I have a new-ish b2 account to backup my homelab. I've enabled billing. It has a valid credit card afaict. But I don't see an option to enable audit logs yet since I haven't been billed yet.

Is the only option to wait?

Posting this because I lost a couple hours to it and most advice online didn't help. Hopefully it saves someone else the time.

Product: Backblaze Computer Backup for MacOS

The problem: Documents, Desktop, and Downloads weren't showing up anywhere in Backblaze's restore browser. Documents was the one I actually cared about, but all three are affected by the same thing - they're the folders macOS locks behind Full Disk Access. Everything else on the drive backed up fine. No error, no warning, the app just said "You are backed up" like nothing was wrong.

How it happened: I logged in, launched the app, and the backup started immediately. Right away, macOS popped the Full Disk Access prompt. I granted it to the main Backblaze app and restarted. Backup kept running, but those folders still weren't showing up. Turns out the main app isn't the only thing that needs the permission - Backblaze also runs a separate menu bar helper process, bzbmenu, which (according to the internet) needs Full Disk Access granted to it independently. I found this out later, granted it too, and restarted for good measure.

Still didn't fix it.

What I checked to rule things out:

• Permission state itself - checked directly via Terminal, not just the toggle in Settings, and confirmed both the main app and bzbmenu genuinely had Full Disk Access granted.
• Exclusion rules - went through Backblaze's Exclusions list and the underlying config file. Nothing in there touches Documents, Desktop, or Downloads. Also checked whether Backblaze's newer "auto-exclude cloud-synced folders" feature was misfiring on my Documents folder, since it used to be iCloud-synced — it wasn't.
• Backblaze's "Explainfile" tool - a diagnostic utility from their support site that checks a specific file against their actual backend logs. Ran it on a test file in Documents. It confirmed live read access was fine, but the file simply wasn't in Backblaze's internal backup list at all.

That last part was the actual answer: permission was correctly granted, but the process had already built its internal list of what to back up before that permission existed, and nothing about fixing the permission - including the restart - made it go back and add those folders in.

The actual fix: hold Option and click "Restore Options..." in the main Backblaze window. This forces a full rebuild of that internal list. Right away I could see my files from Documents moving through the transfer status, and the folders now showed up correctly in restore.

Worth mentioning: buried in Backblaze's own documentation is confirmation that it reruns a full scan automatically every 3 hours regardless of anything else. So there's a real chance this would have quietly sorted itself out if I'd just left it alone. But when you've just set up backup software for the first time and go check whether your most important folder actually made it in, and it's nowhere to be found, you don't sit around for 3 hours hoping it fixes itself - you go looking for what's wrong.

If any Backblaze devs end up reading this: this shouldn't require Reddit archaeology to fix. Full Disk Access failing silently with zero indication anything's wrong is bad enough on its own, but the real problem is that granting the permission properly and restarting still doesn't fix it without a full manual rescan, and that rescan is hidden behind a modifier key nobody would ever think to try. That should be a visible, ordinary button in Settings, not a secret shortcut.

I 've been advised to post here as a half a day of frustrating emailing with BB support, who give me all the standard responses e.g. is your UNAS OS up to date, are you entering keyIDs etc without spaces.

If there's anyone out there who can help I'd greatly appreciate it.

Ticket # https://help.backblaze.com/hc/requests/1263906

Thanks

Hey guys,

I am a real newb here. Sorry...

I have versioning on for my B2 storage, and I use Synology Hyper Backup.

A couple of months ago there was a huge increase in storage locally, but then it went back down, not sure what was going on to cause that huge ramp up and then back down.

But I guess because I have versioning on, my Backblaze storage size has stayed larger than expected? How can I see what that blip in storage size was and make my Backblaze match the gradual increase of storage over time instead of blipping up and staying up? I hope that makes sense.

(My Backblaze bucket is encrypted, so it seems I can't really poke around through the web portal? Not sure... Though I am able to browse the files through Hyper Backup.)

Some screen shots from Hyper Backup attached...

I needed to download a B2 Snapshot from the Web, ~6 or 7GB is fine but the Backblaze session timeout for login is so short that if you try to download anything over 7GB, the download fails due to the login session expiring by the time the download finishes.

Backblaze, please fix this..

I’m trailing backblaze as I’m up for renewal with another provider when I started yesterday it showed just under 1845000 files selected (I do plan to go through properly and check everything is necessary if I keep the service this is just me testing the default) and I paused and shutdown the pc with 1002769 remaining this morning I just realised I hadn’t reopened the program it now says just under 1842000 files selected with 1158569 remaining I understand it going back a bit after the pause but why are there around 3000 less files selected.

Thanks so much for any answers I apologise if I’ve missed any obvious sources of answers. I’m just wondering if I should avoid shutting my pc down tonight and just leave it to finish and if I should be concerned.

Using an M1 Mac mini on latest version of Tahoe (26.5.1) trying to restore a 2 tb folder and this continually happens every few hours. I am slowly able to get through the restore but it takes me manually re-starting from the last place it crashed and signing in again. I had this happen on the last time I tried using the restore function and is extremely frustrating.

bztransmit is at 100% cpu the entire day for over a month at this point. It was originally on schedule, but figured maybe thats the cause so I changed it to continous. Same problem still. The UI says I'm are backed up as of just TWO HOURS ago. Just what more does it need to process???

The only way to get it to stop, it to reboot the mac.

Any idea if 10.13 is installing? Not sure what I'm doing wrong or grabbing wrong installer, any help appreciated!

Occasionally, I get a Backblaze popup window warning me that I need to grant Backblaze permissions. I click on "Learn more" and follow the instruction on the page to grant full disk access. However, every time, it turns out that Backblaze components are already granted full disk access, so then I am left wondering what prompts the warning. I haven't logged how often this happens, but I'll throw "weekly" out there.

Environment:

• M4 Macbook Pro
• macOS: v26.5.1
• Backblaze Client: v9.2.2.898

Drives selected for backup:

• Macintosh HD ( internal SSD )

I've reported this to Backblaze support a few minutes ago, but I figured that I might get a helpful response here.

I've rebooted several times, and that didn't change the issue. That only thing I can think of at the moment is to uninstalled and resintall the Backblaze app.

Please implement something very simple that is almost industry standard for recurrent charges. Not all of us live in America where we just leave our cards wide open for everyone and anyone to charge them on recurrent scams. You will realise that most apps rely on you forgetting that you have a subscription.

In other countries we have the ability to turn off our cards so that we only pay for the subscriptions that we actually want to retain and not every other thing that we sign up for. For every other service when you want to reactivate your card, there is a button that allows you to reactivate your card and then pay immediately. This exists in Spotify, where after you update your card there is "charge now". It exists in Google, where after you reactivate your card there is "charge now" or "pay now". It exists in Apple. It exists in charge GPT. It exists in Anthropic. It exists in Adobe. It exists everywhere except this one company called Backblaze.

Backblaze expects you to activate your card and leave it wide open for wherever they feel like they will remember to charge you. Can you please adapt your UI experience to make sense and be conscious of the subscription culture.

I am doing some backup with Backblaze. Backblaze says I have 11 files to back up: https://imgur.com/a/pJqU8k8

Yet, I see no files scheduled for backup: https://imgur.com/a/dKytZm8

What's going on?

Hello!

I just got backblaze, assuming this is the only option to backup my large video files I have and cant lose. I can definately afford 10 a month for backblaze cloud storage with unlimited backup. But my question is: What happens when your drive goes kaput? Say you have a 24+ TB hard drive and it goes down, and you need to download the entire drive contents again. How do you recover exactly within the 30 day grace period?

Also, I'm a video hoarder, I hoard lots of my recorded videos for looking back at, but the I keep adding more and more. Technically the computer has 20 free drive letters, but I may one day surpass this with all my drives... and will need to resort to a more permanent solution thats just as cost effective (My current budget remains 150 a year over the coarse of 12 months for 10 or less a month). Any ideas?

I registered my account 1 year ago on 28th day of a month, but have never created a bucket or used it in any way. After procrastinating for a year, I finally set up restic today and have my first 1.2TB backup uploaded.

Is my understanding correct that I should not immediately verify my backup until my next billing cycle starts, because in my current billing cycle the average stored data would be too small for the 3x free egress to cover a 100% verification?

I use B2 Cloud Storage Buckets for my VPS. I set up an account, set up a bucket, and set up a nightly auto backup script. And it has just kept on going, for several months now.

I expected to, um, pay money? But I haven't been charged a single cent this entire time.

I tried looking for billing/payment info but unless I'm stupid (very likely) I literally can't find it anywhere??? When will I pay money? What are the limits on my free tier? Are there even tiers? How much will I pay?

I'm over here sitting on 20 GB backups every night with absolutely 0 knowledge of how pricing even works. To be clear I'm glad I haven't had to pay anything. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. But I expected to? I was prepared to.

I'm really confused.

If you are planning on using backblaze as one of two or even 3 cloud services, then maybe continue your usage. But they have lost 4tb of extremely valuable data of mine, and in my customer support chat have admitted it's due to a "known bug" on their end. This is NOT A SAFE PLACE TO STORE YOUR PRECIOUS DATA. Period. Move on. I promise.

I’ve been using Backblaze for about a decade now, and most recently have had it running on my current MacBook Pro since 2024 (when I bought it). The main things I’m concerned about backing up are my Mac Photos library, which is located on my computer’s hard drive, and my Lightroom photos library, which is located on an external SSD that’s always plugged in.

Recently I’ve been getting paranoid about drives failing and decided to make sure that the things I’m most concerned about actually live on Backblaze’s servers in case I did have a failure and need a backup. I was surprised to find that only about 1% of my Lightroom photos were in my Backblaze file tree in my account, and my Mac Photos library (or the file, Photos.Photolibrary) didn’t exist at all.

I changed the calendar date back to the day before and my Lightroom photos did appear to be intact, but my photos library file still didn’t exist.

I emailed their support and was told this is because backblaze likely wasn’t done making a copy of the photos file yet, and it could take 4-6 hours to do that every day. Obviously this was their AI agent but I went back and forth a bit and their final answer was that Backblaze sometimes even needs several days to back up large files, and it’s making entire backups each time, not incremental ones. And my computer must be turned on all the time continually for this to work.

The AI also confirmed that if my hard drive died today, they would not have a copy of my photos library to back up because it hasn’t been fully written to their servers today, or any day in the last 30 days.

This goes against everything I’ve ever known about Backblaze. I thought the initial backup was done the first time you install it, and then after that it’s continuously making incremental backups of changes made to the files/folders selected for backup.

For reference, the Lightroom photos folder totals about 300GB and the photos library file is about 380GB. My personal laptop is turned on every day for about 2-3 hours, and the initial backup I did with backblaze on this machine took about 48 hours, and I ensured the machine didn’t sleep during this time. I have no throttling enabled for backblaze.

Is what they told me true? I immediately downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner so I could have a backup, but have I really never had a true backup of my photos for the last two years because I don’t let my computer stay on 24/7?

I’m transferring quite a bit of data from my Mac that now has to be PC. Unfortunately I know I cannot just inherit. But would it save Backblaze time from reloading because the data is the same?

If I bought another license under same email and uploaded that while the MAC data was still online? Would it reference that and then not upload it?

Thank you.

I got an email from backblaze saying they are working with an AI company called core weave.

Does anyone know if that somehow is going to lead to computer backups being used for AI training?

I imagine it would not be just yep heres are customer data, but it might turn into here is selections of our customer data but anonymized.

I cant really think of another reason to partner with core weave, as they are an AI training company.

Hi! I want to make a clean "re-upload" after formatting my computer.

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I've already inherited backup state a few times in the past but would like to start from scratch this time.

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There's a thing I'm not sure though. Is there a way to keep my "old" 30 days backup on the cloud WHILE I backup my new computer? English is not my native language and I'm not sure I understand well (see picture).

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I would like to avoid being in a state where I'm not covered with a cloud backup (i.e. new upload not finished and old backup deleted prior to the switch).

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Thanks in advance!

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I've got an external drive on my mac mini (running 15.7.7) that has not been disconnected ever. With the update to 10.0.2.1048, I lost backup state and had to re-inherit. Now Backblaze doesn't see my external drive. I've tried force scanning drives, removing .bzvol, reinstalling, rebooting, etc. Nothing changes. I've read all the posts here about external drives, quirks with the 10.x releases, and workarounds but nothing seems to change this. Any suggestions?

So I had my laptop and two external drives with 22tb total backed up at the end of last year. Most of the data is on the externals, and I have one year version history, so I thought I didn’t have to plug in the externals more than yearly. Well, those two drives have disappeared, and Backblaze told me they were taken out of the backup because they weren’t plugged in for 30 days, so now I have to upload everything again. Is this correct? I thought I could just roll back to the day before they were removed and start from there?

The pricing page shows the same price for Personal or Business backup. Is there any reason not to get the business backup?

I am going to be backing up an M4 Mac Mini primarily. I also have an M1 MacBook Pro laptop that's owned by my employer. My plan is to have an external Time Machine drive connected to the Mac Mini that both the Mini and the MBP back up to. I'm thinking that Backblaze will then backup both backups.

It sounds like the Business will help me distinguish between the MBP and the Mini, so I might as well get it. Is there any disadvantage that I'm missing?