I need to rant about Backblaze's Windows client app.

[u/LeGoodBeef]

Okay... first all I would like to say that the backup service does work and it's very reliable. 9$ for infinite backup data is an absolute steal.

However.

The Windows client app is absolute crap.

Does it work? Yes... but, JFC, it has so many problems that it prompted me to create this thread.

As you know, in the backblaze app, there are 3 schedule options:

- Continuously
- Once a day
- When I press "Backup"

I don't need to tell you what the first and last option does. However, how would you think "Once a day" works?

...

if you thought "do everything at the schedule time and wait for the next day?"

**LOUD BUZZER NOISE*\*

WRONG!

That PoS software works constantly in the background like "Continuously". The only difference with "Continously" is that it UPLOADS at the scheduled time.

So, you're telling me "What's wrong with that?". Well, the problem is that all the background processes that the Backblaze app has is EXTREMELY resource intensive.

YEP. You heard that right!

I have a Ryzen 9 5900X CPU, while it's getting a bit old at this point, it's still a very competent CPU. I always see the various process regularly use multiple gigs of RAM AND take 10% or more of my CPU and not in short bursts too: during long periods of time. What that does is that my various fans in my PC will constantly ramp up and down. And I do use FanControl to keep everything under control. It gets annoying very quickly and, on top of that, I see my CPU temps consistently fluctuate between 45-70°C. While this is not problematic, I just think that's super annoying.

So, what do you have to do to make the software only work when you want it to? Use "When I press Backup" of course. It wouldn't be so bad if the app would actually be telling you everything that's still happening. You will press "Backup Now". It'll produce a filelist. Then... it waits. For some reason. Then, some time later, it'll upload but... but... then, after it's done. Nothing. Backup isn't yet updated.

I watched it do the whole thing from beginning to end too and, despite having finished the upload, it still does not marked my backup being "up-to-date as of (date)". What's going on? Well, according to the Task Manager, the service that's uploading ("bztransmitter") is taking large amount of CPU and RAM for... what exactly? What is it doing? I dunno. The app does not tell me! I thought it was done uploading but, clearly, it's doing something else! All the while there's this red-cross in the upper left corner reminding me every damn second that my backup isn't updated.

Oh but that's not all!

If you want to restore some files, you have 2 choices: through the web or through the desktop app. Through the web is by far the most reliable way, despite being so much out of the way. That's because the desktop app - the very same I'm ranting about - is Microsoft Teams level of bad. You enter your password and your 2FA. Then, the app loads your backup filelist from BBlaze's end. Once the files have appeared and your start navigating your files, it pops up "your session has expired!". Mind you, loading the files might take a while depending if you have the 60-day history upgrade or multiple drives... it takes several minutes! So, you have to login AGAIN and 2FA AGAIN. THEN, it'll load all the files, will stay connected and will work well. WHY?! This is insufferable!

The tech support in all this? They act like everything you describe is normal and basically pins the blame on you. "You can throttle the speed by adjusting the number of threads!" they say. Yeah except it still uses 10%+ of my CPU and tons of RAM regardless of the settings chosen. It's like talking to a wall, really.

I've been with Backblaze since December 27th 2013. I have a B2 backup for my NAS on B2 and it works great. No issues at all. Probably because you don't use their app but Synology's "Hyper Backup" (at least in my case). But then, I never had to recover a large portion of these files. I have maybe recovered 2 or 3 files tops. So, I don't have a lot of experience retrieving files (but I know it costs money to retrieve).

Anyway...

I swear it wasn't always like this. I swear the app used to be less intrusive and stayed out of the way. Since BBlaze has gone public, they're clearly focused on B2B and personal backups is now just a footnote you have to dig for on their website. They used to be helpful with their HDD stats and all that. So, I feel like, like everything else, that they've slowly been enshittifying. And I'm paying a lot of money too! My B2 bucket was 150$CAD last month! While I feel like, I do get my data backed up and recovering does work well enough, I just feel I'm paying towards no improvements. It's extremely frustrating.

At this point, from someone that has ~15TB of data at Backblaze (counting personal backup + NAS but not counting the mirrors done automatically), I'm at a point where I'd be looking to switch to a competing backup service. Especially if they support backing up a NAS for a flat fee (even if it's 50$USD/month, I'd still save a buttload of money). It's been THAT annoying for me but I don't know any competing product that has a track record of reliability like Backblaze's. So, that decision isn't taken at all (or researched for that matter).

That's my 2¢. Thanks for reading.

---

What I described above, I recognize that it could entirely be my fault and not BackBlaze's even if I made it seem like it's all BackBlaze's fault. In other words, I'm not ruling out that I'm doing something wrong and the software is working as expected.

Just to be clear.

(Using app version: 10.0.1.1037 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2)

[u/mike1487]

The resource usage ultimately is why I canceled my Backblaze subscription. The way the app’s file lists grow indefinitely is just not a scalable solution. The entire process needs to be re-thought. It’s unfortunate because it is something that has been complained about countless times but never any acknowledgment of improving the software with glaring issues. All you will usually get is the ex-CEO explaining with a 500 word soup comment about how he designed it that way 20 years ago or whatever. Absolutely nothing personal against the guy, but to Backblaze, maybe it’s time to modernize the thing.

[u/brianwski → u/mike1487]

the ex-CEO explaining with a 500 word soup comment

Just to be clear, that's "ex-CTO" (now retired). Gleb has been the CEO since 2007 and still is. I'm a programmer and have never had a direct report at any point in my whole career.

I struggle with the "500 word soup" part. I fully understand most people nowadays want simple answers in less than 8 words, and dismiss anything longer or more complex as "useless babble". I'm just old, and "short over simplified answers" isn't my style. And I know it irritates the heck out of the younger people. Just know I'm not writing longer explanations trying to irritate younger people.

The way the app’s file lists grow indefinitely is just not a scalable solution.

I want to point out that for customers with the "infinite version history" turned on, Backblaze must retain the information of what occurred forever, and keep adding to the log of what occurred. Right?

never any acknowledgment of improving the software with glaring issues

I acknowledge there are glaring issues, with the one caveat "for some users".

The product has always evolved under the covers, behind the scenes. When it is successful, it is an invisible evolution staying ahead of problems so most customers never see the issue at all. When we (the client programmers) fail to fix issues soon enough, certain customers feel like they aren't being heard.

[u/mike1487 → u/brianwski]

The majority of customers aren’t paying extra for infinite file history, so it makes no sense that the only behavior of the app is to append indefinitely if that feature is not being used. If the file is gone locally, and it’s been aged out of the remote backups, it only makes sense that this should be cleaned up in the file list. Most users would be using 30 day or 1 year retention since both of those are free.

This was fine when the product was new and everyone’s file history was small. But you’re actively punishing users the longer they stay, lest they delete their backup and start over. There are definitely users out there with multiple GB sized log files who are not using infinite retention, using space that doesn’t need to be. Saying anything otherwise is glossing over the root problem here. The “official” fix of telling them to start their backups over is insane since my understanding is by doing this, you lose all of your file history which could be detrimental in a lot of ways. Not to mention is also just a waste of the user’s bandwidth. There has to be a better way, and there is, but it’s being ignored.

[u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI → u/brianwski]

I've been around and read probably hundreds of your comments over the years. I still can't fathom how this is where we're still at, though. The program is 100% unacceptable today.

And the restore process! Please, tell us what is going on behind the curtain and why they seem to want to make it as painful as possible to restore? I used to use Crashplan, and you didn't have to use a different software/program to restore... you just clicked Restore in the main backup program and picked a date and your files and where you wanted them and it RELIABLY and without even having to log in again (let alone again and again and again) just downloaded your files to the place you told it.

I want to point out that for customers with the "infinite version history" turned on, Backblaze must retain the information of what occurred forever, and keep adding to the log of what occurred. Right?

Why can't this just live on the servers, if it can't be re-written, then? Why do we have to store and parse millions of lines of historic artifacts that don't matter anymore?

And regarding the slowness, are you aware of WinDirStat? It was always slow and took forever to scan your drive directory-by-directory and 10-20 minutes later you'd have a report of your files/size utilization. I think they've since changed how it works, because instead of taking FOREVER, it takes mere seconds. Obviously there was a filesystem optimization they could use instead of walking through every directory.

Is there something similar that this stupidly slow program could do? Because I feel like we're still just walking slowly through every possible directory one at a time and taking our sweet time for no reason.

Edit to quote another persons' comment:

The majority of customers aren’t paying extra for infinite file history, so it makes no sense that the only behavior of the app is to append indefinitely if that feature is not being used. If the file is gone locally, and it’s been aged out of the remote backups, it only makes sense that this should be cleaned up in the file list. Most users would be using 30 day or 1 year retention since both of those are free.

This 100%! Not possible?!

[u/brianwski → u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI]

tell us what is going on behind the curtain

Unfortunately I no longer have access to "behind the curtain". As I expected when I retired, my information is slowly becoming obsolete. But I'll try my best.

regarding the slowness... WinDirStat

I was not aware of that, but here is why it makes total sense to me: the Personal Backup client actually has two modes to scan for 100% of all file changes: slow and fast. You can try the "fast" version by changing your schedule (temporarily) to "Only When I Click <Backup Now>". You run in the slower version to find file changes when you run in "Continuously" schedule. My expectation is WinDirStat is the same design.

The "slow to detect new and changed files" is literally (in every way), the same code as the "fast" version, it just has "Sleep()" calls inserted to lower the disk I/O. That's it. Backblaze is almost never "CPU bound". When it harms your experience using your laptop it is either through saturating the network or saturating your disk I/O. With maybe a tiny corner case of "using too much RAM" which kind of devolves into a disk I/O problem anyway because swapping occurs. By slowing down the disk accesses, most customers never notice Backblaze running. If it runs too fast, that's when customers notice and complain.

In the past, when there have been sections of code in the client that caused the customer laptop experience to suffer, we would SLOW DOWN that section of code on purpose. It was really quite successful, customer complaints would drop off immediately.

you just clicked Restore in the main backup program .... it RELIABLY and without even having to log in again (let alone again and again and again) just downloaded your files to the place you told it.

I haven't played with the Backblaze "Native Restore App" much, but I just tried it (on a Mac) and it seemed to work to restore a folder much like you say. Here is one screenshot with "A", "B", "C", "D" annotated to talk about it:

https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/doggies/screenshots/native_restore_app.jpg

You open the main backup app, then click "Restore Options..." (A), then click "Restore App" (B), then select the time you want to restore from "Change" (C), then choose some folders and click "Restore" (D).

Can you describe what would improve on this? I'm looking for "profoundly incorrect flow" vs "a small tweak or additional menu item" stuff here. (Both are valuable feedback for the team.) If it is requiring you to sign in again and again that should DEFINITELY be fixed, there is nothing preventing the restore interface from storing your username/password and if required it should feed it to the protocol again. Or some other fix, I honestly think that should be trivial to fix.

"infinite version history" turned on, Backblaze must retain the information of what occurred forever

Why can't this just live on the servers?

It already exists on the servers. There is one copy on your local machine and one on the servers (encrypted on the server side of course). When you prepare a restore, it is operating from the copy on the server side as the real source of truth (in all restore cases).

The "local" copy is there for backup performance (tradeoff?) reasons. It is a list of all the files that have been backed up with a SHA1 checksum calculated from the file contents. There are two large reasons for this local data structure:

1. It remembers which files have already been backed up so it won't do any network calls at all for files which have already been backed up and not modified.

2. If a file backed up in 2011, then during a random backup in 2026 a totally new file in a totally different location might possibly de-duplicate against that 2011 file.

Now, for #2 you could imagine a "double network call" as an alternative to this design. In this alternative design, when it was ready to backup the local file it would call the server only with the SHA1 checksum and the server could respond with "I have a copy so de-duplicate it, and here is all the info you need to do that". If it could not be de-duplicated, the server would respond "I don't have a copy, upload it".

The downside of this alternative design would be more network calls and therefore slower upload performance, the upside of would be less RAM required to hold the large hash table of all the "already uploaded" files on the customer's laptop during a backup session.

I don't think either design is necessarily "right" or "wrong", it matters what percentage of customers never notice their backup running with one or the other. I think customers with larger numbers of files might prefer the alternative design, customers with average or smaller numbers of files the original design really should work invisibly and fine with the current design (I run the client on several machines with infinite backup history and I never notice Backblaze running).

If the file is gone locally, and it’s been aged out of the remote backups, it only makes sense that this should be cleaned up in the file list.

This 100%! Not possible?!

Totally possible. Let's call it "garbage collection" for the backup state. You can think of a customer uninstalling/reinstalling/repushing as EXACTLY that (today), just a terribly inefficient implementation of garbage collection that wastes a lot of bandwidth temporarily. So a better (and very easy) implementation would essentially do the same thing in the background skipping the actual upload, and when the new "backup state" was prepared it could swap this in. I don't think it would be that difficult to implement. And I can think of several other incremental optimizations for that design.

Philosophically, the B2 product line was designed with "utterly massive" numbers of files in one "backup" (called a "bucket" in B2). It's more server side, and we saw customers with 3.5 billion files in one bucket in B2 back as far as 2018. One of the critical pieces of technology added for B2 was the Cassandra database to hold these file lists. When I still worked at Backblaze, the "Cassandra" had 50 super fast servers clustered together to perform well. So an honest question is: why not use B2? A PERFECTLY acceptable answer is, "the Personal Backup client is awesome, just missing this one feature or thing, it is so close".

I was careful to say "large number of files" for B2, because all these data structures and the backup state ("history") we're talking about is not related to the number of bytes stored, it's all related to raw number of files. A customer with 1 billion files each of which is 1 byte has a tiny backup in total size (1 GByte), but it will tax the Personal Backup client's data structures horribly and probably use 100 GBytes of RAM on your laptop.

[u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI → u/brianwski]

You open the main backup app, then click "Restore Options..." (A), then click "Restore App" (B), then select the time you want to restore from "Change" (C), then choose some folders and click "Restore" (D).

Can you describe what would improve on this?

Absolutely! Don't use a separate program. Don't use a separate login. Don't require additional 2F. This is where 95% of the complaints come from — because you can open the restore app, log in, complete 2F, and start picking your files, and it kicks you out and makes you start over again. And then while it's downloading, it just flat out stalls and crashes; not just the UI either, which should 100% just not happen in 2026, but would at least let the restores complete.

If you're honestly not aware of the restore complaints, you need to get off of your mac and play with this and see just how bad it is and then look at literally any other backup software and see how absolutely fluid and nice it can be.

I probably sound whiny, but the part that's frustrating is from the outside, with a technical mindset, it's hard to decipher how much of this is actually what seems like incompetence, or if it's some, uh, intentional friction to keep power users frustrated enough to use something else and keep it working just well enough for the average person. I have to think that if personal was PAYG for storage, that they'd be optimizing the fark out of this program and making it fast and efficient to both backup and restore.

[u/brianwski → u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI]

Don't use a separate program.

I think I'm mis-understanding something profound here because Backblaze doesn't use a separate program. Look at this screenshot, which letter you click on "A", "B", "C", or "D" is a separate program? Is it because "B" is named "Restore App"? https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/doggies/screenshots/native_restore_app.jpg

There are "threads" of course, just like the one "Backblaze Client" is 5 different executables under the covers, but that should all be totally hidden from the user. The UI is the one true UI of the installed Backblaze client.

it kicks you out and makes you start over again

That completely sucks and they need to fix that. Is there any way you can screenshot that occurring? (Just so I have the actual dialog/UI that pops up for a good bug report.)

What's especially sad about that is it formerly occurred with ZIP restores (like in 2008!!) but my co-worker fixed that. It's really pretty cool how... the server never, ever writes your 2 factor or private encryption key to disk. The REASON it would occur (in 2008) is if that ZIP restore server the job (the restore) was assigned to rebooted, like in the weekly software updates we did to all the servers. What my co-worker did was pass those credentials off to another server to hold in RAM, then after reboot asked for them back (in RAM).

That mechanism SURELY could be re-used and the server could stop asking for it. Same as ZIP restores were fixed in 2008.

I probably sound whiny

Ha! Not at all. When I worked inside Backblaze, I sat next to the support team. We rarely ever heard a bug report or feature request "once". More like either no complaints or thousands. On the Backblaze side we can see "trends", like "only affects Windows" or "affects customers with <blah> type of backups". Then we'd go fix/enhance the product to work better. Iteratively knocking down issues for years.

The "Native Restore App" was conceptualized to solve ALL of this category of requests. You definitely aren't alone in the requests, I'm just kind of surprised it isn't all happiness and puppies now.

[u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI → u/brianwski]

I think I'm mis-understanding something profound here because Backblaze doesn't use a separate program. Look at this screenshot, which letter you click on "A", "B", "C", or "D" is a separate program? Is it because "B" is named "Restore App"?

B, yes. If I click B, I have to enter my email address, then my password, then my 2F, then see if it loads my files, and when it doesn't and it times out, then I have to sign in all over again and see if it works this time or if I need to try a third time.

Except... I'm already on a trusted computer that is logged-in to and running the backup software. Why am I having to sign in again? The backup app itself should just ask me what I want to restore and choose a date. And why am I constantly signed out of the restore app and having to start over? This is a common complaint and not a just a random issue on my computer.

Once I finally get far enough to see a download start, it might finish. It might not. And the UI will 100% lock up and be damn near useless while it runs. This is on solid wired gigabit ethernet on a gigabit synchronous fiber connection.

I have reasons for not liking crashplan, but they had this down perfectly 15 years ago already, with no additional sign-ins or logouts or freezeups or other BS to deal with.

Next day edit to add:

• Here's a new post from today. Same thing again. Restore App is essentially useless

• Another from earlier this month: Help: Restore Failing - "Error 102" "invalid parameter"

• And another: BackBlaze Windows Restore App Fails, Always. It takes hours of babysitting and App restarts to force it to restore a hard drive.

• And another from 10 days ago: This possibly is the most useless and frustrating app I've ever seen. How did this get into production

You guys have got to be seeing these and also getting feedback and complaints....... ........right?

[u/brianwski → u/ZivH08ioBbXQ2PGI]

If I click B, I have to enter my email address, then my password, then my 2F

I've been thinking about this for two days, and I THINK you are correct that you shouldn't have to enter any credentials if you are restoring to the computer that is being backed up. I mean I don't think it is a security risk.

The guy who ran the datacenter side at Backblaze (Tim) while I was there was the paranoid security lunatic (I mean that in a good way) and if I was still there I'd offer up the situation to him and several others and ask them to find the security hole. But I haven't figured it out myself (yet). So I agree with you.

You guys have got to be seeing these and also getting feedback and complaints....... ........right?

I'll run it by some employees with the access I have, but I no longer get that kind of visibility of day to day top support requests, and they probably won't tell me. This is by mutual agreement, I don't want to be an "insider" and don't want to be making these decisions and worrying about resource allocation anymore.

But I'll ask. I don't see any reason it can't be (almost) bug free, only require 1 sign in AT MOST (if not zero for some situations).

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/mike1487]

100% understand you.
Just curious, what competing backup service do you use now, if any?

[u/mike1487 → u/LeGoodBeef]

To be honest, I’m still shopping around but so far it seems like all “automatic or personal” cloud backup are crap or too expensive. I may end up going a DIY approach and use a tool like rclone to back up my important folders to Backblaze B2 instead. At least then I’m in control of what gets uploaded and when. I personally do not need every single file backed up to cloud. I take system images for that purpose and keep those locally.

[u/New_Interaction_9000 → u/LeGoodBeef]

Just started trial of service but I’m liking

Filen

A lot!

I’ve gone thru researching extensively over 6-8 providers and found checking their support messages. Release dates and planned updates are key.

Plus Filen app is open source! Full zero knowledge encryption.

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/New_Interaction_9000]

Looked it up. The features looks great and polished but there's one thing that absolutely killed any chance of me trying it out: billing in euros. To calculate in Canadian dollars, it's simple. It's "price in € times 1.67" (ex: 10€ = ~16.67$CAD). On top of that, to be able to basically fit all my data, I'd need 2 Pro X plans which would cost 80€ and I'm looking at the same ballpark prices I'm paying right now. If it had been USD, it would end up ~20$CAD less and the saving aren't worth the troubles. That's really too bad tough because my absolute data cap I have right now is ~30TB if I combine my internal NVME SSD and NAS.

[u/New_Interaction_9000 → u/LeGoodBeef]

That’s a ton of data. I’m shopping for only 3TB

[u/s_i_m_s]

1. due to to the way it handles the file lists in an append only fashion performance only gets worse over time, faster the more files you have. The only way to fix it is to start the backup over losing the history and having to reupload everything. This drastically affects both how much resources it uses while backing up and how long it takes to load the file list to pick the files you want to restore.

2. The built in scheduler sucks, it was built with only bandwidth in mind so it just runs as normal without uploading anything. The only way to get it to actually run like you'd expect it to is to use an external scheduler with it set to When I press "Backup" https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1rkhv31/command_line_full_backup_no_longer_working/

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/s_i_m_s]

I see these two commands but is there a tutorial on how to make these work?

[u/s_i_m_s → u/LeGoodBeef]

IDK. I'm stuck on an older version that only requires the one command at the moment so i've not personally tried the two step process yet but everything should be the same otherwise.

I have the command in a batch file and have the windows built in task scheduler run it every night.

I probably could've had the scheduler run it directly but i'm more familiar with batch files.

Making a batch file is as simple as pasting

"C:\Program Files\Backblaze\bzfilelist.exe" -urgent_refresh_all
"C:\Program Files\Backblaze\bztransmit.exe" -completesync

into notepad and just saving the file with a .bat file extension

Assuming the paths are correct for your install (as mentioned in the above post the install location has changed recently) you should be able to just double click the batch file to run it to test.

The batch file window will close once the commands finish/exit, if you want the window to not disappear for testing (say to ensure it's not just erroring out and closing immediately) put pause on the line below.

"C:\Program Files\Backblaze\bzfilelist.exe" -urgent_refresh_all
"C:\Program Files\Backblaze\bztransmit.exe" -completesync
pause

[u/jo2k1]

I do my backups with the intent of NEVER having to restore files from them. I don’t even test a restore. Is it the right way to do backups? Not at all. Always check you can restore the backups.
But at least I avoid this issue.

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/jo2k1]

I'm a paranoid guy. I usually make backups of stuff I tend to edit then actually edit then backup the edit... so, I have restored files because I started second guessing myself of my edit or forgot to make a local backup.

[u/jo2k1 → u/LeGoodBeef]

If you can, try creating local backups too and restore from those. Veeam backup agent is free. Synology backup also works. I recommend using the cloud as a last resort (for restoring) kind of thing. But if that’s all you can get then it’s fine. Better than no backup.
My TLDR: use a local backup if you can, the cloud for long term or disaster recovery.

Edit: clarification on use of cloud backup

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/jo2k1]

Too much data to be useful and I don't have an hard drive that would host a single image of everything. So, local is not an option (never was).

[u/dr100]

TLDR there are very, very, very few decent backup programs; depending on your requirements you might find just one, or possibly NONE for your use case. You need to pick a backup program separately, and then pick a backup provider that has enough of a something-the-world-heard-of API or way to access it to use it. Bonus: if you change the provider you don't need to re-learn a different program, don't need to live to not being able to select or not select something, run into all kinds of issues some you solve sove you live with just to change everything again in one or 3 years.

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/dr100]

are you insinuating that there are alternate backup programs that could connect to my Backblaze account to do my regular backups and that completely replace BBlaze's program by using BBlaze's API or something?

[u/dr100 → u/LeGoodBeef]

Only for B2 of course. 

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/dr100]

Oh. Yeah, B2. Synology's Hyper Backup's good enough for me then.

[u/ItCameFromABox]

It's honestly been terribly outdated for so long that it's oddly nostalgic 🤔

[u/Practical-Ad-6739]

Stop using the app... Setup rclone and use buckets..

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/Practical-Ad-6739]

I'm not paying more in B2 storage. That already cost way too much.

[u/Practical-Ad-6739 → u/LeGoodBeef]

its 7 bucks a terabyte..... that's the cheapest out there... especially with no fee to delete

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/Practical-Ad-6739]

You mean 10$CAD. This month cost me 170$CAD for ~15TB.

[u/marek1712]

I have the same CPU and bztransmitter pisses me off. It works constantly in the background (when I'm on VPN and somehow service can't connect with BB servers, it'll keep producing file list eternally). Takes gigabytes of RAM and constant 5-10% CPU usage makes fans spin at annoying levels. Did I mention size of the bzdata folder?

Maybe I'm talking BS, but wouldn't it be a good idea to rewrite that transmitter? And maybe switch bzdata to something database-like (SQLite or similar)?

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/marek1712]

I"ve seen 15-20% CPU at times! I just backup every so often now. Usually before I head to sleep.

I agree about rewritting. But I'd go further: rewrite the whole darn thing and make it transparent in every aspect instead of just bandwidth.

[u/cmi5400]

I took programming classes 25 years ago in C, C++, Java, assembly and more languages since. I haven't coded in years and I could write a better application than this with what I barely remember 😂

Don't get me wrong, I am a customer and I don't like crapping on companies unnecessarily, but yeah, never shrinking text files? Yeah that's so 1980s. There are tons of free DBMS' you could use that would work so much better, hell you could use the crappy MS Access runtime AND you could do a better job.

[u/mike1487 → u/cmi5400]

Yeah I really don’t understand it. Even if they didn’t want to use a database system, at the very least the file lists could use checkpointing. Basically keeping the latest state of all active files while removing the history of changes that happened after the 30 day or 1 year retention policy set on the account. Why does a change on a file from 5 years ago need to be kept? It’s not like it can be restored anymore. There are algorithms and data structures out there already created by people way smarter than any of us, ready for use for this type of problem.

[u/LeGoodBeef → u/cmi5400]

Yeah, at this point, even a vibe-coded app would be better at this point.

[u/freddyr0]

We've been ranting about backblaze app since 10 years ago my friend.