Old Photos, Home Fire, Lost everything - Saved my data... Barely....

I was just digging through some of my old photos today, and I wanted to share a story from 2013.  

Hint, this story ends with Backblaze. Kind of ironic,
backup... my home went aBlaze...

   Me and my now wife, had bought and were living in a 3 story condominium, our unit was on the top floor.   You already know I'm a bit of a Geek, so I had quite a bit of tech in this condo, automated lights, security cameras, my own media server with multiple raid arrays, you know the usual geeky stuff.  I don't know about you guys but I like to keep all of my important info in digital format, 2FA stuff, important document scans, and passwords go into encrypted zip files, everything else like all of my DVD's and digital movie copies,  ripped CD's and other purchased mp3 files, all stored on my trusty home server with dual disk redundancy raid!    I was safe and protected from a drive loss...  Most of this data was stored on a drobo drive array.  (yea I like drobo actually, had ZERO issues, ever! still use one today a B1200i)    

My home server setup in the condo.

Then one day as we were coming home from work (we both worked at the same place, car pooling with each other) we noticed some smoke in the distance, my wife made the comment "eek looks like something is on fire over there,  Hey want to stop and get some Culvers burgers?".   We took our time got some dinner, ate it in the car on the ride home.  As we got closer and closer we also got closer to the fire...   She jokingly made the comment "that better not be our house", then as we rounded the corner to our home we saw this....

Lots of things go running through your head,  I hope everyone is ok, oh man will insurance cover this, how bad is our unit, was there anything in there we couldn't replace......  etc......       Long story short, it was a rainy day,  a thunderstorm went over,  lightning went through the roof and struck the fire sprinkler pipes, causing a fire in the attic which burnt its way from the top down.   

This is my unit balcony.  :-( 

After the dust settled, fire was out, they let a few of us go into the safer units..   Some of the third floor concrete floors had totally collapsed into the second floor,  Our unit was safe enough to enter, with only the roof collapsing into our home.     Water, smoke, and mild fire damage..  But we had a hell of a skylight..  

A view down our third floor hallway...  Everyone's units to the left and right. 

This was a look from the hallway into our brightly painted swanky home.

My poor drobo.....

Our insurance was awesome,  Basically told us they are marking it as a total loss and would cut us a check for the full insured amount.  I could grab whatever I could or wanted to keep.   It was a mess. I started thinking about all of my documents and stuff to prove I even existed, oh man, all of my movies those DVD's add up, I have a lot of personal time into building up my web and media server, OH!  maybe my drives survived??    So I grabbed the drive trays out of my server, each drive still dripping wet,  the once bright white drive labels now yellow and brown. I grabbed my beloved drobo, which was running when the fire happened. I also had a UPS on everything, so it was all running well into the fire after the fire department cut building power, sucking smoke and water into all of my geeky treasures.  

So I got all of my drives, took them to work with me, blew everything out with a dry air compressor line.. and now we wait...   I let them dry in one of our warmer equipment rooms for a week or so.  Then came the day, time to fire up the drobo and drives.....    Plugged everything in, fired it up, and....... Oh it came online!   OH!  there is all of my data!    oh........  now what???    I need to get this moved to somewhere else, fast.  So I bought a few cheap usb drives until I can build out my new setup, migrated all of my data to single unprotected USB drives.    

Ok...   This was just a really bad year for me and my wife..   I was in the middle of changing jobs, whole new career for me after being at my current company for 18 years, we also had to deal with this fire, insurance claims, working with contractors to pick out the rebuild design (like building a new home),  we were also in the middle of buying a new home, would all of this time out right and work out ok?  Lol   You guys that have been through any one of these life changing tasks knows it sucks. Now imagine them all happening within weeks/months of each other!  Changing careers after being with a company for so long,  Selling a house, Buying a house, Building a house (rebuilding condo).   Also having to repurchase everything we lost, clothes, "stuff" ughhh..   It sucked to say the least.    To this day we remember things for the first time that we lost in the fire..  Pictures, notes, other small items.       Everyone was safe, from this fire,  we all just lost "stuff".    Thankfully my data and digital existence was saved in my drobo. 

Fast forward a year,  insurance bought me a new home-server, all of my data (my digital existence) is now on a single drobo B1200i array with dual disk redundancy.   But I need to seriously consider off site backups..  I just got lucky in this case that the fire was in the attic and worked its way down, not causing a huge amount of actual heat and fire damage in our unit, because of this I was able to save my drives..   That wouldn't have been the case if this was a fire inside my actual home.      So I started looking into various "cloud" services to back my data up to..   There are so many choices, a lot of them share the same core servers, like AWS servers.  I think there were like 10 backup services that all used AWS.   Anyway, I ran across Backblaze (https://www.backblaze.com/)  I started reading their website, the first thing that stood out was the price..  cheap..  for unlimited, huh... I'm probably a home power user.. lol I probably use more data than a small business...    Talked with backblaze, actually got real people, fellow geeks responding to me..  My use case falls within home use, great!   Sign me up!    I signed up, paid for a year or two in advance at (5$ per month at the time, now its up to $7/mo I believe).  Though the price jumped $2 per month, $7 is still just in the range I'm willing to pay for off-site backup..   $10 would be too much in my opinion.     But anyway...   Installed their windows software, hooked up my new drobo array, migrated my data from the USB drives to the new drobo, then started the backup to Backblaze!  I have gigabit internet, so the backup completed fairly quickly (like 7 TB of data I think).  SWEET!   All of my data is backed up locally on my Drobo, and "in the cloud" on backblaze..      A week or so went by, as I did some googling, more research on backblaze, how they got started,  how their software and storage pods worked.    I got to thinking, well, where is my actual "cloud" data stored?  What data center, what pod, is it just sitting on someone's desk?    I like to say "there is no cloud, its only someone else's computer"  totally true..   But I want to see it!  I'm a Geek after all.

So I emailed the geeky fella's over at backblaze that have been so nice to me in the past, I was directed to Yev from backblaze, super nice dude...   I basically asked him to send me a picture of the actual storage pod my data is stored in..   I wanted to see it... 😆 after all years of my digital existence that have always been in my control are now siting in someone else's hardware..    I'm a bit worried about this...  I would imagine its a bit like sending your kids off to collage, or letting a friend borrow your beloved car. I want to know my data is in good hands!      The fellow geeks at backblaze emailed each other and directed my request to the other geeks at the data center, and they kindly took the time, not just to send me a generic picture of a random backblaze pod, but write a little sticky note, stick it on the pod and make a little video/gif image to send me!   I mean, great customer service, and I got the feeling this company is ran by fellow techie geeks like myself, not just a money hungry AWS or something like that.     It was pretty cool..      

Pretty sure I'm a Backblaze lifer, unless they increase the price much more  😁   I have done a few small restores with zero issues,  backblaze keeps a few historical backup copies, great incase something gets corrupt then you backup the corrupt version, you don't restore a corrupt version, you can pick an older good copy to restore.   Backblaze will even send you a loaner hard drive with all of your restore data that you can use and return to them so you don't have to re-download all of that backup data.    Its a pretty sweet gig they have going, and so easy for me as an end user.  Even though I'm techie, I love that its point and click..   I need to spend my time learning other programming languages and completing un-finished projects, not learning software to perform backups..  

Just thought I would share this,  also put it online digitally for when my memory starts to fade...  Moral of the story, if you are like me and store your life digitally, ABSOLUTELY USE BACKBLAZE, you can have the most awesome local redundancy and it won't help you if something crazy happens, fire, tornado, whatever. 

As always, I'm not the best with grammar, just like I might get anxious when other bloggers improperly use or represent technology I understand and apologize to those that are grammar champs, for things like that improper use of a comma, run on sentences, misspellings, and extra periods..  ⬅ oh lol like that.    Thanks for reading guys!