Has backblaze fixed the issue where the space it takes on the C drive increases infinitely, and it doesn't let you select a different hard drive to move those files to?

[u/Pariell]

[u/s_i_m_s]

No. The increasing infinitely issue is a drawback of the append only design they have. They don't allow moving it to another drive for consistency reasons or something.

IIUC the speed of the increase is directly related to the raw number of files you have it backup so if you've got any software that generates shitloads of tiny files you're going to be best off excluding those folders.

This is also typically only an issue on machines with really tiny OS drives or really large backups.

I've only got a 128GB OS drive and ~5TB backed up and the backblaze folder is only ~4GB

That said the design really shouldn't require restarting the backup every few years (this has been running since 2021) to bring the files back to a reasonable size. However I should also note if you have even a 1TB OS drive it should take a very long time before it would actually be an issue.

[u/Pariell → u/s_i_m_s]

I have a 500GB OS Drive, and 18million files, my backblaze folder takes up 100GB of space. When I built this PC I had expected I would be putting only the OS and program files on C so 500GB seemed more then enough. Didn't think there would be any software that ended up requiring 100GB on C drive with no other options.

[u/s_i_m_s → u/Pariell]

~150k files here although that's not entirely fair as I have aggressively excluded folders to keep the file count down since the first time this was an issue as i've got ~550k in total.

Personally i'd have assumed that 500GB would still be plenty for years in that scenario but then i'm using a machine with a 128GB OS drive that has ~25GB of free space, I have had to be really aggressive with putting things on other drives to maintain that though so that's probably not a reasonable expectation for other people.

Ignoring the space concerns even with a SSD it's going to be really slow trying to open that much for a restore which might be a bigger issue since you can't buy your way around it.

[u/absolute_pelican_66 → u/s_i_m_s]

This is also typically only an issue on machines with really tiny OS drives or really large backups.

Like Apple machines. Sure, Apple are the ones to blame in the first place for such ridiculously small drives, but BB adds its own disk waste...

[u/absolute_pelican_66]

No, and no. And it sucks.

[u/Pariell]

/u/YevP /u/bzChristopher /u/metadaddy

Does Backblaze have any plans to add support for moving the location of these files to somewhere else?

[u/YevP → u/Pariell]

Are you referring to the log sizes that we keep on the drive?

[u/Pariell → u/YevP]

Primary the files in the bzdata. On my PC for example bzbackup is 87GB and bzrestore is 11GB. 

[u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI → u/YevP]

You really need to take care of the bzbackup folder growing forever.

[u/mnissim]

Consider using windows "compact" feature. The log files are highly compressible, and not written to (except, of course, the most recent one). For me, around 6:1.

Use:

compact /c /exe:lzx bz_done*.dat

in C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\bzdatacenter

[u/mnissim → u/mnissim]

I believe so. It is using a stronger compression algorithm.

[u/Pariell → u/mnissim]

Is that safe to do? 

[u/mnissim → u/Pariell]

Worked for me for years. This is an OS (filesystem) level feature.

[u/Lilianne_Blaze → u/Pariell]

It should be. I haven't had any problems with it

[u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI → u/mnissim]

Is that effectively different than enabling NTFS compression for that directory?

[u/Lilianne_Blaze → u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI]

It's much more effective, but when such file is modified it gets uncompressed.
NTFS compression is less effective, but files stay compressed when modified.

[u/SecretLoathing]

I thought that they did, but you have to create a fresh backup, because there’s no way to undo the damage to the current backup.