Backblaze Developer Newsletter—October 2023

Our monthly newsletter brings technical articles, events, and news to developers working with Backblaze B2 Cloud Object Storage.

Hi there!   Although we featured Backblaze Tech Day '23 last month, our schedule allowed us to squeeze in another mention of our annual technology showcase just before the big day—see our lead item below.   Aside from Tech Day preparations, this month we've been taking a close look at the latest release of the popular file management tool, rclone, as well as presenting our mid-year review of the metrics we gather from our storage pods' SSD boot drives. To round things off, we have news of a useful new feature in the B2 Command Line Tool.   This month we're also looking for some feedback. We're interested in understanding how customers process their data, videos, etc. using cloud services (e.g. event notifications, serverless functions, transcoding, etc.) and their corresponding cloud workflows. If you've got an extra few minutes, feel free to fill out the survey. We always love to hear about topics that you'd like to see us cover here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in the documentation. Email your suggestions to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Backblaze Tech Day '23: Live, Online, Tomorrow! Join us live on Wednesday, October 11, at 10 a.m. PT, for Backblaze Tech Day '23! Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman will kick off a two hour program of short technical sessions explaining how you can leverage Backblaze B2 in areas such as AI/ML, edge computing, and data lakes. The Backblaze team will be joined by speakers from partners such as Snowflake, and Fastly, while "Mr. Drive Stats", Andy Klein, will share his unique take on all things storage. You can find the full agenda at the registration page. And, the first 1,000 registrants to attend will receive an exclusive Backblaze Tech Day '23 shirt. At the time of writing, there are still a few shirts available, so don't miss out—register now to secure your spot (and, fingers crossed, your shirt)!   Register Today → Big Performance Improvements in Rclone 1.64.0, but Should You Upgrade? Rclone is an open source, command line tool for file management, and it's widely used to copy data between local storage and an array of cloud storage services, including Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. Rclone v1.64.0, released last month, includes a new implementation of multithreaded data transfers, promising much faster data transfer of large files between cloud storage services. Backblaze Chief Technical Evangelist, Pat Patterson, took the new version for a spin, and discovered that, while the new rclone version does indeed deliver significant performance improvements, you should probably wait for rclone v1.64.1 before you upgrade.   Find Out More → The SSD Edition: 2023 Drive Stats Mid-Year Review A couple of weeks ago we published the 2023 Mid-Year SSD Edition of the Backblaze Drive Stats review, based on data from the solid state drives (SSDs) we use as storage server boot drives. In this blog post, Andy Klein reviews the quarterly and lifetime failure rates for these drives, offering observations and insights into the data. We're gathering enough data now to take a first look at the average age at which our SSDs fail, and see how well SSD failure rates fit the ubiquitous bathtub curve.   Read More → Stream Data into Backblaze B2 Objects with B2 Command Line Tool 3.10.x Among the new features in Backblaze B2 Command Line Tool 3.10.0 is the ability to upload data into B2 from a stream such as a named pipe or standard input (stdin). Now you can create a pipeline of commands terminated by b2 upload-file using - (hyphen) as the localFilePath argument to represent stdin. For example, you can create a compressed, encrypted, backup of a PostgreSQL database, without writing any intermediate files to disk:   pg_dump mydatabase \ | gzip \ | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -pbkdf2 -pass file:passphrase.txt \ | b2 upload-file my-db-backups - backup.sql.gz.enc   Get Started With the B2 Command Line Tool → Know anyone who might like this newsletter? Forward this email to them so they can subscribe! Backblaze, 201 Baldwin Avenue, San Mateo, California 94401 Unsubscribe Manage preferences