Backblaze Developer Newsletter—September 2025

Hi there,

We braved the August heat of Las Vegas this year, with Backblaze speakers at both Def Con 33 and Ai4 2025. Scroll down for a link to the recording of our Def Con session on Drive Stats, and the Backblaze Tech Lab recap of Ai4, as well as an upcoming webinar on how robust, scalable cloud object storage underpins scalable AI pipelines.

If there's anything else you'd really like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or on Backblaze Tech Lab, our weekly webinar series, please do let us know. Email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email).

Tracking 300k+ Drives: What We've Learned After 13 Years

Def Con is an annual conference for computer security professionals, hackers, and researchers from around the world, now in its 33rd iteration. Within Def Con, the Data Duplication Village (DDV) aims to help the information security community by providing information through replication of large amounts of data; currently five datasets including archives of conference presentations and password hash tables, measuring 34TB. Conference attendees can drop off one or more hard drives, onto which the DDV team will copy the requested data.

Given their intimate relationship with hard drives, it's no surprise that the DDV has an interest in Drive Stats, our ongoing analysis of hard drive reliability, and this year, the DDV team invited Backblaze writer Stephanie Doyle and Chief Technical Evangelist Pat Patterson to present some of our learnings from 13 years of collecting and analyzing hard drive data. It's now live on YouTube—check out the link below.

Watch the Recording →

Backblaze Tech Lab Covers Media Archive Monetization, the Future of AI, and Securing Your Data in the Cloud

The past month has brought a new set of webinars in our (more or less) weekly series, Backblaze Tech Lab. Unlock Your Media Archive looked at creating new monetization opportunities with cloud storage and AI; in Cloud Data Storage and the Future of AI, the Backblaze team presented their thoughts on the Ai4 2025 Conference that took place in Las Vegas in August, and Securing Your Data in the Cloud presented some critical cloud security features and best practices. Click the link below to browse more recordings of past webinars and register for upcoming episodes.

Check Out Backblaze Tech Lab →

The AI Pipeline Starts with Storage: Architecting Scalable Data Foundations

Behind every successful AI initiative is a robust, scalable data layer. This session, presented by Jeronimo De Leon, Senior Product Manager for AI at Backblaze, explores how object storage supports every phase of the AI lifecycle, from data ingestion and labeling to model deployment and monitoring. Jeronimo will explore how strategic use of object storage across the AI lifecycle enables scalable, efficient pipelines by aligning performance with workload needs. Whether you're launching your first AI use case or scaling enterprise models, your data architecture decisions today will shape your success tomorrow.