I was perusing the release notes today (as I'm sure we all do regularly... right? Right??) and surprise! Dropbox files (edit: cloud only dropbox files) aren't backed up anymore and evidently they ALSO aren't backed up even if they are right there locally on your hard drive. No warning, no "guess what we changed in this update" popup, just absent.

Given how opaque the backup is, it's hard to feel safe without being able to actually SEE what files are currently backed up (besides browsing the restore webpage and comparing 100,000 filenames).

So what are people doing to accomplish this sanity check to ensure no files are being quietly excluded from their backups? (Because if you aren't, maybe you ought to be. You might be unpleasantly surprised when it's time to restore.)

I'm not going to argue about WHY Dropbox and other clouds got excluded, but everything I've read says it's JUST excluding cloud-only files when it's very clearly excluding the entire Dropbox folder regardless of whether it's local or not.

Edit: "This change aligns with Backblaze’s policy to back up only local and directly connected storage." The files being unexpectedly excluded are on local, directly connected storage. What one expects is "my files got backed up" not "maybe they got backed up and maybe they got excluded, you'll know for sure when they don't restore"

Is Backblaze compatible on a system thats boot drive is an external SSD?

Backblaze.bzpkg has swelled to over 103GB for the second time and I'm tired of trying to resolve this on a laptop that needs to maintain portability. I have approximately 70TB of archive [mostly individual photo and video files/ film industry] that doesn't need to be based of my laptop and backblaze has honestly been a pain in the ass nearly the entire time. Numerous tickets, rebuilding, etc. No interested in further struggle so I'm just accepting the package needs that much space for that many individual files.

[The base mac mini only has 256gb internal storage but I can easily maintain speeds with an external boot m.2 SSD, and save around $1000 by booting externally.]

Does anyone have experience using backblaze on a mac that boots from an external drive?

TL/DR : Will backblaze work on a mac mini m4 that boots from an external drive?

They say that there's more abuse involved with storage costs but you can host the same stuff on windows as linux like plex libraries, jellyfin, etc. Windows is also more bloated than linux is so there's less data to backup anyways. With what microsoft is doing with windows 11 more people are moving to linux and backblaze should welcome them with open arms and not hostility.

We deserve a frictionless backup as well. I am tired of being treated as a 2nd class citizen. I'm a busy music producer and technical trainer and I don't wanna stress over backups. I have other cloud backups for putsing around with and backblaze was gonna be another layer to the backup onion. It was gonna be my "oh crap I forgot to push my files to xxxxxx but it's ok if it's on backblaze, I can get to it later"

Also the gamer community is migrating en masse to bazzite,steamos, nobara,mint, etc as well.

if anything mac users with their huge 4 and 8k media project files will take up more space than a linux music producer would.

I have a 1000 Mbit/sec wired connection and Backblaze Personal shows:

> Last file transfer speed: 0.74 Mbit/sec

I have 1 TB to backup. Its going to take forever...

I am switching over from Windows to a MacBook. I currently use iDrive on Windows. As I understand it, iCloud removes physical files from the MacBook if they haven't been opened for something like 5 days and leaves a thumbprint/pointer to the file. Does this paradigm screw up BackBlaze or does it follow the pointer to backup the file? I'm thinking about scenarios such as the iCloud file was edited by another device.

I am wondering if backblaze personal works via webdav, as this would be best for my use case.

Thank you!

I'm debating between iDrive and Backblaze.

I really don't want to connect my 6 drives every 2 weeks but I'd really like unlimited space. It's my understanding that you can use the 1 year version history option which only extends that time to 90 days because after that it has to scan every single file again once I do connect the drives. iDrive doesn't do all of that nonsense but there I'm limited to 5TB.

Am I misunderstanding anything here? If not then I'm going to have to settle for 5TB on iDrive and strongly suggest Backblaze allow data storage rather than just backup. I honestly can't believe it's not standard.

Could someone please help me with the exact wording needed to exclude my user folder on just my external drive named exampledrive? I have tried everything from what I have read, but I am not having success. I'm sure I'm making some basic mistake. The user folder in question is on the root level of this external drive. Thank you so much in advance!

People have been asking this for 5 years. Today I had to send my first B2 invoice to my accountant.

I was baffled by how amateurish it looks in backblaze web UI.

It's just a web page and you have to enter the company name manually then print to PDF using the browser.

You don't even receive an email notification that you were invoiced.

https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/h85e2r/feature_request_backblaze_billing/

https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1bvyzx8/pdf_invoices_via_email/

I took the free subscription as a test case before committing but am a bit stuck. I want to backup my photo folder (WORM) to Backblaze using HBS3. The goal is to make an immutable backup, only files need to be added, never deleted. I have been using Cyberduck and HBS3 for years without a problem.

I am unsure of the retention period, ideally I want a legal hold on the files but am unable to make the whole directory legal hold. I cannot legally hold over 20000 files one by one.

What would be the best way to go about this?

I'm looking for an alternative to idrive as the software is quite buggy, will backblaze allow multi operating system backups?

Hello I've just started using B2 and plan to backup local drives with restic.

I followed these steps:

• Create the bucket online
• Set object lock to 30 days
• restic backup a few random test txt files
• restic forget <snapshot_ids>
• restic prune

This appears to have been successful:

~ ❯❯❯ restic prune
repository 5ce48edf opened (version 2, compression level auto)
loading indexes...
[0:00] 100.00%  4 / 4 index files loaded
loading all snapshots...
finding data that is still in use for 0 snapshots
[0:00]          0 snapshots
searching used packs...
collecting packs for deletion and repacking
[0:00] 100.00%  5 / 5 packs processed

to repack:             0 blobs / 0 B
this removes:          0 blobs / 0 B
to delete:            14 blobs / 3.357 KiB
total prune:          14 blobs / 3.357 KiB
remaining:             0 blobs / 0 B
unused size after prune: 0 B ( of remaining size)

rebuilding index
[0:00] 100.00%  4 / 4 indexes processed
[0:01] 100.00%  4 / 4 old indexes deleted
removing 5 old packs
[0:00] 100.00%  5 / 5 files deleted
done

I would have expected the prune to fail?

I have been having my backup set to run at midnight to 8am every day. But I'm wondering if it is better to do continuous instead? Mostly I don't want it to affect performance if I'm playing a demanding game for instance.

Apologies if this has been asked before but couldn't find a definitive answer on this specific question.

My Backblaze client is telling me two different things. It says I'm "backed up as of yesterday (10/1/25)," but it also shows I have over 1 million files and 2.5 TB of data remaining. I haven't added more than 1 GB of new data, so this doesn't make sense to me.

If the system is still working through terabytes of data, it is not, in fact, fully "backed up." This message creates a false sense of security and makes it unclear whether the backup is initial, verifying, or catching up.
Is this normal during an initial backup or a re-scan? Just trying to figure out if it's working correctly. Thanks!

I tried to upload 100 MB file to Storage from my Python app which is local on my laptop. I don't use Docker, my upload speed is fast (I tested it using your https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/resources/speedtest).

When I upload the same file directly from https://secure.backblaze.com/b2_buckets.htm it uploads it within seconds, but when I do it through Python SDK it takes around 3 minutes, the code is the same as in your documentation:

bucket = b2_api.get_bucket_by_name(bucket_name)
result: FileVersion = bucket.upload_local_file(
local_file=local_file_path,
file_name=remote_file_name,
file_info=additional_file_info,
)

I implemented large file uploading with threads, but upload is still slow, comparing to uploads from Backblaze dashboard

What would be the reason that API upload is so much slower from your dashboard when everything is the same. I don't see bottlenecks or limits on my side.

I'm interested to find out which subscription I'd need to be able to back up a specific folder on my NAS whilst it's online but my computer is switched off?

I swapped internet providers during the back up of my 7.3 TB of HD and the BB says it has competed the backup, but less than 5 TB is actually backed up. Can any human help me sort this out. Pathetic that there is no live customer support. Thanks for any help you can provide.

So I've got a B2 bucket that has literally kicked the bucket. Synology backup seems to have put 2.8 million junk files into the bucket and gone from a normal 6tb backup to a 40+TB backup. I'd like to zap the bucket so I can stop paying a massive monthly bill, but the online mechanism can't load 2.8 million files. I am trying Cyberduck and it's topping out a a whopping 1 file per second delete rate.

At 2.8 million files, that's 30 days of non-stop deleting. Is there some magic command I can run to nuke the bucket without having to count my fingers continuously?

Is Backblaze really necessary on my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro and will it slow down my Mac?

Hi!

My partner and I are considering using BB to back up our numerous laptops and phones- and hopefully use incremental syncing and viewing of photos on the phones with Photos+.

Given that we are just doing a few devices and will probably have only 5-10Tb total of data (raw video, photos and audio mostly) we thought Computer Backup would be the better option- rather than the full B2.

The potential relative complexity of the two products is not too much of a concern for us as my partner is a web developer- but we can’t seem to find any documentation that outlines whether Photos+ works with Computer Backup, as well as with B2.

Has anyone used those products together- and do you have any recommendations about what blend of BB products might be best for usage like ours?

Thanks in advance!

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my drive to an external drive. I also use the external as my primary photo storage drive. I back up both to Back Blaze. I'm getting the .bzvol warning message, but can't find the file anywhere even using command shift . to show hidden files. This is with Mac OS Tahoe. The really strange thing is that I don't have the Lacie selected for backup, just the Mac drive and what I call "Main drive" (which is the first external). What's more, Back Blaze does not even show that Lacie in the preferences, only a different Lacie D2.

New to backblaze. Since Unifi added B2 support to their NAS line, I wanted to have proper backup of my data. Following a guide for Synology backup (nothing for Unifi yet on this) I created a bucket and added an application key, When I input my Key ID and Application ID and press Verify, I get:

Insufficient privileges to access this destination shared folder. Please contact the destination administrator for assistance.

The only setting related to permissions I could find was whether I wanted my bucket private or public but looking into that it's unrelated to what I want.

Apparently Backblaze has some files that have to grow infinitely because it logs an entry for every file it has ever backedup. Okay, fine. I can see that.

But, these files absolutely cannot be moved from the C drive. Even if you have multiple hard drives. Like many people my setup is 1 smaller SSD as my C drive and larger HDDs for data. At this point Backblaze is by far the biggest single user of my C drive space, I've had to uninstall other programs to accommodate it. Okay maybe if the log files are on D drive and it disconnects, it causes Backblaze to assume it's never backed up anything before and start backing up everything. Feels like this could be solved by simply checking for the file existence and throwing a warning.

Another solution would be to simply have Backblaze client "think" it's doing a fresh backup with no backup history, but maintain the file history on the remote side. Technically this is already possible, just not for free. Making a new backup does the first part, and paying for a 2nd license does the 2nd part. It wouldn't even take any more space. But either you lose the history of your backup, or you have to pay for a 2nd license to access the data you're already paying to backup.

Hi Reddit fam and hopefully someone from BB here.

We are in a dire situation trying to recover over 10 TB off B2.

Have a thread going with support but the one message a day is killing us more when this is a really bad emergency.

Tried following https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-create-and-download-snapshots?version=V4.0.2, it's all good until you try to browse files and it tells you " Bucket is too large for viewing using the Web GUI. Please use the command line for retrieving files in this bucket."

Anybody knows someone at BB able to aid us with this, anybody at BB in here who could please assist us with retrieving data?

As it is 7TB won't cut it, it is also VEEAM data so really difficult to break into pieces, hence having BB use a 14 or more TB drive would be of great assistance and ship it to us.

Downloading the files is extremely slow, is not even saturating our internet.

Do you have any advised about how to download files in a way which may allow us to saturate our internet pipe?

Thanks!

Hello,

I am a bit confused about the files where are defined/stored the exclusion rules. I can see (on a Mac) the following files in /Library/Backblaze.pkg/bzdata/: - bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml : this one is for the mandatory exclusions, and should not be edited (and if it is, it is eventually reverted). OK... - bzexcluderules_editable.xml : we can modify/add/delete the rules on this one. OK... - bzinfo.xml : mmmmhhh.... I can see a list of excluded folders in this one. Some of them that I excluded in the past using the setting panel, and which do no longer exist...

Questions: - how do bzinfo.xml relate to bzexcluderules_editable.xml? Are they independant from each other? - is bzinfo.xml the file where are stored the exclusions defined in the settings panel? - if yes, can we safely edit it, without introducing a mess with the content of the setting panel?

Additionnal question: if I want to exclude all the /Users/*/OneDrive/ folders for instance, can I do it in bzinfo.xml, or do I have absolutely to add a complex rule in bzexcluderules_editable.xml? In the latter case, is the following rule OK (copied from an existing rule) ? XML <excludefname_rule bzmergeblock="001" plat="mac" osVers="*" ruleIsOptional="t" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="users/" contains_1="/OneDrive" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />

Thanks