Backblaze Developer Newsletter—December 2024

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

Happy Holidays!   As we draw towards the close of the year, it's been a busy month on the Backblaze Blog, with articles on the new Custom Upload Timestamps feature in Backblaze B2, Event Notification use cases, Drive Stats, and much more. You'll find short summaries of all of these below, plus an article on setting up CORS rules—essential information for accessing content from JavaScript running in the web browser.   We hope you can take the opportunity to relax, recharge, and spend time with friends and family as we welcome 2025!   Best wishes from all at Backblaze. We always love to hear what you'd like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in the documentation! Email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Seamless Data Migration with Custom Upload Timestamps A file's upload timestamp is returned by Backblaze B2's S3-compatible API in the Last-Modified HTTP header, and by the B2 Native API as the X-Bz-Upload-Timestamp HTTP header. By default, it is the date and time when the file was most recently uploaded to Backblaze B2, and is used by Lifecycle Rules to determine when the file should be hidden or deleted. Ordinarily, there would be no need for the upload timestamp to be set to any other value... except for when you're migrating data to Backblaze B2. If your retention policy is to hide files a year after they were created, and delete them altogether three months after that, then you really want the upload timestamp to reflect the time that the file was originally created in the migration source, rather than when it was uploaded as part of the migration. Custom Upload Timestamps, a new Backblaze feature announced earlier this month, allow you to do exactly that, via either the X-Bz-Custom-Upload-Timestamp HTTP header in the B2 Native API operations, or the --custom-upload-header with the B2 CLI. Now your files can party like it's 1999!   Read the full story → Setting Up CORS Rules for Backblaze B2 Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, universally, and understandably, shortened to CORS, allows you to define rules for how your content is used by JavaScript code running in web browsers. For example, a CORS rule might say "only JavaScript served from https://scripts.example.com can access files in this Backblaze B2 bucket". The Backblaze web UI allows you to easily create a rule to enforce that, but it's limited to a single rule and fairly coarse-grained access control—you can allow or deny access to B2 Native API operations, or S3-compatible API operations, but you need to reach for the API or CLI to configure multiple rules with finer-grained access control of API operations. For example, "JavaScript served from anywhere can download files from this bucket, but only code served from https://scripts.example.com can both upload and download files". Helpfully, Slovenia-based developer Matija Žiberna recently posted a handy article that walks you step-by-step through installing the Backblaze B2 CLI, creating JSON CORS rules, and using the CLI to update your Backblaze B2 bucket.   Get to grips with CORS → 7 Ways to Use Event Notifications to Streamline Application Workflows Backblaze B2 Event Notifications is a fundamental building block for integrating Backblaze B2 with workflow platforms such as Pipedream, Zapier, or IFTTT; serverless environments such as Fastly Compute, Bunny Edge Scripting, and AWS Lambda; or, in fact, any application or platform that can receive JSON via an HTTP POST (pretty much the lowest common denominator of web integration). In this blog post, Backblaze Product Marketer Amrit Singh presents seven patterns for using Event Notifications to streamline business processes, from processing user-uploaded files to triggering data integration workloads as tabular data lands in Backblaze B2.   Learn more → Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2024 It's Drive Stats time again, and our Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller, Andy Klein, has all the data and analysis of our 288,547 data-bearing hard drives' performance over the past three months. What's happening with annual failure rates? How are the new 20TB Toshiba drives faring? What are the oldest still-spinning drives in our fleet? Andy has the answers to these questions and many more!   Dive into the latest data → Continuing Our Focus on Consistent Performance To maintain the consistency of our high performance storage infrastructure, we introduced rate limiting and that certainly sparked some lively conversation. We've rolled back many of those changes and have applied a different approach to safeguarding our environment from behavior that could affect performance across the fleet. Running a living, breathing infrastructure means that we'll continue to optimize. Read the blog for more on our thinking and the latest.   Read the blog post → 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