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Tag: Backup

  • Backblaze Computer Backup 8.0 Offers Greatly Increased Performance

    Backblaze Computer Backup 8.0 Offers Greatly Increased Performance

    Backblaze has announced version 8.0 of its Backblaze Computer Backup app, significantly increasing the performance over previous versions.

    Backblaze is a popular backup option for both Mac and PC computers. The latest version brings major speed boosts across the board, thanks to increased threading and better throttling.

    Modern computer systems use concurrent threads to divide up tasks and complete them faster. Previous version of Backblaze only used a maximum of 30 concurrent threads. In contrast, version 8.0 can use up to 100 threads simultaneously.

    The company has also improved its auto throttle technology to better utilize network bandwidth and system resources, while at the same time reducing load on hard drives and SSDs by 80%. The new version also updates progress information better, rather than appearing to hang when uploading large files.

    Sometime application updates don’t really seem to offer enough features to justify the upgrade price. With Backblaze Computer Backup 8.0, however, it seems the performance alone will be a welcome improvement for most users.

  • APFS Bug In macOS 10.15.5 Impacts Bootable Backups

    APFS Bug In macOS 10.15.5 Impacts Bootable Backups

    The makers of Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) have discovered a serious issue in the latest version of macOS that affects the creation of bootable backups.

    According to CCC’s Mike Bombich, Apple changed something in the chflags() system call. As a result, when trying to initialize a bootable backup, it exits with a success exit status, but actually fails. Unfortunately, it does not generate an error code when it fails, as it should.

    Bombich makes it clear this issue has no impact on existing backup drives or the startup drive, but only the process of creating a new bootable drive. Fortunately, CCC has a plan in place.

    “Last year at Apple’s Developer Conference, Apple suggested that backup software should use Apple’s ‘Apple Software Restore’ (ASR) for cloning APFS volume groups,” writes Bombich. “Initially I dismissed this – I shouldn’t have to use Apple’s black-box utility to do my job, I prefer to take full responsibility for my backups. Anticipating a world in which Apple continues to restrict access to APFS rather than grant it, though, we decided to invest a fair amount of time evaluating this functionality, and we’ve been beta testing it for the last 8 months. I don’t like to lean on ASR for general backups because it has some shortcomings and doesn’t give any insight into its internal activity (e.g. files copied, errors encountered), but in this very narrowly-defined case, we can leverage Apple’s proprietary utility just to establish bootable backups. We posted a beta last Sunday with new UI around this functionality, and we intend to continue producing bootable backups by leveraging ASR for the initial backup.”

    As Bombich points out, there is no way of knowing if this change was intentional, in an effort on Apple’s part to force developers to use ASR and not use firmlinks. If so, at least CCC is prepared. If not, a fix should be forthcoming.

  • Clumio Raises $135 Million Series C Funding For Cloud Backup Solutions

    Clumio Raises $135 Million Series C Funding For Cloud Backup Solutions

    Cloud backup provider Clumio has announced that it has secured $135 million in Series C funding.

    Clumio was founded by serial entrepreneur Poojan Kumar to provide cloud companies with a suite of cloud-based backup tools. The company’s approach is someone unique in that, “unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud,” says Kumar. “This round of investment allows us to push that advantage as we accelerate our development and go to market strategy while continuing to meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”

    As an added benefit of the service, customers do not need to install—or even purchase—any specialized hardware or software to take advantage of Clumio SaaS. The service allows a company the ability to rewind and go back to a point before something went wrong, such as a cyberattack or data loss event.

    “Similar to Snowflake disrupting the data warehousing market by leveraging the scale, elasticity and economics of the public cloud, Clumio is building a globally consolidated data protection service the right way,” said Mike Speiser, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures. “Harnessing the full power of the public cloud, they are reimagining the backup experience for the enterprise paying particular attention to security, predictable costs and simplicity for their customers.”

    The company plans to put the funding to good use, growing its engineering team and expanding its U.S. operations.

    “This new funding will help Clumio execute in the following areas:

    • Accelerate the growth of its engineering team, both at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, CA and in its new development center in Bangalore, India
    • Expand go to market and service operations in the U.S.
    • Add more support for its 100% channel strategy with additional partner resources and programs and build upon momentum in technology partner programs with AWS, VMware and others
    • Introduce support for new workloads as Clumio continues to execute against its vision for a globally consolidated data protection service

    “Clumio is a secure, backup as a service that consolidates the protection of an enterprise data center and any remote sites with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage – or even buy at all. As enterprises move aggressively to cloud, they can use Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services. Authentic SaaS protects data regardless of where it resides and delivers critical benefits to the enterprise.”

  • What iCloud Is, and What It’s Not

    In spite of all the hype around Apple’s iCloud, there has been some confusion about what it is and what it’s not. For starters, the iCloud stores user content on the cloud and pushes it to other devices, such as the iPad. While it’s great for storing and sharing documents and images between devices, or syncing information on your devices together, it is not a back up.

    Were you under the impression that iCloud was a back up solution? Let us know.

    For example, if you create a document on your iPhone, you can pull that same document up on your iPad through the iCloud. However, if you delete it on your iPhone, it cannot be retrieved on your iPad.

    Anthony Palermo, the creator of online back up Dolly Drive, said that iCloud was “Apple’s introduction to services that go beyond your device.” His product, on the other hand, does serve as a cloud back up through Apple’s Time Machine.

    “Dolly Drive is actually more than just the ability of backing up your information, [or] your computer to the cloud, it also has a framework to back up locally your drives, so that if you ever were to lose your hard drive, you can immediately connect an external hard drive and be up and running again,” he said.

    He went on to explain that even though iCloud and Dolly Drive serve 2 very distinctive services, they are both critical to the needs of users. With iCloud, users can view their iTunes library from all their Mac and Apple devices, stream photos between devices, sync and store documents on devices, and see apps and app history on all devices.

    Through Dolly Drive, users have a back up to all their computer files, if they want. Also, it backs up computer content automatically every hour and allows users to continue working even if their hard drive crashes.

    “Our intent is to make sure that no matter what’s on your computer or where it’s at on your computer, it gets backed up,” said Palermo.

    We asked him what he thought about Apple and Google’s very different approaches to the cloud. According to him, Apple wants to offer the best experience for their devices. Google, though, is focused on platforms and on a large-scale experience for users.

    He also told us that he expects the value of the cloud to increase over the next several years.

    “We’re going to see great things to come with the cloud in the next 5 years, and I think, at that point, younger, more experienced computer-savvy users will see the cloud as just a natural process of what they do as they sit down and work with their devices,” he added.