Backblaze Developer Newsletter—December 2023

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

Hi there!   As we head into the holidays, we bring you the gift of content, including a deep dive into Object Lock, the latest Drive Stats report, our annual Holiday Gift Guide, and more.   We hope you can take the opportunity to relax, recharge, and spend time with friends and family as we welcome 2024!   Best wishes from all at Backblaze. 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). Digging Deeper Into Object Lock Backblaze B2's Object Lock, and the related legal hold feature, are widely used in backup and archive software to protect data against accidental or deliberate deletion. Different use cases for locking data—such as ransomware protection, regulatory compliance, and preservation of evidence during litigation—present different requirements for how long data should be locked, and who, if anyone, should be able to unlock it. In this blog post, Backblaze Chief Technical Evangelist Pat Patterson walks you through your options for making your data immutable, and provides practical advice on avoiding potential issues through inadvertently locking data during development and testing.   Read the Blog Post → Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023 This quarter saw Backblaze pass a milestone: we are now spinning over a quarter of a million hard drives in our data centers—to be precise, at the end of Q3 2023, we were storing data on 259,533 HDDs. We also saw some of our drives warming up during the record-high temps of summer 2022. A small number of drives exceeded the maximum manufacturer's temperature for at least one day, and while we haven't seen it affect failure rates in this report, we'll track that fleet of drives for the future. In this quarter's Drive Stats blog post, Andy Klein explains how we are monitoring "hot drives" to compare their failure rates to their cooler counterparts as well as providing his regular analysis of failure rates across our fleet of hard drives; plus, we're now tracking additional data that allows you to correlate to a drive's physical location within the Backblaze data centers.   Dive Into the Numbers → New B2 Command Line Tool Feature: b2 cat You might have noticed that we've been hard at work on the B2 Command Line Tool this year, adding an official Docker build and adding the ability to stream data into b2 upload-file. Version 3.13.0 of the B2 CLI, released last month, added a new, very handy, command to download a file from Backblaze B2 directly to standard output: b2 cat. We've shown previously how you might use b2 upload-file to upload a compressed, encrypted backup of a PostgreSQL database, without writing any intermediate files to local storage; here's how you would use b2 cat to restore PostgreSQL from such a backup:   b2 cat b2://my-db-backups/backup.sql.gz.enc \ | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt -pbkdf2 -pass file:passphrase.txt \ | gunzip \ | pg_restore -d mydatabase   Get Started With the B2 Command Line Tool → What Are "Unfinished Large Files?" Recently in the Backblaze subreddit, Reddit user u/NoPrize2421 asked about "unfinished large files" in the context of uploading data with rclone. Pat replied with both a short explanation of unfinished large files, and a detailed description of how large files are split up into smaller parts for upload to Backblaze B2, why they are sometimes not finished, and how to delete them so you're not paying to store data you don't need. If you've seen unfinished large files in the Backblaze web UI, Pat's reply will tell you everything you need to know.   All About Large Files → Backblaze Holiday Gift Guide 2023 Every year, Yev Pusin, our Senior Director of Marketing, asks his fellow Backblazers to submit the gifts that they are looking forward to both giving and receiving, sprinkles in a few of his own favorites, and publishes our Holiday Gift Guide. This year, his suggestions include a pizza oven, a sleeping bag that you can walk in (an outdoor snuggie, perhaps?), and a whole range of very cool LEGO sets. If you've been struggling to come up with the perfect gift for a loved one, you might just find it here.   Check It Out → 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