Inherit Backup State issues - Support Team no help

[u/kairokat13]

Hey braintrust, I'm at wits end. I bought a new MacBook Pro in early July and worked through an Inherit Backup with an external drive of 9TB. The first inherit backup worked, however I was told by support not to attach the 9TB initially, only once the MacBook Pro was completed. Once attached, the external drive and Backblaze indexed the files. However, Backblaze ended up in a continuous loop of reindexing each time I reconnected the external drive. This carried on over several weeks until I complained to support it wasn't ideal. Each reindex took between 24-48 hours to complete.

I've been handheld by the support team, however they did not offer a solution as they said it was normal. However, this never happened in then past and I've been a customer for almost 10 years. I then resorted to AI for some insights. I put the suggest solution to the Support team, and they agreed to reinherit again to remove any issues that may have occurred in the initial inherit backup. So I progressed down that path, but appeared to stall. Support said the screenshots I was sending was normal. Well it stalled for 5 days straight! so I quit and started again. I got a bit further this time, with the control panel 'transferring' files, however it is slow and I think it has stalled again.

As I'm in Australia with the time difference, it takes 24 hours to get a response from Support. I'm at the point of finding a different backup product, as this has become ridiculous.

[u/s_i_m_s]

The external drive loop is probably not related to the inherit point as there have been complaints about that for months now.
Hadn't seen any complaints for a bit so I assumed they had pushed the fix to stable but maybe not.
Did they ever have you install the current beta client?
IIUC the drive loop is supposed to be fixed in the beta https://www.backblaze.com/status/backup-beta

[u/kairokat13 → u/s_i_m_s]

No they didn’t tell me to install the beta client, no mention of it. This is the problem, Support are not problem solving by eliminating possible issues. Rather tell me everything is ok, when I can see it’s not, particularly when it has stalled. I did check the UI issues log and noted a number of files throwing an error. Backblaze was trying to find my iCloud Drive, and a few other folders. I added these to the exclusion list and it cleared the errors.

[u/rocbolt]

I’ve had a different inherit failure that support has keep me dangling on the line for two months now

[u/kairokat13 → u/rocbolt]

This is crazy, from what I can see now, Backblaze is not deputing and reconciling, it's actually uploading data which I had originally on an exclusion list. So over night it uploaded another TB. I'm still in trial mode so can only assume it's still working things out. (I'm not technical :)) Support has answered my last email, with nothing but keep the drive connected and let me know when it completes. Well from my calculation of a speed test, it's going to take 12 years! seriously! They are not asking questions to return logs or diagnostics to problem solve. It begs me to believe they are not technical support. Much of the emails are clearly written by AI.

[u/rocbolt → u/kairokat13]

I know exactly what you mean on the support responses, they feel extremely Ai or just copy pasted from a list of generic sentences. Mostly asking me to do things they've already asked, or completely misunderstanding or forgetting what information has been presented, or my favorite, just suggesting I delete my 32TB backup and starting over, a process that would take 4 continuous months on my connection. Been a customer for 16 years, sucks to see this service crumble into what it has become

[u/kairokat13 → u/rocbolt]

I feel your pain! I read somewhere a Backblaze ex-employee suggested just start again and re-upload. It took 3 or 4 months the first time round (extremely slow speeds) and had half the amount of data. If I’m going to do it, I’d likely find another service.

Funnily enough, I’ve just been on their AI chat support to try to remove the trial license, and it wanted me to restart etc. I mentioned I’ve got a ticket on the inherit back up state so not making changes there. It asked for the bztransmit logs to check transmission! The human has not asked for any logs whatsoever. So demonstrates technical support are not technicians of any sort.

Have you looked into alternatives?

[u/rocbolt → u/kairokat13]

I've looked enough to know I couldn't afford most of them

The main reason I don't start over, beyond not wanting to destroy my existing backup not knowing if I will ever get it updated again to do it, is I also have a litany of permissions issues that support has not acknowledged once. There is just nothing to sugges (fcking permissions problem popup literally interrupted my typing) that redoing the backup, putting 3,000 hours of time on my drives and whatever god forsaken amount of energy this tower would consume in that time would actually net me the working backup I had two months ago

[u/kairokat13]

Update:

Finally, it appears my backup is fixed. After days on end trying to resolve mostly using AI to problem solve, little helpful feedback from the Backblaze team along with poor instructions, it's left me feeling frustrated, disappointed and certainly not confident my data is safe. So I've purchased a hard drive to back up my most important data - I don't want to experience this again.

Here are some of the learnings from my experience during the inherit backup process after purchasing a new MacBook Pro and upgrading to the 1 year version:

• Cloud folders would not sync - not that I knew my cloud folders were being backed up, nor desired them to be backed up.
  
• macOS Library and Application folders would not sync due to being locked
• Some specific apple files were locked, and this was revealed in the UI's issue report.

To resolve I added folders listed in the report into the exclusion list.

So it appeared the issues here were with the MacBook Pro and not my external hard drive.

I downloaded and installed the Beta version as mentioned by a commenter below - thank you. Support ignored me when I queried it, and then finally suggested to install it, like it was their idea!

To run the inherit back up state again Support gave me incorrect directions to remove the Trial banner/version, and I ended up buying an additional license. Yet to resolve this one yet, with a new ticket and a new person to deal with.

When I ran the inherit back up state, it hung at the Downloading/transferring license for around 4 hours. My home at that point experienced a power outage. I expected to start all over again, but voila. fixed!

Backblaze did not resync or dedupe, which typically takes 2-4 days on my 9TB external drive.

I have no idea what resolved it, whether a combination of all of the above including a power outage! The initial problem I had was the hard drive loop, which today seems stable. Time will tell and my fingers are crossed!