Backblaze

Security works best when it doesn’t depend on one more checkbox. Starting September 14, 2026, we’re making server-side encryption the automatic baseline for Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. Backblaze B2 will automatically encrypt all newly uploaded and copied object data at rest using Server-Side Encryption with Backblaze-managed keys (SSE-B2) and AES-256. The default applies immediately to new buckets.

At NVIDIA’s GTC conference, Adobe’s CTO Ely Greenfield walked the audience through the company’s three-year journey building frontier generative AI models from scratch. And the AI training data pipeline required to keep thousands of GPUs productive. Along the way, he showed a profiler readout from their early training runs—a visualization of exactly how much time each GPU was spending on actual computation versus sitting idle.

If you’re running a Mac fleet, Jamf is often where everything starts. It handles provisioning, policies, app installs——the orchestration that keeps your fleet sane. But backup is the thing that doesn’t fit. Jamf gives you control over every Mac, but it doesn’t protect the data on them. Backblaze closes that gap without changing how your team works. Either you know who owns every device upfront (rare), or you don’t (common).

Between June 22 and August 3, 2026, 1,314 people entered hundreds of projects into a single brief: build a generative media app on Backblaze B2 object storage, orchestrated through the open-source Genblaze SDK, for a share of a $10,000 prize pool. Almost every entry could generate an image, a video, or a soundtrack, and generate it well.

Since April 2013, Backblaze has published the daily health readings of every hard drive running in our data centers. Model, serial number, failure flag, and dozens of Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) attributes, collected into a CSV for each day, released publicly every quarter, for free. We built Drive Stats as a mechanism to understand our own fleet, then published almost on a whim—so much so that the original idea is credited to two Brians.

At GTC this year, Jensen Huang put a number on a problem that most enterprise AI teams already feel but struggle to articulate: about 90% of what gets generated every year is unstructured data. This includes PDFs, emails, video, contracts, support tickets, and voice recordings. Until recently, that data was, in his words, almost entirely useless. You could store it or search it by keyword, but machines couldn’t read it, understand what it meant, or draw any connections between it and other content.

Organizations rarely struggle with a lack of storage options. More often, they struggle with determining which solution best fits the way their data is created, accessed, and protected: backup versus cloud storage. That’s especially true when evaluating backup and cloud storage solutions. The terms are often used interchangeably, but backup and cloud storage are designed to solve different problems.

Welcome to the Q2 2026 Network Stats report. While we’ve been tracking trends since December 2023, this is the third quarter since we operationalized the dataset and re-launched the series, allowing ourselves to make direct, quarter-over-quarter comparisons. Why? Because AI workloads were changing traffic patterns across Backblaze’s network, and reshaping the internet. With three quarters of historical data now available, we’re moving beyond measuring traffic volumes.

You’ve done the storage evaluation. The per-terabyte price is right. The durability numbers check out. Compliance boxes are ticked. And still, the cloud migration project hasn’t been approved. That’s not a coincidence. The cloud storage industry has spent years competing on what happens after you’re already locked in: performance, redundancy, features. Almost nobody competes on what it costs to get there—or what it costs to leave. Migration friction isn’t an oversight.

Long time readers: I must start with a mea culpa that this article was not released on our traditional May the Fourth (or thereabouts) report date. Please know I missed making the many and sundry Star Wars puns as much as (I’m sure) you missed hearing them—so, I’ll probably slip a few in, just because. That said, there was good reason for the delay. We were diligently investigating a disturbance in the force. (See?