Zhang wrote a note and put up flyers about the theft, which was picked up by ABC News and which a friend of his posted to his Facebook page, and which was then posted to Reddit and many other websites beyond that. He offered $1000 to the thieves for the data, telling them exactly where on the disk they could find it, giving them the password, and telling them they could keep the computer already; he just wanted to graduate.

Now, in honor of the “Everything Wrong With … in X Minutes” CinemaSins YouTube movie spoofs (and they’re hysterical), here’s everything wrong with this story.

1. “Zhang’s laptop had been in an unlocked room in Wright-Rieman, which houses laboratories.” People can walk into Rutgers University lab rooms and walk out with laptops? Doesn’t campus security worry about thieves stealing other equipment, student records, dangerous chemicals, and so on?
2. “Rutgers is an open campus,” said [Rutgers Police Lt. Paul ] Fischer. “It’s not like a small liberal arts college where it’s gated in. So, even if the buildings are secured, people can piggyback in.” This is the reaction of the security guy, whose job it supposedly is to keep the campus secure? Oh well, people can walk in and take things?
3. Campus security doesn’t have security cameras, even in laboratories where people are working with chemicals and on laptops?
4. Does Rutgers really want their security guy on national television telling everyone how easy it is to steal things from the campus?
5. Just how many things get stolen from Rutgers, anyway?
6. If it’s so easy to steal things from Rutgers, wouldn’t it be a good idea for the campus police to tell this to the students, before students lose five years of research?
7. “Fischer said that he wouldn’t suggest offering monetary rewards in the future” because it can invite fraud. Okay. What should the student have done differently (other than your barn-door suggestion that he hang on to his laptop next time)? Can’t he get the student to withdraw the reward if it’s such a bad idea?
8. Is the Rutgers security guy working with this student to ensure he doesn’t agree to meet someone, get bopped on the head, and also be out $1000? Or to otherwise protect him from fraud?
9. Does the Rutgers security guy think that having the theft nationally publicized on ABC News is a smart move? And on Facebook? And on Reddit?
10. Shouldn’t the Rutgers security guy suggest to Facebook that maybe it would be a good idea to redact the student’s personal information from the posting, which has more than 33,000 shares?
11. Is the Rutgers security guy maybe checking Craigslist? And eBay?
12. Doesn’t the chemistry department have a server to which students can save their data? Hell, I went to Boise State and we had that.
13. If it’s this easy to steal things from campus, and there’s no provision for students to back up their data on campus, and nobody warns students their work is that vulnerable, and the student may have to start his research over, doesn’t he have the basis of a nice lawsuit?
14. Just what sort of chemical research is this student doing, anyway? Do we need to worry about a new kind of poison gas or IED springing up in New Jersey?
15. How competitive is the chemistry research program at Rutgers? Is it possible the thief is someone in his department who’s fighting with him for grants or something?
16. What are the chances that the student isn’t actually ready for his thesis defense and this is his way of procrastinating until the laptop is “found”?
17. This student’s been going to Rutgers for five years and he didn’t know the buildings are insecure?
18. “…from where his computer was taken sometime between 10 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.” This student leaves his laptop unattended in an unlocked room from 10 am to 5:15 pm and is surprised that it’s gone? Are we sure that Lost & Found didn’t pick it up?
19. We’ve got a student smart enough to be getting a PhD in chemistry but not smart enough to keep from leaving his laptop in an unlocked room?
20. Or to copy his data to a DVD?
21. To a thumb drive?
22. To a cloud storage service?
23. To an external hard disk?
24. To email it to himself?
25. To do a backup? “’A lot of people are asking me why I didn’t back up my data,” Jim told the Daily Dot. ”I think the reason is that I am pretty busy recently and this kind of thing never happened to me before.’”
26. “The posters contained very specific instructions and details regarding his dilemma, including his laptop’s password.” Well, that certainly makes it easier for the thieves to use the laptop.
27. Where is the student getting the $1000, anyway? And how did he come up with that figure?
28. The posts also included his phone number. If the thieves even wanted to call, would they be able to make it through the blizzard of harassing phone calls he must be getting by now?
29. He has also suffered several scamming attempts. “’There are a few people sending me messages saying they have my laptop and asking for money, but when I asked for proof, they cannot give anything to me,’ he said.” You think?
30. Really, should this student even be allowed to be messing with chemicals in the first place?
31. Does the student think that the thief is stupid enough to show up to a meeting to exchange the data and money?
32. Or to pick it up at a mailbox?
33. How exactly does the student think this is going to work? The thief will send him the data and trust him to send the money? He’ll send the money and trust the thief to send him the data? The thief will hand him the data and hang around while he checks it?
34. Even if he gets the data back, how is he going to know that the thief didn’t change some of the data just to mess with him?
35. How many backup companies are offering to pay all the student’s expenses in return for his doing an ad for them?

The company has been known for some time for its storage designs, which, instead of making real real big storage, uses a whole whole lot of commodity storage devices hooked together into “pods,” with as much of the extraneous stuff stripped off as possible. This reduces costs and is more scalable than large storage systems that require forklift upgrades to be expandable.

Backblaze has been getting so well known for its storage system that other companies, such as Netflix, have taken to using it as well, and several vendors have started selling storage systems based on the Backblaze designs.

The system has its flaws — such as, if the company has trouble finding commodity disk drives — but in general it works pretty well. (Facebook has also taken to designing its own disk drives, as well as servers, for a similar reason: economies of scale make it more efficient to design its own hardware.)

The system works so well that the fact that Backblaze has designed a new generation of the storage pods it uses has itself made the news, because so many organizations – Vanderbilt University, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Shutterfly, along with Netflix — have been using the Backblaze designs.

“In the world of high-volume storage, we’ve come to a place similar to the PC market decades ago when it was cheaper to just buy the parts and build your own than it was to buy a pre-assembled computer,” writes GigaOm’s Derrick Harris.

Version 3.0 of the storage pods now have a capacity of up to 180 TB — up from 135 TB, because they’re based on 4 TB, rather than 3 TB, commodity drives. In addition, a number of the other components have also been replaced. The result is a drive that is more reliable, easier to manage — and cheaper than the 135 TB second-generation systems it replaced.

Backblaze also releases the specs of the system — including a parts list, prices and all, right down to the screws, as well as very detailed instructions — to enable other companies to use its designs as well. That is, if they can. “To obtain these prices we do purchase them in quantity,” Backblaze warns.

Disclosure: I am a BackBlaze customer.

The company, which is known for providing low-cost constant backups for its subscribers, is also known for building its cloud out of a whole lot of teeny (well, 3 TB) commodity disk drives rather than a few great big ones.  This saves money and helps the company grow more granularly.

The only problem is if you suddenly run out of teeny commodity disk drives — or find that, in a matter of two weeks, that they’ve tripled in price, as BackBlaze did, when it was adding 50 TB of capacity a day. At the same time, the company wasn’t buying enough to be able to get deals from the manufacturers.

In an extremely detailed, hysterically funny blog post, the company is now relating how it dealt with the crisis — basically, by buying them as consumer commodities rather than as parts, and turning them into the parts they needed to build the “storage pods” on which their service was based.

“With our normal channels charging usury prices for the hard drives core to our business, we needed a miracle,” writes Andrew Klein, director of product marketing. “We got two: Costco and Best Buy. On Brian [Wilson, CTO]’s whiteboard he listed every Costco and Best Buy in the San Francisco Bay Area and then some. We would go to each location and buy as many 3 TB drives as possible.”

While the company then had to “shuck” the drives from their cases, this saved the company $100 per drive over buying them from its usual suppliers. Problem solved.

For a while.

“The “Two Drive Limit” signs started appearing in retail stores in mid-November,” Klein writes. “At first we didn’t believe them, but we quickly learned otherwise.” So workers started making the circuit – circled the San Francisco Bay hitting local Costco and Best Buy stores: 10 stores, 46 disk drives, for 212 miles. It put a lot of miles on the cars, and a lot of time, but it solved that problem.

For a while.

Then BackBlaze employees started getting banned from stores.

At that point, they started hitting up friends and family, and not just in the Bay Area, but nationwide. “It was cheaper to buy external drives at a store in Iowa and have Yev’s dad, Boris, ship them to California than it was to buy internal drives through our normal channels,” Klein writes.

(The company also apparently considered renting a moving van to drive across the country, hitting stores along the way — a variation on the “bandwidth of a station wagon of tapes” problem — but decided it wouldn’t be economical.)

By the time internal drive prices got to their normal level, the company had bought 5.5 petabytes of storage through retail channels — or more than 1800 disk drives. But finally, it could go back to its normal practices.

Mostly.

“On July 25th of this year, Backblaze took $5M in venture funding,” Klein writes. ”At the same time, Costco was offering 3TB external drives for $129 about $30 less than we could get for internal drives. The limit was five drives per person. Needless to say, it was a deal we couldn’t refuse.”

Disclosure: I am a BackBlaze customer.

This works for anything, whether you’re talking about logistics shipping to the Gulf War, moving cross-country, or organizing the pantry. It’s also the same theory behind virtualization – if you get a whole bunch of little processors working together well enough, they’re at least as good as one big processor, because you can keep adding little processors to them.

Traditionally, storage companies have worked by making bigger and bigger boxes; it’s part of what has kept companies like EMC and IBM in business, because really big boxes cost a lot of money.

However, we’re increasingly seeing cases where users are, instead, getting a whole bunch of little boxes to work together. It’s only worth the effort if you are, yourself, a great big company, so that a) you have the expertise around to hire people to get the little boxes to work together better and b) buying all the big boxes you would need just costs too darn much and it actually does save you money to find a way to let little boxes do it.

This is where companies like Facebook, Backblaze, and now Netflix come in. (And, likely, companies such as Google, but they don’t talk about it — though if you Google YouTube and “content delivery network” on the Google site, you sure end up with a lot of interesting patents.)

Backblaze has been patting itself on the, well, back for being the inspiration behind Netflix’ move, but really, the credit goes to the moving companies that figured out that, instead of sending gigantic trucks to all sorts of places to pick up stuff to move it, instead they should send a bunch of storage containers to the people who are moving, let the people fill them up, and then drive around and pick up all the storage containers. This was called a pod, and Backblaze called its similar system — a standardized bunch of storage and hardware and software to manage it — a Storage Pod.

(When you think about it, we’re even moving that way with coffee, with those little K -Cup things. And, really, it’s how the Internet itself works — instead of trying to send one large message, it breaks all the messages up into packets of the same size and then reassembles them at the other end, because the simplicity of only having to transport a single size of packets is worth the effort to break the message up and reassemble it.)

So, what Netflix decided was, rather than building a centralized gigundo data center with a ton of storage in it to hold all the movies, instead it would build a whole bunch of standardized pods — which it is calling the Open Connect Architecture — and placing the pods all over the country so the data doesn’t have to go as far.

True, if you’re renting something esoteric they’ll probably have it in some main office somewhere, but it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re renting one of the ten most popular movies of the past six months. It’s basically the same method behind Redbox — take care of the 80% of movie watchers and then figure out how to deal with the other 20%. So far Netflix is only taking care of 5% of its data this way, but it expects to ship most of its data this way in the future.

This sort of system only works if you’re really big — in the case of Netflix, streaming a billion hours of programming a month. The announcement hammered the stock of the vendors Netflix has been using to deliver its content, and there’s some dire warnings about what it means to big storage vendors like EMC, but, practically speaking, most companies just don’t operate on the economies of scale to make it worthwhile to do on their own.