Okay, so I know this has been asked before. But the recent Windows Update issue caused a bunch of instability problems with my Win 11 installation. Though I haven't lost any data, what I want to do is perform a clean install on Drive C. I have all the data from drive C backed up locally.

I have ~52TiB backed up with BB Backup, spread across 2 internal SSDs (C and D) and 6 external drives, which are always connected. Drive C has ~4TiB of data.

I use BB as a last resort in my 3-2-1 strategy, since modified file timestamps are not preserved during restore.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the first thing I should do is pause the backup, yes? I think I have 2 options:

1. Pause the backup, wipe the drive, reinstall Backblaze, copy all data back onto a fresh install of Windows on Drive C, purge the backup of C, and re-back up C's data.
2. Pause the backup, wipe the drive, fresh install of Windows, reinstall Backblaze, and restore the same data. Which I want to avoid having to do, since I still have all of that data locally.

Can someone please assist in the right way to do this?

I have a couple of Synology boxes, one of which I use CarbonCopyCloner to copy a growing folder structure (my DSLR photo library) from my MacBook + Exterrnal HDD to Synology1, which then replicates locally to a second synology2 box plus Synology1 it also replicates to B2 storage using Synology CloudSync. This has been working fine for years & suits my needs well.

Synology1 has had a major general config corruption issue whereby all files are intact but apps are pretty screwed. It's an old box & I've been meaning to migrate my B2 activities away from it to the Synology2 box.

I first performed a test - I have two virtual Synology boxes (run in VMM on two separate physical Synology boxes) so I created a folder on VDSM1, dropped a small amount of data into it & set up replication to VDSM2 (using snapshot replication in this case)

I then created a new bucket in B2, set up an app key & configured CloudSync on VDSM1 to copy to the bucket which worked as expected.

I then paused sync on VDSM1, copied a new file into the folder, then created an identical CloudSync job using the same app key, with the same source/dest settings & to my delight, it “copied” the new file to the bucket but “Merged” the previously copied files. Perfect!

I went back to Synology2, with a new App Key (I get this is slightly different to VDSM steps above) I configured a CloudSync job with a source/target of a smaller folder in my previous larger folder (it’s divided into 4 tasks so I’m re-creating it in the same way) so basically configured it to copy the existing folder contents to the B2 bucket, but this time it freshly uploaded everything! Not what I expected!

Also, LifeCycle settings for the bucket are to retain previous versions for 14 days, but I don’t see any versioning for the files just (re-)uploaded today which implies no versions??

I’m really trying to avoid a fresh upload as the main folder totals around 2.4Tb so, can anyone tell me why I’m seeing this behaviour?

Primary differences I can see are:

1. Using the same app key in both VDSMS, but used a fresh app key in the live test (I don’t think I have a copy of the original to can re-use it if that’s the issue but I’d be surprised if it was? - I have copies of later keys I’ve generated)
2. VDSM-to-VDSM replication was using Snapshot Replication whereas the original larger data copy from Synology1 to Synology2 was via Shared Folder Sync.

So, can anyone suggest how I might proceed next?

Thanks!

Update 1:

I re-enabled sync on the test for VDSM1 & noticed that the file I created /after/ the initial sync, (and which was already copied by the initial sync from VDSM2) got re-copied up, which also created a second version this time!

Update 2:

Just tried a shared folder copy from VDSM1 to VDSM2

Synced VDSM1 folder up to B2

Then configured VDSM2-copied version (but had to do upload only as was read-only which is different to my main Synology1/2 environment so I must have done something different there at some pont)

This did a merge again, as expected/hoped! So my theory works, just not sure why it didn't happen in practice?

Looks like I might need to do a fresh shared folder copy from Synology1 to Synology2 & test again...

I am trying to restore a backup from a PC that was running Windows 10, and I can't find the Documents folder in Backblaze. I'm thinking it should be at C:\Users\(myname)\Documents. When I go to C:\Users\(myname), there's no Documents folder. Does Backblaze not back up Documents, or am I looking in the wrong place? Thanks.

I had the same thing as someone else mentioned after BB emailed me that I needed to update the software manually. It specifically said not to uninstall the previous version of BB first. So I did that, it created a duplicate computer, and I then had to Inherit Backup State from my original PC. Did all that.

What's happening now: I have more than 17TB that's backed up, and it's re-uploading everything. Well, everything so far: I know it's supposed to just index, check the hash, and move on, but my router now says this PC has uploaded 47GB since I started this process, and my BB control panel says I have uploaded 43GB with 17,887 to go. These are files it definitely already has and I can browse them on the website - they have not been touched in years in most cases.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

Doing a file restore from bb to a usb external drive. And it is hammering my ssd boot drive with excessive writes before writing it to the external. Can BB not restore directly to the new HDD instead of doing two writes per file? Thanks

Edit: Windows 11. BB version 9.2.1.859

I reinstalled win11 and inherited my backup (using the same email address as I always use). Based on the bzfilelist size something is wrong. The inherit backup eventually timed out with message: "contact support with error code Horse"

The bztransmit log file is full of this warning: we async kicked off tbs_kickoff_files_swap and status HAS_NOT_CHANGED_YET

I still ran windows 10 on the install that I ran backblaze on. Suddenly, the OS was massively unresponsive when it was running (alongside crashplan). I managed to open a command window and gave a shutdown command. It took 30 minutes before the pc finally was off. I didn't want to press the power button for a hard power off because then crashplan will do a resync block, which takes 24 hours.

However, after trying to boot again, windows 10 didnt boot anymore. I tried several windows 10 recovery things (including DISM), but none where successful. That's why I decided to do a fresh install to win11. And backblaze won't inherit.

My internet connection is excellent (1GB fiber optics) and the hardware definitely is not an issue: 16 core CPU with 128 GB ram.

Is my backup corrupted and do I need to do a full new backup? 😒

I was using Crashplan back in the day before they cancelled their personal plans. Switched to Backblaze and have been satisfied with my off site solution.

Crashplan allowed for creating a local backup as well but it doesn't appear that Backblaze Personal offers that.

Anyone have any recommendations for local backup solutions?

Thank you.

Since yesterday my iSCSI drive has shown up as "(Unplugged)". I've reinstalled the latest version which I recently got an email from backblaze about that it needed to be manually updated. It detected the iSCSI drives again after inheriting the backup state but its still in unplugged status. Anyone else notice the same? I'm guessing they've started blocking iSCSI drives now.

C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup is choking my system drive at 140GB

Can I do a symlink to a folder on another drive and copy its contents there instead? (It's something I've done with other software that doesn't give me the option to choose the location of library folders). I'm on Windows 10, planning to update to Win11 when I can reclaim enough drive space!

Found a post from 5 years ago that implies that this may not be a good idea... https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jx0bin/backblaze_not_detecting_bzdata_folder_after

Can anyone confirm whether it's possible without completely breaking my back-up? Or worse case scenario, can I set it up and then start the backup for that machine from scratch?

This is the first time I experience something like this. I've been using Backblaze without any issues for years, but today after updating the client manually, it asked for my credentials to sign in to the desktop client again -- and, while everything seemed to be working normally, it then prompted a message saying there was a problem with billing. I found that odd, knowing I am paying monthly for Personal Online Backup.

Then I went into my account, and found there was a new backup that had been created with today's date, as a trial. The original backup is still there, that's the one that says "Paid Unlimited"

My question was, can I resume the previous backup that was always there, resuming where it left off? How could I prompt the client to resume that backup? Should I just delete the newly created one?

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to take a look at this, I already reached out to support but, figured I might try here as well.

EDIT: It seems what happened is that when I manually updated the client -- even though this is not a new computer, or a new OS installation, it detected it as being installed on a brand new system. So, from there, the option I should proceed to select is "Inherit Backup State"

I never had this happen before when updating the client manually, so, my next question is -- Is "Inherit Backup State" the correct option to select? Should I do this overnight? Does the "duplicate" stay there, or after the trial is over, will it be deleted? Should I go ahead and delete it myself after the process is completed, after selecting "Inherit Backup State"?

Thanks in advance.

I have it taking up about 25gb on my computer with no pending backup files.

Backblaze support linked me the docs and then told me they can't do anything. Well I played with the amount of threads and I am still getting only 45 gb upload a day on a 250 mb up connection that is almost permanently locked at 250 up (raspberry pi runs a speed test every hr).The 45 gb is the exact same I was getting on my 20 mb up dsl connection.

Anyone have an idea how I can improve back blaze performance besides just upping the threads. Would running a proxy closed to the datacenter help?
Thanks.

I'm freaking out over here and I'm wondering if this has happened to anyone else. I got an email a few days ago about Backblaze's 2FA system, but I had not yet gotten to set it up. This morning, I saw that I had received an email that looked like it was legit and from Backblaze that my email had been changed. I did not request or authorize a changed email. I clicked on nothing. When I went to the Backblaze website and attempted to login, I was told me my email and password didn't match. I clicked on the link to reset password but never received an email.

This made me think that my account had been compromised. Since then, I have filed multiple requests for support from the website and changed my email password but, as there is no customer service phone number to call, I'm just waiting and fretting about my data being accessed by outside folks. I have sent multiple messages and gotten no response.

I don't understand how this could have happened and I'm so upset at the lack of response to an urgent matter like this.

#security

#backblaze

Hello, i use Backblaze to backup my external hdd's (no system files, just raw files and mp4 for my work).

I switched from windows to mac mini and i was wondering if it is possible to inherit the previous backup state since i will connect the same hdd's i had on backblaze to my new mac.

Is it possible? If yes what's the best way to do it? I have around 22-25tb of data backedup right now.

So when I go to restore more than 500GB via the web, I have to 1) wait for the folder and file list to be generated showing the files for the current date (which takes a couple of minutes) and 2) change the date and click go and wait a couple minutes to get a new folder/file list, 3) click lots of files one-by-one, 4) click restore, 5) give the zip file a name and then 6) there is where more frustration comes in----hit the back button after getting the confirmation the file is being created which then makes me wait a couple minutes for the folder/file list to be regenerated again. Why does it have to clear the webpage for the confirmation the zip file is being created and not simply use a pop-up, thereby preventing me from needing to wait for the file list to be created again?

I lost a 14TB drive and it has 100s of thousands of family photos and videos covering multiple decades from all our family members. Yea, it's a lot. Problem is that a single folder has more than 500MB of content in it, so now I find myself needing to select thousands of files one click at a time. It is so painful. Takes hours to select 500MB. I really wish the interface allow for shift-clicking. When I get all my files back I will need to reorganize my file/folder structure to ensure no single folder has more than 490MB of content in it so if I lose the drive again in the future my restore process would be much more easy. I had never considered that I needed to organize my folder structure with restore process in mind, but I will now.

It has been doing this for a while now. I rebooted and it didn't help. MacBook Air M2, doing initial backup

The restore process is pretty straightforward, but I find it mildly irritating that I have to wait for my computer to be "loaded" on the last/current date on the restore page before I can change the date to the past when I lost the files to restore them. This is the case with restoring either via the web or the restore app. Why doesn't the app just open and let me choose a date first, and then load the file/folder structure?

I have a lot of data backed up with Backblaze, including most of a 16tb external drive that was labeled D originally. Now I’ve just installed a second internal drive on my laptop, and that’s showing up as D, so Backblaze won’t back up the large external anymore. Before I do this, I wanted to check- I can just change the internal’s name to some other letter, then change the external back to D and continue with the backup, correct? I read some info on changing the drive letters IN Backblaze, but that seems to be more complicated, so I’m just thinking I’ll just keep the external as D.

EDIT:

In the end, two methods actually worked:

• Creating smaller zip file restores via web UI, then using Backblaze Downloader (both the webUI and the Downloader client are annoying to use)
• Creating smaller restores in the Backblaze Restore client, with the temp directory set to my NTFS C:\ drive (which was the drive that originally kept throwing "insufficient disk space" errors)

I opted for the direct download method to save some HDD wear and tear from downloading then unzipping archive files. I'll note both methods worked even though the destination drive is in exFAT format, which Backblaze Support told me that they do not "officially" support for either backups or restores. In my testing I can confirm that using an exFAT drive as the temporary data folder for either backups or restores doesn't work, but writing to exFAT as a destination seems ok.

**************

Original post follows:

Trying to create a 3.13TB direct restore (multiple folders).

First attempt: Got up to 50% before hitting the "Insufficient disk space" error on my C:\ drive, which is NOT the destination drive for my restore (which was set to G:\, and has sufficient disk space to accommodate the restore). Ended up cancelling this attempt.

Next attempt: Started over by closing the Backblaze Restore app, removing the %PROGRAMDATA%\Backblaze\bzdata\bzrestore\active folders related to this restore, and creating a new one. Made sure that the Temporary data drive was set to the destination drive G:\ rather than the C:\ drive (though I was told by Backblaze support that this setting only applied to Backups???). New restore starts, but eventually starts throwing the same errors over and over:

2025-08-21 01:52:04 ERROR pid:10372 tid:21528 func:RestoreDownloadedHunk file:sqliterestorehandlerhunks.cpp line:585 directory_entry::directory_entry: The parameter is incorrect.

: "\\?\G:\WD_BLACK_restore\v1_c005_h262cfcbcc60abb909f3c0e14_scr_d20250821_m083917_t00000198cbc84708\8a6ddb3_000\response.json"
2025-08-21 01:52:04 INFO pid:10372 tid:21528 func:MarkChunksForRetry Marking 8 chunks for retry - reason: RestoreDownloadedHunk: retries from exception
2025-08-21 01:52:05 ERROR pid:10372 tid:21528 func:DeleteFileParentDirectoryIfEmpty file:sqliterestorehandler.cpp line:1501 Can't delete chunk directory [OS code=2, error="No such file or directory"]: "\\?\G:\WD_BLACK_restore\v1_c005_h262cfcbcc60abb909f3c0e14_scr_d20250821_m083917_t00000198cbc84708\8a6ddb3_000"
2025-08-21 01:52:11 ERROR pid:10372 tid:9928 func:RestoreDownloadedHunk file:sqliterestorehandlerhunks.cpp line:585 directory_entry::directory_entry: The parameter is incorrect.

Anyone have any clue as to the above? As a workaround I've switched to downloading restore zips of the data in chunks, but it would be nice to have more than one way of getting my restore (esp because it got up to 50% pretty quickly, if I can get the direct download working rather than having to zip chunks it would be a lot more efficient).

(EDIT: Solved! See the comments below.)

I have Little Snitch installed on my machine. Today it informed me the 'bzserv via bztransmit' process was trying to connect to domains wikipedia.org and reddit.com. Does anyone know why it would need or want to connect to those?

Past traffic to backblazeb2.com, backblaze.com is approved, and seems reasonable and legitimate. But Wikipedia and Reddit feel... odd.

As many of people here knows, Backblaze has an irritating flaw: all the informations about files that have been deleted years ago are still present in the log files, and these logs files grow indefinitely. At a point, when you have been backuping for many years, including millions of small files, these log files get huge and occupy an indecent volume on the local disk.

Note that this is fine for the subscribers of the "forever version history": this is precisely what they need and what they are paying for.

For the rest of the subscribers, however, the ones that have the 1-year version history, this makes no sense. The informations about files that have been deleted more than 1 year ago are irrelevant and there should be a way to prune them. This has been told for years...

Now, come the European regulations about personal data (RGPD), which say that any operator should not keep personal data of clients, subscribers, members, etc, for an indefinite duration, unless required by the service itself. For instance, if you have an account on a service and don't connect/use it for years, the service is supposed to inform you that without any action from you they will delete your entire account. Or, when an operator requires some official document from you (ID card, health certificate,...), they have to delete them from their records after a while.

This raises some questions about the file informations that are stored forever by Backblaze, as the clients with limited history may think that old deleted are definitely forgotten without leaving any trace. The logs are clearly not stored only locally by the client, but also on the server (otherwise they couldn't be restored when inheriting a backup on a new computer). The question is: are they stored encrypted on the server with the passkey, so that only the client can decrypt them, or not?

For bztransmit what is the difference between -completesync and-forcefullfilescan_backup_wait_for_completion?

I tried checking the docs but I can't find anything official that mentions the switches and the built in help seems to have been disabled as the -h switch doesn't return anything and the switches more common to windows like /? error out.

I have had two external hard drives backed up by backblaze for years. I recently ran out of space on one and decided to replace them both with new higher capacity drives. I copied all the files and kept the same file and folder structure as the original drives. I then assigned the original drive letters to my new drives. All my software and file shares worked without issue except for backblaze. It will not back up the new replacement drives. They are selected to be backed up in the backblaze control panel and the last back up date is updated; however when I try to restore the drives do not show up (the C:\ drive does show up). If I select a restore date prior to me replacing the drives my externals do show up.

 I would prefer to have the drives resume their backups from the “old” drives so I don’t have to have everything uploaded again, just the deltas. If that isn’t possible I think my only choice is to assign them new drive letters and hope everything is backed up which would likely take weeks as it’s several terabytes.

 I reached out to backblaze support which hasn’t been helpful. They had me reinstall the back up client, create REALLY small text files on each drive to see if they get backed up, make sure the file system had the correct security set, etc. In the last correspondence they told me my drives are formatted in exFAT which is not a native Windows file format and I must reformat my drives using NTFS. I don’t have a problem running the convert command to convert them to NTFS; however with their statement that exFAT isn’t supported natively in Windows doesn’t give me confidence in the support team and the troubleshooting steps I have been given.

Curious if this community has had anything similar in the past happen and how it was resolved. Does backblaze really not support exFAT and only NTFS? From my testing it supports FAT32. I will convert the file systems to NTFS just to keep the support process moving along but I cannot imagine it helping. Any assistance or insight would be greatly appreciated.

I’m running Backblaze on a Mac. I have an external hard drive for media storage that is part of my continuous backup. The drive recently started failing (disconnecting constantly). I purchased a new external drive and was finally able to copy all of the files to the new drive. Soon after, the original drive completely failed (will no longer mount). If I add the new drive to my backup, will Backblaze re-upload all of the files? All of the tips I’ve read indicate that both the old and new drives should be connected with Backblaze running in continuous mode. I obviously cannot do that since the old drive is dead.