for years now. While cloud-backups weren’t new to me when I came across them, having a native macOS app for a cloud-backup service was something I knew I wanted. I’ve been a subscriber for many years, and I have no plans of leaving anytime soon. Today, Backblaze has announced the tenth anniversary of the first release of the Backblaze Storage Pod.

Backblaze offers unlimited backup (including attached USB drives) for only $6 per month. If you have a fire, flood, or theft, a local Time Machine backup might not be useable. With Backblaze, you can download all of your files, or have them mailed to you on a USB drive.

In September 2009, their red 4U storage server came equipped with 45 hard drives with 67 terabytes of storage for just $7,867. Over on the Backblaze blog, they recapped some of the history.

Of course, like any technology company, they aren’t stopping. Backblaze has Storage Pod 7.0 on the drawing board. Here is a shortlist of some of the features they are looking at:

The Backblaze Storage Pod was more than just affordable data storage. Version 1.0 introduced or popularized three fundamental changes to storage design; 1) you could build a system out of commodity parts and it would work, 2) you could mount hard drives vertically and they would still spin, and 3) you could use consumer hard drives in the system. It’s hard to determine which of these three features offended and/or excited more people. It is fair to say that ten years out, things worked out in our favor, as we currently have about 900 petabytes of storage in production on the platform.

• Updating the motherboard • Upgrade the CPU and consider using an AMD CPU • Updating the Power Supply Units, perhaps moving to one unit. • Upgrading from 10Gbase-T to 10GbE SFP+ Optical Networking. • Upgrading the SATA cards • Modifying the tool-less lid design.

For those of us that use services like Backblaze, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. – you might not often think about the platform that’s powering them. A “cloud” is just a fancy term for someone else’s computer. When we upload documents and data to Backblaze, they have to figure out how to store it. Check out their blog post about the announcement to learn more about their upcoming technology.

Backup is a solved problem for consumers and businesses today. While I love Apple’s Time Machine software for personal backups, if people will only do one backup location, I suggest Backblaze because it’s automatic and offsite.