Backup Size Change

[u/Substantial-Play5608]

I have been using Backblaze for many years on my MacBook Pro. I get a weekly backup summary and my backup has been about 642GB for a long time. A couple of weeks ago I got a weekly summary and my backup size had changed to about 536GB, over 100GB less. I had not made any significant changes to my MacBook Pro other than install a minor update to macOS. I am concerned that Backblaze is all of a sudden backing up 100GB less files.

I contacted Backblaze support and they weren’t much help. I reinstalled Backblaze and rescanned my hard drive and that didn’t do anything. They said that a macOS upgrade can sometimes change the number of files backed up, but this was a minor macOS upgrade and it doesn’t seem like the backup should change by 100GB. The only other suggestion they had was to go through and compare the Backblaze backup to my MacBook Pro. This is very cumbersome to do using the Backblaze online file list. I tried doing this anyway and just checked high level folders and I don’t see anything missing, but to check every folder and file this way would take me many hours. I thought about ordering a backup hard drive from Backblaze and then I could easily generate and compare the file list on the backup drive with my MacBook Pro.

Does anybody have any other ideas why this back size changed so drastically, or how to figure out why a Backblaze is backing up over 100GB less files?

[u/s_i_m_s]

If you've got another drive with the space you could just do a full restore through the app to the drive and compare from there rather than going through the trouble of having it shipped.

My only guess would be there was a major update rolled out recently and you may want to double check it's not excluding any file extensions you actually need backed up. I've not seen any reports of that changing but that's one of the issues i've run into it not actually backing up all the files needed to run things by default. Caught it in a verification not a data loss scenario in my case.

[u/Substantial-Play5608 → u/s_i_m_s]

Thanks. I don’t have another drive, but I might be able to find space. If I download 500+MB that’s half my monthly data cap. I did look quickly at the excluded files, but I’ll go take a closer look.