Backblaze Saves Christmas

Backblaze Saves Christmas

Every day Backblaze restores data for over 100 people. Sometimes people share the stories of their data loss and recovery. This story was so good, though, I just had to share it outright. Enjoy.

Yesterday my wife was working from home; feverishly trying to finish a document she needed done today. She had been up since 3am, her team is pushing to have this project done before Christmas. About 10pm she came running into the bedroom “Come quick something’s wrong with the laptop, it’s making a really weird noise!”

(Oh no! says the little voice in my head, not the hard drive…not right before Christmas!)

Sure enough our laptop’s little drive decided this was its last Holiday Season and was chewing itself up as I scrambled to find a memory stick in the desperate hope I could snatch her document off the machine before it was too late. No luck, the drive was toast…no warning signs at all…just kablamo.

While she proceeded to initiate the sequence for an all out panic attack I realized this was also our primary drive for the family photos, videos and our iTunes music….everything! Thankfully this is not our first rodeo, we use an external drive and Time Machine. I remembered it was only a few days ago we had it connected so the family stuff was safe…but…

…her document was another story. She’d been saving it all day, but her only copy was local on the drive. She tells me it will take about 2-3 days to rework a new document from scratch and that means missing our Christmas vacation. Say what?! Seriously?!! … I asked

I’ve got my screwdriver flying around ready to rip into the MacBook thinking I’ll somehow pull the drive’s platen and magically find a way to get that document off it….because it’s Christmas and miracles happen on Christmas, right? Well that’s when I remembered about a year ago I signed up for Backblaze. Hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Never open it, never really checked to see if it was working.

Aha, maybe if we were lucky Backblaze had done a backup sometime during the day and a portion of her document may still be alive. We were more than lucky…I logged in from my other laptop and found Backblaze had completed a backup just 20 minutes before the drive failure! There was her document!!!!

I’m sure you do this sort of thing everyday, but this really was huge. You saved our Christmas vacation!

Have a great Holiday Season Team Backblaze…we will too, thanks to your service!

Warm Regards,
The Caldwells

Chris—thank you for sharing your amazing story and have a fantastic Christmas!

About Gleb Budman

Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.