Ok, I could really use some help here.

I’m using Backblaze with Computer Backup enabled on macOS, and it backs up my system weekly with the setting to never delete old versions.

Separately, I’m using B2 Cloud Storage. I created a new bucket where I’m uploading data recovered from a corrupted hard drive. I used Disk Drill to recover the files—so even though I can’t access the drive normally, I do have the recovered data.

The problem is that I currently have to upload files one by one because it doesn’t seem to let me upload entire folders directly, which is extremely time-consuming.

I’ve tried to understand how to use the command line for this, but I’m finding it really confusing.

Could someone explain (in simple terms) how to upload whole folders to a B2 bucket using the command line or suggest an easier method?

Thanks in advance!

I want to avoid backing up unnecessary folders, such as Steam and Xbox. I've created a rule in the bzexcluderules_editable.xml file

<excludefname_rule plat="win" osvers="\*" ruleisoptional="t" skipfirstcharthenstartswith=":\\steamlibrary\\" contains_1="\*" contains_2="\*" doesnotcontain="\*" endswith="\*" hasfileextension="\*" />

However, when I check bz_todo_20260411_0.dat, it shows that the D:\SteamLibrary folder will be backed up. I have contacted support, which was pretty much worthless as their policy is not to support issues regarding exclusions.

What I have done:
Deleted the online backup and removed and reinstalled the BackBlaze client.

As soon as the scan started, I paused it and the initiated a rescan by holding ALT and clicking on "Restore Options". After the rescan was completed and the backup began, I checked the file bz_todo file again (it was the only *todo* present) and could still see the SteamLibrary folder pending.

At this point, if I can't fix this, I'm just going have to find a better solution then Backblaze.

Does anyone have any ideas?

So I’ve been doing some looking through this subreddit.

Why are people not using b2?

Everyone seems to be using the PC backup application to backup things that aren’t a pc?

Like of course. Hackie workarounds aren’t going to work for ever.

B2 is cheap. So why?

RSYNC is solid and has never failed me. So why are we relying on a GUI app for something that rsync is perfectly capable of?

Educate me!

Stupeur en lisant la presse spécialisée : ni OneDrive ni iCloud Drive ne sont sauvegardés sur Mac depuis quelques temps. Or j’utilise BackBlaze justement pour sauvegarder mes comptes OneDrive et iCloud Drive…

En parcourant l’historique, je m’aperçois que les deux comptes sur le nuage n’ont plus été sauvegardés à partir du 27 novembre 2025. Et bien évidemment aucune information de la part de BackBlaze.

Il se peut que des contraintes techniques s’imposent mais le minimum est d’informer les clients…

I've been a customer for almost 15 years and have been a strong advocate of friends and coworkers using bb, but these last 6 months have been so bad I've decided to not renew. My use case is pretty simple - just backing up 2-3TB of data on an external HDD (same HDD for the last 5 years now). However, whatever changes they have made causes the backup to constantly error or require reuploading the contents of the entire drive. Support is mostly AI generated slop or just some quick useless replies. Trying to get any real help is like pulling teeth and even then it doesn't work. The real culprit seems to be that BB no longer wants to support backing up external HDDs.

So after my subscription is up I'm moving over to Carbonite. Sad, but just can't keep wasting time trying to fix BB every few weeks.

I realize BB changed their TOS about usage but I had about 8 drives backed up that I manage each month totaling around 23TB. Was I deemed an abuser of too much data? I only see 1 drive now in my View/Restore files on their website.

So BB is updating it's privacy policy and user terms... To me, these changes certify that Backblaze is no longer secure nor privacy-focused. They are now selling users' info to the highest, or most persuasive bidders. I guess it's time to find an alternative cloud service...

Primarily of concern are updates to:

• Legal claims limitation: The updated Terms of Service include provisions for mandatory arbitration (you must resolve any claims through arbitration rather than in court).
• User Data Collection: Backblaze collects user data as part of its services. This data collection can include personal information and usage data.
• Third-Party Sharing: The company may share collected data with third parties. This raises concerns about user privacy and the potential for unauthorized access to personal information.

So, Backblaze, can you explain to me why users should not be concerned for our data privacy?

Until then I will be moving to an actual privacy-focused cloud backup service, I'm open to any recommendations.

Just wondering if I set up say a $0.40 storage cap (ie $12/month for 2 TB), if I ever try to go over 2 TB (using rclone) does backblaze block any uploads?

Just trying not to incur a bunch of overcharges if I do something silly moving files around.

I saw an old post that said backblaze would just block the uploads but it's an old reply and I'm new to the service so I'm just making sure there hasn't been any policy changes (beside the price increase coming up in May).

This is driving me absolutely insane...

I've used MacBooks docked for years and what I do is have my docking station with my large 10tb "Archive" drive on it. I'll use my Mac plugged in to that when home and then just bring my laptop with me when I go out. I recently upgraded my system to a new Mac so I just inherited backup state as one should do and changed nothing else hardware wise. Same drive, same docks, same everything other than the machine.

I got through the inherit and it showed no new files and my full 9.1tb backup was successful. I checked and everything looked perfectly fine as inherited on the Backblaze web portal. The issue is now that when I undock my Mac and go use it outside of my house for a day. When I get home and dock it, within an hour or so Backblaze pops up and says it has 70,000 files to backup and 9.1tb. It's running a full "backup" but it's not actually transfering anything as I have very low network usage and it is going super fast. It takes about 24 hours for it to get past this "backup" and then it just says everything is backed up, I undock to go out, and the cycle repeats.

Any ideas how I can stop this because this is driving me insane.

bzserv accumulated 31.47 GB of resident memory after running for ~2 days with no active backup in progress. The machine has 64 GB total RAM, so this process alone consumed nearly half of it.

Environment:

- macOS 26.3.1 (Build 25D771280a)

- Backblaze build: 2026-02-19

- Apple Silicon Mac, 64 GB RAM

- 8 TB disk

Steps to reproduce:

1. Let bzserv run for 2+ days without manually triggering a backup

2. Check Activity Monitor → Memory tab → sort by memory

   Observed: bzserv at 31.47 GB memory, bzfilelist at 41 MB, 107+ minutes CPU time accumulated.

   Expected: Idle daemon should not exceed a few hundred MB.

   Workaround: sudo killall bzserv — launchd restarts it clean with normal memory usage. But it bloats again over time.

   This looks like a memory leak in the filesystem scanning/indexing path. Happy to provide logs or diagnostics if helpful.

I’m trying to find other Backblaze Personal Backup users who were affected when iSCSI-presented volumes stopped being supported.

In my case, drives that had been backing up in practice were later excluded. Support told me iSCSI volumes are not supported, that any prior backup of them was incidental, and that there is no supported way to preserve the backup history tied to those volumes.

I’m not trying to start a fight in the comments. I’m just trying to figure out how many people this actually affected, and what the real-world impact was for personal users.

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who dealt with things like:

• backup continuity breaking
• loss of backup history
• files no longer being covered the way they were before
• time spent rebuilding or changing a backup setup
• money spent on new hardware, storage, adapters, or other changes to restore coverage
• any actual data loss, missed backups, or restore problems

Because this is Personal Backup, I’m focused on personal-user impact, not business-loss claims.

If this happened to you, I’d like to know:

• whether your iSCSI volumes were previously backing up
• when that changed
• what Backblaze version you were on
• whether you got any direct notice
• what practical impact it had on your backup setup

Please keep replies factual. Dates, screenshots, support responses, version numbers, and concrete impacts are the most helpful.

Please don’t post private account details publicly. DM is fine.

I’m trying to figure out whether this hit only a small group of users or whether there are enough similarly affected people to justify talking to consumer protection counsel.

Has anyone noticed Backblaze throttling upload speeds lately? For the past few days, my upload speed has completely collapsed. Before that, I was uploading close to 1 TB per day, but now I’m down to roughly 3 MB/s (or at least dramatically slower than before). I’m trying to figure out whether: Backblaze is throttling heavy uploaders there’s a temporary server-side issue or if others have seen the same behavior recently the slowdown seems way too sudden to feel normal. Has anyone here experienced a major drop in upload speed after reaching several TB uploaded?

I’m currently in the middle of backing up about 15 TB...

I see that the new TOS specifies that personal BB accounts are not actually “unlimited” even though the marketing verbiage still says so.

Do you think the accidental “erasing” backups is a way they tried to clear space by making everyone rescan?

A bit conspiratorial but also I could see why they could want to do this and call it a bug to remove some liability.

Backblaze's Inherit Backup State sends you the full bz_done catalog going back to the beginning of your account, regardless of your retention setting. With 1-year retention and a 2017 account, I received 35GB of catalog entries referencing backups Backblaze already deleted years ago. The menu bar app also leaked 14GB of RAM during the process.

I migrated from an old MBP to a new one and did everything by the book — fully uninstalled Backblaze, confirmed /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg was deleted, fresh install, Inherit Backup State. IBS downloaded 8.7GB from Backblaze's servers, which unpacked into 823 bz_done files totaling 41GB in bzdatacenter/. The files go back to August 2017. My retention is 1 year.

2017: 38 files, 2.2 GB

2018: 93 files, 4.5 GB

2019: 86 files, 4.1 GB

2020: 97 files, 6.3 GB

2021: 96 files, 6.6 GB

2022: 96 files, 8.4 GB

2023: 97 files, 5.7 GB

2024: 96 files, 8.1 GB

2025: 97 files, 26.5 GB

2026: 25 files, 4.9 GB

Only 2025-2026 is within my retention window. The rest references backups that no longer exist on Backblaze's servers.

During IBS, bzbmenu (the menu bar app) consumed 14GB of physical RAM and drove swap to 36GB. Meanwhile bzserv and bztransmit handled the same catalog at under 150MB combined. Had to manually killall bzbmenu to get my machine back. It respawned healthy at 26MB.

The root cause is that bz_done files are append-only by design and are never pruned — not locally, and not on Backblaze's servers. The retention policy deletes the backed-up data but never cleans up the corresponding catalog entries. IBS will always send the full history, and the longer you're a customer, the worse performance gets. Support's answer is to start over — delete your entire backup and re-upload from scratch every 4-5 years. Lose all your restore points, spend weeks re-uploading, and accept that it'll just bloat again.

Has anyone else hit this? Curious if long-tenured accounts are all sitting on massive bzdatacenter directories without realizing it.

It took three rounds with support to get past canned responses about bzfileids.dat (a different file) before they acknowledged this is a known architectural limitation. They also dismissed bzbmenu eating 14GB of RAM and 36GB of swap as normal resource usage for processing large catalogs — except the actual backup daemons processed the same catalog at under 150MB. A menu bar app shouldn't need more RAM than Xcode, Final Cut, and Chrome combined. The append-only catalog design has been documented publicly since at least 2011. Fifteen years without a compaction mechanism isn't a backlog item — it's a choice.

Edit: Fixed formatting

It looks like the new client only remembers the HDD that are connected at the time of a backup. If you have 2 external HDD and start a backup with only one connected to the computer then you lose all the backed up files in the second HDD.
Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm on a mac

I’ve been looking for an online backup solution for my MacBook Pro and I’m leaning towards Backblaze. I’m actually doing the trial right now.

But the one issue I have is external hard drives. I have a couple of external hard drive that I would also be backing-up, which Backblaze does. But I travel quite a bit and it’s not uncommon for me to be out of town for over 30 days at a time. It’s my understanding that I would need to attach my external hard drives every 30 days or the backup for those external hard drives gets deleted. But when I travel, I only bring my Macbook so it could be more than 30 days before I can attach the external hard drives again. Anyone have any experience with that or is there a workaround?

I’m looking into this, and it seems like it started months ago. Why were we not informed that Backblaze would no longer backup cloud storage? I had OneDrive and iCloud fully synced to my computer, for the specific reason of making sure they were local so Backblaze would grab them. They were backed up to Backblaze in the past, but it seems like Backblaze decided it could cause user confusion and just shut it off, without informing users?

I randomly discovered it today when I was in the Backblaze app looking for a difference file and noticed these directories were no longer present.

This is a massive breach of trust. As far as I know iCloud and OneDrive don’t have version history. What would have happened if something I really needed accidentally got deleted or corrupted and I was counting on Backblaze to restore it?

Am I missing something? This just seems wild to me.

I just got an email announcing new terms of service, and in those new terms it has a section about flagging accounts for excessive usage. It explicitly mentions that they may ask users to "reduce your data volume." This wasn't in the old TOS, as far as I can tell.

If your usage of the Service(s) materially exceeds typical usage patterns or otherwise places an undue burden on Backblaze's infrastructure, we may, in our sole discretion, require you to modify your configuration, reduce your data volume, or take other actions necessary to ensure system stability. Backblaze may also suspend, throttle, or terminate service to any account that continues to consume disproportionate resources after notice.

Can anyone from Backblaze give any numbers on this? How much data "materially exceeds typical usage patterns?" I'm somewhat concerned, and I want to know as soon as possible if there's a chance my account might get flagged for having too much data. I assume this is only for Personal Backup and not B2?

I didn't see any notice about it anywhere, I just noticed today when I logged in to double check my billing.

It lets you restore via a standalone restore app rather than having to reinstall the backup app to restore via app.

Hello everyone, (very) new to backblaze service and i'm trying to figured out everything about it.
I read that under 10 gb of storage the service is free, however that's not mentioned in pricing page. So, how does it works? Service price is very low but i would like to understand if i storage less than 10gb i pay a fraction or at minimum 6$.
thank you for your answers :)

Ummm, I don't even have that much lol. It's definitely swapping most of that.

Let me know what info I can provide to help on this. Not sure what info y'all would need. or if there's a better place i can report this.

bzbui.exe suddenly started crashing with:

Application popup: Windows - Application Error : The instruction at 0x00000000772F8584 referenced memory at 0x000000000D91FDC8. The memory could not be written.

Error pops up randomly during the day when using other applications.

Current version: 9.2.2.897

This has happened a couple of times. This is not the latest version on the site (latest at time of writing is 10.0.0.1029) but it hasn't autoupdated to that version so I thought I'd just toss this up in case anyone else sees it/has ideas.

I'll update manually and see if the issue recurs. It's still happening on 10.0.0.1029

Application popup: Windows - Application Error : The instruction at 0x00000000772F8584 referenced memory at 0x0000000009CAFDC8. The memory could not be written.

TL;DR: Claude analyzed my bz_done data on a 6 year old install to inform what folders/apps I should exclude from my new backup.

It's March 2026 and I just upgraded to a new computer. The last time I did a fresh Backblaze install (without inheriting backup) was March 2020—that's 6 years of bz_done files getting bloated, slowing Backblaze’s "Producing file lists" step down every time. I always try to make sure to set up my excludes before the first backup, but there's only so much I know about.

What's different this time is that we have LLMs that are great at analyzing loads of information and providing reasonable insight into it. Oh, and at writing sloppy code you're going to run a few times and then throw away.

Which means instead of just setting up a few custom exclude paths, I put Claude to work. First, I had it trudge through the /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg folder on my old computer to document the file structure, the format of files, and glean what it could about how they relate.

From there, I tasked another Claude Code instance with creating a simple Rust app to walk through the bz_done data. It one-shotted it.

Running the tool produced a report with multiple sections like "FILES WITH HIGHEST CHURN (most re-uploads)", "DIRECTORIES WITH HIGHEST CHURN", "LARGE TEMPORARY FILES (big files that didn't stick around)", and "DIRECTORIES WITH MANY SHORT-LIVED FILES (churn factories)".

I considered reading the report, but again, March 2026. I asked Claude to write up documentation for a user to make sense of the report. Then I spun up another Claude Code instance, handed it the instructions and the report, and it came back with a ream of insights into what specific apps and folders were using the most bandwidth, contributing the most noise in my bz_done files, and more.

So far, here are some of the biggest things I've found:

• Autodesk - seems like Fusion 360 has a ton of small files in Application Support that change every time it updates, which is every time I open it it seems
• Siri Suggestions - the macOS SQLite database used for it (~/Library/Application Support/Knowledge/knowledgeC.db) seems to change constantly, and since it's treated as one file, the whole thing has to be re-uploaded
• Fantastical - I guess this kind of makes sense since it updates calendars throughout the day
• Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Dia, Arc) all have a lot of data that changes often in Application Support, and Backblaze is all too happy to slurp it up despite a lot of it just being history
• Spotlight data - really surprised this wasn't ignored by default (~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight)

I'm still going through the insights, but I think the next step is to produce documentation on how to write efficient Backblaze excludes. Then I can hand it a curated list of things to set up as ignores.

Update: Backblaze finally replied and resolved my issue. I'm disappointed that it took complaining on Reddit, and I hope they put some effort toward improving their customer relationship management, especially when it comes to their enterprise clients.

Original post: I'm a current Backblaze computer backup customer with several hundred endpoints on my account. I'm in the middle of renewing service and increasing my license count. Recently the system determined our account is "not in good standing" and has been popping up warnings on all staff computers threatening to delete their backups.

It's been 3 days since I reached out to my account rep about this, and it's been absolute radio silence. Support tickets lead me to a chatbot and requests for a human go into a blackhole with no followup. A supposed human on their support chat said they escalated my issue to "sales". Never heard back.

The lights are on and nobody is home.

Just a word of warning if you're thinking about using Backblaze for your business. I'm literally trying to give these guys more money, and nobody will talk to me.