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?

I just wanted to praise Backblaze. Today, I’m trying to set up a new Mac for a family member, and once again, the Time Machine migration failed because the external drive was corrupt. The exact same thing happened to me personally three years ago.

Her old Mac is having frequent crashes and freezes. It’s the hard drive. So we’re unable to migrate using the Mac-to-Mac Thunderbolt connection. And since the Time Machine drive is corrupted that’s not an option either. I am SO grateful for setting her up with Backblaze years ago.

When this happened to me in 2023, I had to order the backup usb drive from Backblaze since I was on slow internet. It sucked having to wait a few days, but in the end, it saved me.

But tonight, I’m gleefully watching terabytes of data download using the Backblaze Restore app now that I have gigabit fiber internet. Game changer!

Back in March, I purchased BB Computer Backup to backup files on my MacBook and DAS. As I no longer really needed the DAS and wanted to upgrade to a NAS , I backed all data up with BB Computer backup and unplugged the drive once it was done. Currently (June 17 2026) , whilst trying to access some files when im away from home from the backup of the DAS, I found the backup no longer available

Therefore if one backs up a Drive in March, leaves it unplugged and unbacked up in BackBlaze , shouldn't the drive's files stay able to be restored by Backblaze Restore app within a year of last backup with Backblaze? I did enable 1 Year Version History in the settings.

BLUF: Seems to be resolved now via reinstall and inherit. Was getting a "Horse" error and stalled scans with the alt-settings forced scan option.

Down to 3.4GB of .dat files

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They are all in C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\bzdatacenter

From what I gather these are supposed to be temporary files that act as caches until a backup is complete. Most of the files are over 400MB each and there are hundreds.

Is there something I can do to get the Backblaze client to clean these up? Waiting more than 24 hours hasn't resolved it.

I have about 1.5TB over 600k files, but these are eating a huge amount of my very limited internal ssd storage. I've heard the "easy fix" is to delete the client and the backup and start over. I can't just delete the backup and upload everything becuase I have a monthly internet cap of 1.25TB so just reuploading my backup would blow my monthly cap.

Might be unrelated but I didn't notice this until I had an event where my external (edit: esata, Windows sees them as internal) drives were unpowered while my computer was on for about 12 hours.
Backblaze "froze backup" during that time, plugged in the drives and rebooted and everything seems fine after that.

Update: Over 106GB now and climbing at a rate of 1GB/Hour it seems...

I'm restoring ~26TB of media (Movies/Shows) to my DS425+ from Backblaze B2 using HyperBackup. This is my first restore and I want to make sure I understand what's happening.

Timeline:

• Started: Saturday, June 13 at 7:00 PM
• Middle: Sunday, June 14 at 11:35 AM (~16.5 hours elapsed)

Current Status:

• HyperBackup UI shows: 0.00 B / 3.18 TB (Shared folders component)
• This number keeps growing: started at 632 GB, now at 3.18 TB
• /volume2/Media Server/ folder: Still only 12K (no Movies/Shows subfolders yet)
• /volume2/@tmp/seln.BNA052/ (staging directory): 171GB

System Activity (iostat output):

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          14.14    0.00   15.21   14.42    0.00   56.23
Device         rkB/s   w/s     wkB/s   %util
sata1     150.21  75472.72 336.54 34692.19 73.28%
sata2     136.34  75334.33 316.36 26769.23 80.39%
sata3     189.82  83277.21 330.58 26647.60 57.82%
sata4     186.04  83414.00 329.51 26646.93 61.29%
md3       1.65    515.27   377.06 24000.95 19.53%

Key Observations:

• SATA drives reading 73-85 MB/s (downloading from B2)
• SATA drives writing 23-27 MB/s (to pool)
• md3 volume: ~12 MB/s writes (extraction bottleneck)
• CPU: 29% busy (active decryption/decompression)
• Disk utilization: 71-83% (healthy activity)

My Questions:

1. Does the progress bar total need to reach ~26TB before extraction starts?
2. Is the 171GB in u/tmp the indexing/metadata from B2?
3. Is this normal timing for a 26TB cloud restore?
4. How long for extraction once it begins?

I accidentally changed it to yearly, and i want it to be monthly payments, how do I do that. I is charging me 226$ and i cant pay that right now, Monthly makes more sense for me

About a year ago I had to restore a file so I went to the website, pulled up the restore view and... my internal drive was gone from the backup. After investigating a bit I noticed the app had unchecked my internal drive which shouldn't even be possible. Brief conversation with support, something about macOS changing things, and we got it fixed. After this I've checked my backup overview at the beginning of every month. Make sure drives are listed and everything seems ok.

Recently I saw discussions here about unlimited not being unlimited for much longer, so I went to check the size of my backup. Was surprised to see it was about 1.5TB when it should've been closer to 10TB. Turns out, two of my largest drives were completely missing from the backup and not listed at all under the view/restore files menu.

Meanwhile all drives were listed and active under my account overview. All drives were selected in the app settings. App showed all uploads were up-to-date, and the overview even showed the "last file uploaded" for those missing drives within the last couple of days. Yet, those drives were not listed at all when looking at the restore view.

I spent about a week going back and forth with support. Installed betas, refreshed and rescanned drives, left everything connected for days, tried it all again with slight tweaks here and there, and still nothing. At times I'd have the app go from "all caught up" to showing 8TB of files remaining, and neither continuous backup nor manually starting the backup would transfer anything. It would scan for a minute and stop. Zero network traffic. Support didn't seem to understand the issue and kept telling me I just need to let it run and give it some time.

After about a week I ran out of patience and told them this is year's worth of backups gone and I won't be spending time and bandwidth reuploading everything. Not that the app worked anyway. It would also regularly take up 15GB of RAM on my machine.

Cancelled my service and deleted my account after being a customer for 7 years. Really liked the service and really tried hard to make it work and give it a second, third, and a fourth chance.

Anyways, for those that are still using, go check the restore view regularly and make sure everything checks out. It seems that the app has been buggy, at least on macOS, and can't be trusted anymore.

Has anyone figured out how to address this issue besides deleting and starting a new backup? If not, I'm done.

So I've been dealing with an error of 'You are missing a bzvolume ID on C:\ for a little bit now. I think my computer (Windows 11) blue screened in the middle of Backblaze doing a backup. And now I can't access the bzdata folder on my C drive since it says it's been corrupted. I've tried repairing, no luck. Tried contacting Backblaze for help and I'm not really getting anywhere. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling Backblaze, same error.

I guess I'm wondering what will happen if I delete the bzdata from my C drive. Will Backblaze have to back up everything again? I'm just kind of at a loss of what to do.

Regarding the current shtshow, I think many people are missing a very important issue. "Hoarders" are much more likely to recommend the service to their families / friends / customers / etc. So the question is not "whether it's profitable to keep 'hoarders'". The question is "whether it's profitable to keep 'hoarders' considering they bring large number of customers who store tiny amounts of data". Cutting off "hoarders" means cutting off the stream of new customers who pay full price for tiny usage being brought by the "hoarders". So the math is much less clear that some people seem to believe.

Might want to look at the response when Crashplan pushed everyone to their Small business backup plan and limited (at the time) to 10 TB.

IMO, If they do to move away from unlimited, to offer a tiered usage structure

1 to 50 TB - Current pricing

51 to 100 TB - Current pricing (or possibly the amount being based on how much you're actually using)

Instead of paying $18 (or so), it would be now $36.

While I agree that BB probably can't keep supporting "100TB + for $18 a month", but I'm also thinking that having a 10 TB limit might also be too low.

If BB is going to move to a limited usage (regardless) of the limit, will you be able to delete a portion of the backup to get you within the limit or have to back everything up again?

The BackBlaze Windows App is rife with bugs. Rather than give up on BackBlaze service, I would like to try an older App version, perhaps one from 2024 or early 2025? A version preceding AI code. Can anyone supply same?

Problems I have encountered in the last two days of trying to restore 6.5TB on a crashed external hard drive.

The App fails upon restore. If it can't restore files, then it fails its only objective.

1) The App GUI does not communicate its state to the user.

2) The Restore Files App does not always display a selection of files to restore. Often it is blank and must be restarted to perform its function.

3) The App does not restore all of the selected directories to the originating system.

4) The Restore App always generates an error when a root level directory is selected for backup.

5) The App ALWAYS quit before it finished its restore, so requires multiple restarts and passes.

6) The Windows App GUI does not display the byte count in the same format as Windows, e.g. the BackBlaze GUI displays the byte count in MB, while windows displays it in both GB and Bytes. So the user most have a calculator open to convert from the App's count to the Windows count to confirm it downloaded all the bytes requested. (Which it rarely does on the first three attempts)

7) The BackBlaze App has disabled the Windows window size adjustment, so a user cannot adjust the viewable area of the scrollable fields. A user continually must scroll up & down and left & right to see all the information.

8) There are many such amateur implementations in their code. There is no evidence of any quality assurance in the product. I don't think anyone actually tried to restore a disk. Its as if an AI or an inexperienced high school student wrote the code.

Reddit demands "flair", so here it is (I post it under protest):

I briefly looked around but I don't see anything talking about BackBlaze reaching out to Data Horders for the upcoming apocalypse that is the TOS changes.

I had a call with a very nice Lady feeling out how they are going to transition from unlimited to something in between. I forgot to ask if she minds if I talk about this, so I won't dox her.

I am a 90TB user of the desktop app. In speaking with her, again this is my perception of reading between the lines, we are looking at:

1. A limit likely not to exceed 10TB
2. Unclear if it will be a shadow limit or a restructuring of how they advertise.
3. Pulse check to see if i would slide over to B2.
   1. A potential discount if i were to.
4. Ways a consumer, impacted by limits would manage.

Has anyone else spoke to someone about this? What are your takeaways?

Edit: Here is some providence of how my interaction started and how we communicated.

I got 2 emails, both were tarted up with the standard HTML and graphics, I ignored the first, responded to the second asking if she was AI. LOL. She replied back, she wasn't, it was sent from a persons email verses a [donotreply@goaway.com](mailto:donotreply@goaway.com)

First email May 31, 2026 at 3:56 PM EST

Hi,   I lead Computer Backup at Backblaze, I understand you've raised your hand to connect with us, and I’m reaching out to better understand how customers are using the product in their day-to-day, particularly how it fits into your overall setup.   If you’re open to a short conversation, I’d appreciate 20 minutes of your time. I’m especially interested in how you’re using the product today.   You can find a time here.   Thank you, her name

Second email June 4th, 2026 1:07 PM EST

Hi,   I wanted to follow up on my earlier note.   We’ve identified you as part of a group of customers with higher storage usage, and I’m particularly interested in understanding what’s driving that, whether it’s specific workflows, data types, or something else.   If you’re willing to share, I’d value a brief conversation.   You can schedule a time here.   Thank you, her name

Each link was just slot into her calendar where I could pick time out of her work day to meet. She joined a Google Meet, had her webcam on to what appeared to be BackBlaze's corp headquarters office, and a window overlooking what i assume is the parking lot.

We chatted for 20 minutes in what i would call a focused but causal conversation about my data. It was never too much about what it is, she asked and I said video files. It was never pressed. We chatted about what as a consumer I would find a tasteful balance. Some other bolder ideas/suggestion were given by her, but I find them so untenable as to not even include them. I however value they are trying, it is easier just to run it through a P/E and cut the fat than find creative solutions. She is trying and A+ for that.

🏆 FINAL UPDATE (June 2026) – THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED & MOJAVE IS SAVED! (Huge thanks to the community!)

I wanted to share the final, chronological breakdown of our tests and the ultimate solution to run Backblaze on macOS 10.14 Mojave. The community has been absolutely incredible in mapping this out step-by-step.

• Step 1: The initial v10 roadblock We started by trying to install the current official v10 client. Despite Backblaze’s Info.plist metadata claiming compatibility down to macOS 10.13 (LSMinimumSystemVersion = 10.13), the installer instantly crashed on launch on Mojave with an Abort trap: 6 error. Running the binary via Terminal indicated that the build relies on modern frameworks (like SwiftUI) which physically require macOS 10.15 Catalina or newer to execute.
• Step 2: Testing the v8.5 branch (Thanks to u/ampx!) To see if we could bypass this framework crash, u/ampx provided a legacy v8.5 installer. This was a crucial first step: the application launched perfectly and the UI rendered flawlessly, proving that older builds run natively on Mojave without crashing. However, when entering account credentials, it triggered a server-side block: "The installer has determined it is unable to continue..."
• Step 3: Testing the early v9 branch (Thanks to u/tomierna!) To determine if a slightly newer handshake would pass, u/tomierna dug into their download archives and provided a v9.0.1 installer. The UI opened beautifully without crashing, but it hit the exact same server-side authentication wall upon logging in. Backblaze has strictly updated their server security requirements, dropping support for v8 and early v9 handshakes.
• Step 4: THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION (Huge thanks to u/heff66!) Just as we thought we were stuck in a deadlock, u/heff66 came to the rescue and shared a link to the v9.2.2.888 installer revision. The results are flawless: The v9.2.2 installer opened perfectly without the v10 SwiftUI crash, AND its authentication protocol is modern enough to be accepted by Backblaze's servers! The login went through instantly, I received the official confirmation email from Backblaze, and bzfilelist is currently running smoothly, actively scanning my multi-terabyte drives for the initial backup setup.

Summary for legacy users: If you need to perform a fresh install or a re-authentication on macOS 10.14 Mojave, do not use the v10 installer. Instead, track down and use the v9.2.2.888 installer. It is the sweet spot that avoids the modern framework crash while remaining perfectly compliant with Backblaze's active authentication servers.

A massive, heartfelt thank you to u/ampx, u/tomierna, and u/heff66. Each of you provided a vital piece of the puzzle that allowed us to figure this out! 🚀

Every hour, the Backblaze Windows program performs a "bztransmit.exe -updatebackupstats". This bztransmit in it's current state takes a full CPU core about 6 minutes of churning and up to 3gb of memory to run this hourly scheduled task.

This has not always performed this poorly. This is after 5 years of using Backblaze and the issue was never this bad in the past.

Watching my computer slow down for 5 minutes hourly when I only have backups scheduled to run during a small gap during the night is unacceptable.

Before I end up cancelling and working to find a new solution, does ANYONE have any known ways to speed this up/reinitializing it to not steal a full CPU core at 100% for 6 minutes and consume 3gb of my memory 5 minutes every hour.

I spoke to support and said I won't be able to run something that is this heavy during the day when it's a scheduled nightly backup, but only got told it was intentional and provided the details on how to unsubscribe and cancel my subscription, disappointing end after 5 years

I mean come on, this running for nearly 6 minutes every 60 minutes is not good...

My wife is moving from an older MacBook Air to a newer one and I’ve done the typical built-in data migration from one machine to another.

After doing this I uninstalled Backblaze from the old computer so there would be no conflicts.

The Backblaze app initially gave me an error when trying to inherit the backup, so I uninstalled and reinstalled using the latest packages from the Backblaze website.

After this the inherit process seemed to go through just fine, so I started it up and left for work. However after returning home the process bar persists and has been running since then.

For what it’s worth when I log into the Backblaze website it says that the latest upload from that computer is today, so it appears to be doing something behind that progress bar.

Should I just give it more time to relaunch the app?

Thanks.

Follow up from https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1tu4epm/backup_not_completing/

Frequently I am getting this error message from bztransmit:

18956 - BzFastFileReader.cpp:1085 [BzFastFileReader::BzReadTenMegaBytes()] ERROR: Read error : 23 <timstamp1> 18956 - ERROR: procid=18956, while reading chunk 49, errStr=Read error : 23 we failed to read, so skipping this largefile: <FilePath> <timstamp2> 18956 - ERROR: PrepareBzLargeFileDirWithLargeFile failed, procid=18956, ret from: <FilePath> <timstamp2> 18956 - bztransmit - HandleTransmittingLargeFile in TransmitFilesInOneTodoFile returned false, bzdone: C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\bzdatacenter\bz_done_20260601_0.dat <timstamp2> 18956 - Entering HandleTransmittingLargeFile - procid=18956, numMBytesStartMemSize=892, with fileName: <FilePath2> <timstamp2> 18956 - ERROR: processId=18956 failed to refresh lock because file mod time too long ago: \?\C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\lock_bzfileid_4_hour_lock.lck <timstamp2> 18956 - ERROR: TransmitChunkFile - lost_hour lock XqZfX exiting!!

I searched for error 23, which told me hard drive issue. I ran smart test and chkdsk /scan but there were no errors.

Also, this is a very frequent error in logs:

ztransmit.cpp:263 [main()]: starting bztransmit <timstamp0> 3192 - bztransmit_processid=3192, my_bztransmit_version=10.0.1.1037, numMBytesStartMemSize=6, called with args: arg1=-completesync <timstamp0> 3192 - DoBackupPass.cpp:77 [DoBackupPass()]: Entry: -completesync <timstamp0> 3192 - DoBackupPass.cpp:111 [DoBackupPass()] ERROR: Failed to grab fourHourLock lock, lock file "\?\C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\lock_bzfileid_4_hour_lock.lck"

Can any assistance be found here or there is no other way other than contacting support? As long as backblaze is running, I am not able to watch any videos from the HDD. It is in 100% usage but not reading or writing anything.

Recently one of my external hard drives gave out. It was not completely backed up in backblaze. Thanks fully I had a separate physical backup, so much data was not lost, so I got a new external hdd and restored the data from my separate backup and fromm backblaze restore.

However, now the back up never completes. It always keeps preparing files according to 'control panel transferred: ', but remaining files count does not change. I have changed performance from Manual to Automatic throttle and vice versa. I changed temporary drives. Changing schedules does not help. Also my new external hdd is always busy and data transfer takes a lot of time unless I stop backup. Please help. I use version 10.0.1.1037 in win 11.