What are /r/backblaze's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze as a programmer, although not on the billing code.

> here it wouldnt make much sense to only offer credit card as payment option

Can you list some of the alternatives you would prefer or that make more sense in Portugal/Germany/Europe?

Backblaze uses the billing service "Stripe" (https://stripe.com/) to do our payment processing, and they sometimes add features and we don't notice. It might be "pretty easy" to enable other forms of payment through Stripe for us.

If we have to add a whole other parallel system it probably won't happen anytime soon.

The whole banking industry slaughters me. You would think you could hit a web page, create an account on that web page, and setup a "proxy USA credit card" in your account that would pull from one of your European accounts and pay Backblaze in what Backblaze thinks is a USA credit card for a 1 penny fee. But no, it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time to do ANYTHING with banking. If you send something called a "wire transfer" it means they print a piece of paper and it takes 3 days and might hop through two intermediary banks on the way. (sigh)

Ok, here's what you do in case the computer is totally destroyed.

get on another computer, go to Backblaze.com and either restore the files from there, or have them send you a copy of the restored files. then when you get a new computer, you can install BB and inherit the backup with your new computer and data. without the computer connecting to the service you have 6 months to do this..

If you need MORE than 6 months without ACTIVELY being backed up you can pay for Additional time, there's a 'version history' option that will keep your files up to a year.

following me?

> Dutch guy here. We use Ideal.

Interesting! I have not heard of Ideal, but Stripe certainly has: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/ideal

That page says it's responsible for 55% of the online payments in the Netherlands.

Here in the USA, the college kids use something called "Venmo" (now owned by PayPal) which is extremely convenient and absolutely awesome compared with anything else I've ever used. It's kind of amusing, but while most banking is traditionally totally private between you, the bank, and the vendor, Venmo started as defaulting to "public" payments which was like posting to a social network like Facebook that you just paid your buddy for your share of the pizza. It seems counter intuitive to an old person like me, but my nieces and nephews said it served as social pressure - if everybody in your entire pizza outing had already paid it put pressure on the last cheap person to finally pitch in.

We had a small emergency while travelling a couple weeks ago and our house/pet sitter needed some quick help, and we were able to pay her muscular boyfriend by Venmo in SECONDS to come by and help her lift some gigantic packages off our porch. The banks in the United States are screwing up, they might lose a chunk of their market if they don't catch up.

To my understanding, the free egress with Cloudflare is to be used “with limits”, such as hosting a static website on Backblaze. Much more and you could be violating Cloudflare’s terms.

https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content > > The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.

That said this probably a better question to ask Cloudflare rather than Backblaze.

api.backblazeb2.com uses a Let's Encrypt certificate. You need to update your system's CA certificates (usually by updating the ca-certificates package).

See https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/ for background.

Adam from Backblaze here. We've seen that some of the built in unzip utilities on Mac and Windows can get kinda wonky with large zip files or really long path or filenames within the zip, so we often recommend trying a third party unzip utility.

For the Mac, my personal preference is BetterZip 4. Their free trial should suffice to unzip.

If you continue to have trouble, feel free to PM me, or shoot our support team an email at helpme at backblaze dot com, and we can dig in further for you.

I had similar issues with Backblaze's consumer product and moved over to their B2 service. I have never liked how Backblaze handles external drives but I do understand why they do it, from a business perspective. Crashplan used to handle external drives with ease but again, it's not sustainable.

Not pushing any particular product but you might want to look into Arq (what I use) or Duplicacy (used to use). There are others out there but I use / have used both of these extensively. Both work with B2 (and other cloud storage services) and handle external drives, NAS, etc., with ease.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> set the temporary folder

If you open the Backblaze Control panel and find the “Settings...” button, on the first tab is “Temporary Scratch Drive” or something like that. You can set that to an external or internal drive other than “C:\” there. Hit “Pause” on the backup (if it is running). Make sure this folder is empty (while paused):

C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzbackup\bzdatacenter\bzcurrentlargefile\

Then hit “Backup Now” or wait to let the backup resume.

Now, that will change where Backblaze makes a copy of large files it is about to backup, which is “temporary data”. However, there is some data which is not temporary (should only be 2-3 GBytes) where Backblaze remembers hat has been backed up or not backed up. That cannot be moved. The way to make it smaller (the smallest it can be) is to uninstall, reinstall, and NOT use “Inherit Backup State”. It will repush all your files, in the process clearing the “history” of everything that has occurred which shrinks this folder to the theoretical minimum. It will then slowly grow from there to about 1 GByte over the first year of operation. Maybe 2 GBytes over 3 years, etc.

Another idea is to upgrade your internal SSD. The Samsung EVO series is ridiculously good, and a 256 GByte doubling of your capacity is $35 from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-250GB-Internal-MZ-76E250B-AM/dp/B07864WMK8/

Just to clarify, rclone supports B2's server-side copy (see Remote Overview) as of 1.48.0.

So as long as it can be done, it will. I've seen files copied way faster than my internet could possibly do. And you could verify with --dump-headers

> how to do it right

As long as they are the same account (or maybe same bucket in their implementation? I don't know), you don't need to "do" anything. Just rclone copy b2:bucket/old b2:bucket/new will work. Or move which will actually copy then delete.

> Surely this would mean she'd be able to see all my personal photos without my permission, using Backblaze (even though I thought my photos were locked by my Windows password)

Yes, just like someone could use one admin account to take over access to another and its files (without your permission) or boot your computer into an alternate operating system (like Linux) and access the files that way, or physically remove the hard drive or other storage device and plug it into another computer to access the data there.

If you're worried about someone else accessing your files, relying on the use of different Windows accounts / passwords on the same machine isn't buying you much. This isn't really an issue with Backblaze per se, just the way local Windows accounts and NTFS filesystem permissions work.

If you're worried about someone you share a Windows PC with accessing your data, you need to think about storing it exclusively in a cloud account (Google Photos, iCloud, etc.) that only you have access to or finding a way to encrypt the data such that accessing it requires knowledge that only you possess (like a password / passphrase). This can be achieved with something like https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

/u/brianwski forgot to do the thing where we mentioned Extended Version History which can also help in this situation -> backblaze.com/version-history.html (you can increase the 30 days to 1 year or forever). There are some considerations regarding large external drives but for the most part that covers a lot of the "accidentally left computer off and went on vacation" or "deleted a folder months ago" use-cases.

For backup use restic. Here configuration for Wasabi:

https://angristan.xyz/backup-servers-using-restic-wasabi-object-storage/

For storing data use rclone mount:

https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/

> Is there any way I can rename these files so that they aren't seen as a backup but just regular files?

Backblaze never ever should be used to backup a backup. That's not how it works. Backblaze backs up from the ORIGINAL files, it can't backup a Time Machine drive.

If you want to preserve the files from a Time Machine backup -> first prepare a restore from it onto a TOTALLY separate drive. Prepare as many restores are you need, then wipe the Time Machine drive removing all of that history and custom data structures that are custom to Time Machine. If you are not comfortable wiping the Time Machine drive - then you haven't prepared enough restores yet -> keep going, keep preparing restores from it until you feel comfortable wiping it.

Renaming the Time Machine folder might destroy it and all the files inside of it.

You can buy a brand new hard drive that is large enough to hold all of your restores from Amazon, and they are incredibly inexpensive, like $45 inexpensive. You can order a 1 TByte drive from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Avolusion-HD250U3-SuperSpeed-Portable-External/dp/B06VVHXJQH/ Shipped to your home in a couple of days. Then you can prepare a restore onto it and wipe the old Time Machine drive for use as a data drive.

Or this 2 TByte one for $62: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MY4KWFP/

If you need larger, let me know - they now make them up to 16 TBytes in a single external USB drive.

If I were you, I would buy an additional drive that is large enough VERY SOON and prepare all the restores you need from that Time Machine drive -> there is a good chance it will die on you soon and you will lose all your files that you should have restored from it. Time Machine Backups are not long term storage, you have to restore from them relatively quickly or they go bad.

After you get that part done, and wipe the Time Machine drive, then install Backblaze and do the backup!

I always have my VPN on. Even when I am on my home WIFI.

I have been considering exploring the use of tasker to toggle my VPN off when I am home based on a few conditions. But its really not necessary for me. I dont see any speed difference.

https://www.arqbackup.com

Natively connects to B2. You control the encryption keys, and does everything you mention.

If you really wanted to, you can also use the S3 API with Arq Backup for backup immunity.

You might want to look at rclone (https://rclone.org/). It supports B2 and has a move command which supports doing moves on the server. You'll need to do a rclone config to define a new B2 remote, then something like rclone move RemoteName:Bucket/Old/Path RemoteName:Bucket/New/Path. The online documentation is pretty good.

You may be right about the pricing not being a big deal. I looked into rclone and while it seems pretty powerful and flexible, this bit in the docs gave me concern (though I might not fully understand it): https://rclone.org/b2/#sha1-checksums

> Sources which don't support SHA1, in particular crypt will upload large files without SHA1 checksums. This may be fixed in the future (see #1767).

I think this means if I want to apply encryption with rclone, it won't be able to use B2's checksum validation on large files (which most of my files are), so there would be a (admittedly) slim possibility of undetected corruption. That seems like kind of a big deal?

Just an update: I circulated an email internally on how we felt about international payments. I'm not sure what will come of it, but I floated it and they will look into it in more depth. :-) Below are some utterly random observations and banter from different team members:

From support: "Yes, support and I see this request a bit."

From billing team: "In order to accept SEPA from European customers (the equivalent of ACH in the US), we'd have to price our service in Euros, like Google does for GSuite.

https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1247360?hl=en

That's a bit of a marketing challenge, since our web site assumes constant pricing at a given point in time and also a bigger engineering task, since our back-end assumes single currency. But it is fixable."

From a remote employee who lives and works in Europe: "European consumer point of view, normally if I buy something in foreign currency, from a web site (amazo.co.uk, airbnb.com, etc) there is generally just a 1.5-3% currency exchange fee."

Answer from another employee: "I'll echo what <remote Europe employee's name> has to say: back when I had a French credit card, it imposed a 3-5% (not $3-5 USD) foreign transaction fee, with a minimum fee of 0.50 EUR. So that policy would effectively add 10% to the cost of one monthly B1 license: extra 0.50 EUR on a 5.39 EUR ($6 USD) monthly license cost."

From Support again: "From what I have seen from people from France that have sent in a portion of their register, I have seen a flat fee for 3.5 euros in addition to our $6 charge. So, I think it depends on the bank, like it does in the US."

> pauseuntil_reason="ca_will_not_give_storage_id"

Maybe related to the Let's Encrypt Root CA expiration?

The customer could upload their own cert, but if they have already added a CNAME to a B2 server, then B2 can use the ACME HTTP-01 challenge to get certificates automatically. This does not require the customer to have Backblaze manage their DNS.

> From this reference: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states#fixed > > "Broadband average upload is 49.53 Mbit/sec" > > So you are correct in that the average USA broadband customer can upload 2 TBytes in 4 days, not in 2 days. Since the vast majority of Backblaze customers have less than 2 TBytes, this means repushing is easy and painless. I fully understand that is not the case for you, but I'm explaining that you are an outlier.

Your interpretation of that upload number is COMPLETELY INCORRECT. I don't know if you are willfully ignorant, or just trying to win a debate, but either way, you are completely off base. That number is in no way representative of the typical bandwidth of consumer internet connections.

https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/2018/#fixed

I will bet you, Backblaze the corporation, or anyone at Backblaze that wants to layout the cash, ten thousand dollars, right here, right now, that this statement is absolutely positively 100% false:

>the average USA broadband customer can upload 2 TBytes in 4 days

It's kind of a weird implementation choice, but it also kind of makes sense that "sync" would include all versions of the files. Of course there are plenty of occasions where, like OP, you only want a snapshot of the current versions of files too, so it's also weird that there doesn't appear to be a way to set that flag with the b2 CLI.

I'm pretty sure rclone would, by default, only sync the current versions of b2 files. Maybe check into that?

Of course! And it looks like I goofed... It's "delete before" "delete after"

https://rclone.org/flags/

--delete-after When synchronizing, delete files on destination after transferring (default)

--delete-before When synchronizing, delete files on destination before transferring

--delete-during When synchronizing, delete files during transfer

With Azure and using their Archive Tier in Blobs (not a super mature implementation with RClone), atleast at the time when I did my integration, I effectively had to --delete-before. I'll check my implementation today and will post back if I changed it to something different.

Yes I've considered it but then I've calculated that it would cost ~$50 (so nearly 1 year of subscription). Just to palliate the subpar restore service. Is this on purpose to push for those b2 paid downloads?

I will complete my restore with the downloader but I'm not surprised to find so much bad reviews on sites like https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.backblaze.com

Got a few questions:

• How long does it take to send the USB hard drives to the UK?
  
• Wouldn't in this scenario I have to order two 8TB drives since that seems to be the limit?
  
• Does backblaze intend to have larger capacity USB hard drives in the future? (for example, 18TB hard drive)

Also, on the time to download. I have a gigabit home internet connection. So, assuming it can max out my home internet connection it shouldn't take much more than 24 hours to download 10TB. (looking at my D drive as used in my example I have 9.03TB used)

I have the same problem, datacenter upload speeds are lower on EU side, about half, and then even lower when measured directly from client upload. I'm from Spain. I know the datacenter is in Amsterdam, I don't expect the full 600Mbps uplink I have on fast.com but damn.. I get 1/6 of that at most.

https://www.cloudflare.com/peering-policy/

It would certainly upset people if Cloudflare suddenly started depeering networks for no real reason but it is a possibility. If you've paid money then check the legals around the contract.

I believe first 10GB of storage are free. As far as bandwidth goes, uploads are free, but downloading your data is $0.01 per GB. If you download through Cloudflare or Packet however, it’s free. See https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ or https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html for more info.

I run an image hosting site, which for months pulls in an average of 20TB bandwidth. Still up and running. And all it's costing me so far is the storage. CloudFlare is a part of the Bandwidth Alliance group, which essentially is a group of companies looking to reduce the cost of bandwidth or completely waiver it for customers if served through CloudFlare: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ Backblaze being one of the many members, which is crazy considering their super cheap pricing. Bandwidth costs can make up a lot of profit for them.

Not sure what tool you're using but from the rclone docs:

> Backblaze recommends that you do lots of transfers simultaneously for maximum speed. In tests from my SSD equipped laptop the optimum setting is about --transfers 32 though higher numbers may be used for a slight speed improvement. The optimum number for you may vary depending on your hardware, how big the files are, how much you want to load your computer, etc. The default of --transfers 4 is definitely too low for Backblaze B2 though.

Just in case anyone else stumbles upon this in the future via google search. I ended up using B2 and rclone with a cron job to sync it to a bucket. It's more expensive and not as convenient as having just in Backblaze, but it doesn't look like there is a way to back up network drive contents into a regular Backblaze account.

Hey, Adam from Backblaze here.

I don't know of any GUI apps that could achieve your goal, but rclone has really powerful filtering tools to achieve your goal.

To filter by date, rclone supports quite a bit of granularity, but in your situation you may want to filter by max-age and min-age with simple dates, such as:

rclone ls --max-age 2021-05-05 --min-age 2021-05-07 b2:mybucket/myfiles

That example would list all files from May 5th to May 7th.

For filtering by the .7z extension or by name is pretty straightforward:

rclone ls --include '.7z' --include '*setname.txt' b2:mybucket/myfiles

I would highly suggest using the 'ls' command to list files so you can see what the results are, and then when you're comfortable with what you're filtering, don't use the 'delete' command, use something like 'move' to move them to a separate location, just in case something gets screwed up and you move legitimate files.

rclone move --include '.7z' --include '*setname.txt' b2:mybucket/myfiles b2:mybucket/likely_ransomware_files

Look into the --fast-list tag in the command line instruction. I honestly cannot remember the details (I just set and forget), but I think this command drastically reduces API calls for B2.

You could set up a computer at home using rclone serve ftp. That turns your computer into an FTP server but rclone then uploads that to Backblaze.

Are you comfortable with command line, etc?

> I couldn’t find anything that does that

rclone's <code>rcat</code> does exactly that with tons and tons of testing and configuration and userbase behind it.

Still, this looks impressive. If I never re-invented the wheel I would have much less experience and competence

Use rclone with move command.

It will use the copy+delete functions, and it is much faster than reuploading everything because the copy operation is done server side.

Use --transfers=50 or more to make it work faster. Each file change require a single short request, so use as much as you think your client can make.

Until such an app is created - For my android phone I use foldersync to monitor for changes in specific folders on my phone that I want backed up. It instantly copies them to my PC over wireguard VPN. Backblaze personal backs it up. So I have a backup on my personal PC and with backblaze. Completely automated. Works for me.

That's actually a really good idea might so something like this:

https://www.ionos.com/costs?__lf=Order-Product&amp;__pageflow=Order-Tariff

And then just run rclone there and I am of course aware of the mirroring.

How about this options? (No data transfer fees)

https://www.scaleway.com/en/object-storage/

https://www.stackpath.com/products/object-storage/ (No charges for data transfer (egress) or API requests/calls while delivering over StackPath CDN)

Thanks! Does Backblaze use something like UseResponse or UserVoice?

A central system for feedback, where people can vote for features, works great.

Alright i found another solution which is using DroidFS and Sirikali to open gocryptfs syncronized with rclone. https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/comparison/

> can my plugins and personal preferences restore as well?

The best way to tell is to try it. Like if there is article somewhere on their website on how to restore or what to backup, go sign into your Backblaze account here: https://secure.backblaze.com/user_signin.htm and see if it contains the files you will need.

I found this article: https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data that seems to indicate the Zotero is a folder under your user's directory. That should work really well with Backblaze (like right in our sweet spot of what we do well), but it's always best to check. One of the things that can go wrong is if Backblaze doesn't have permissions to read the Zotero files. If Backblaze can't read a file, Backblaze can't back it up.

Cyberduck does suck. So does Filezilla, but I guess it's the best free client around IMO. I use WebDrive and have had nothing but good experiences so far. Also pretty impressed with how quickly and willingly the tech team answered my questions.

Have you tried mountain duck Pretty stable for me ok both Mac and Windows Even has an local sync feature so certain folders/files can be stored locally for quick access which might be what your looking for...

I see. There are limitations to the web interface for B2 both in size of files and number of files. You may want to use an integration of some kind to access your B2 account for best results.

If you want something easy to drag and drop, check out Cyberduck, but there are plenty of other B2 compatible software titles out there to work with B2.

This is not an endorsement as it's literally the first thing I found on Google that I think might work. You want a 3rd party software program that will let you browse and download your B2 files.

https://cyberduck.io/

If you're just uploading files, you may wanna give CyberDuck a try. It's free and provides a relatively simple GUI interface to manage data on B2 (and several other cloud storage platforms). No CLI required: https://cyberduck.io/

I just noticed CyberDuck mentioned in the Backblaze knowledge base, which provides an interface sorta like a network drive. If you don't mind the latency, that might be an option.

ok I did not catch that, my bad.

Looking at the documentation for duplicity : http://duplicity.nongnu.org/vers8/duplicity.1.html I don't see any option to have threading or parralelism backup. B2 will not throttle, but will have a limit per thread. So you should aim to have multiple thread, somehow. If you have only one big file to transfer, if "duplicity" can't spit the file and use those chunks in multiple threads, it will be slow. Altought, I did saw an option to split some files.

Once again, thank you for your help.

I found a solution, with some one from the Dark Side.. :)

https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/how-to-fix-error-1202-on-mac-os-x-prior-to-10-12-1/

After this, I was able to reinstall the BackBlaze software and solve the starting point of my problem. The BackBlaze control panel was showing a message about maintenance issue with servers. So, no backup was happening. At that time, I didn't know the reason for that was the outdated certificate.

Apps that offer backup to both Cloud (their Cloud space) and physical drives:

Acronis True Image 2021 premium

Arq Premium

https://www.arqbackup.com/ - just tell it to backup your google drive folder to B2. Not free.

rclone is a great, free tool that works well with B2. Search on how to automate it, there's scripts for that.

If you're not scared of a command line, try Duplicacy, which has a free CLI command line and runs in QNAP - just use the terminal.

You'll want to try this out locally first to get the hang of it, then experiment with B2 until you're comfortable. The deduping is excellent.

You can use something that will backup all your computers to one location locally (like the free http://www.urbackup.org/). Then you just back that one computer up to BB. That also will let you store as many versions of your data as you like since urbackup or whatever will manage that.

wow 25Mbit/sec

If I'm you, I will set the threads to 30. And check the actual upload speed from your Mac, not backblaze.com.

&#x200B;

If backblaze has no limits, you can backup all in one day I think.

Interesting! No need to apologize for pinging, that's why we're here, sorry we missed it! I think Brian is definitely better at answering that question but we do have this blog post (backblaze.com/blog/managing-for-hard-drive-failures-data-corruption/) which talks about it. In terms of B2 Cloud Storage, that's a great way to mitigate against bit rot b/c our system "heals" if it notices the that something on our side is not well (like if a bit flips inside one of our vaults).

I'm not 100% sure how the client on the Computer Backup side handles that, but /u/brianwski might be able to chime in? I think if it's something you're really concerned with, something like B2 is a great way to mitigate against it!

I think the client would see the change and back it up as a changed version in which case enabling Forever Version History would help solve that, but Brian's the expert on the client :D

I hear you. Our goal is to make sure this doesn't happen, which is why we added the Email Alerts back in 2014 and added the Extended Version History feature last year. I understand that those might not be enough and for people who want an archive we do have B2 Cloud Storage - we even have backup applications as integrations. Those might not work for everyone, but we do provide those options.

> I'm using a laptop and keeping my hdd connected for 4 hours is annoying for me.

Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. Recently I have been upgrading my laptops to contain enough disk (SSD) all internal to the laptop so that I no longer need to have an external drive. It makes everything much more convenient.

> If it's not working like this I'm sorry but I can't use your service at the moment

You might want to look into our "Backblaze B2" service, and one of the 100 3rd party integrations. You can find a list here: https://backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html These store files on the IDENTICAL storage as "Backblaze Personal Backup" but have different GUIs that might fit your use model more.

Depending on which tool you use, a file stored in B2 stays in B2 until you ask it to be deleted. In that way it doesn't matter how long your external hard drive is disconnected -> 10 years, 20 years, the copy of the files will always be in Backblaze B2.

Thanks! And if someone delete the main and only bucket by mistake? and if I only use the web interface to upload, download, i guess i can't make an "app key" for backblaze.com.. ?

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is a Cloud Storage platform, so it by itself does not do any deduplication. Some of our integration partners might though, take a look at: https://backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

That's correct! Our online backup service does allow link-based file sharing, but it's not a collaboration tool. Our B2 service though does have integrations (https://backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html) that might be closer to what you're looking for!

I like to think of this setup as sort of a one way valve with two ends of pipe:

1. "db server"
2. "backup staging server"

"db server" can't talk to "backup staging server", and really knows nothing about it other than having a public ssh key in it's allowed keys list.

So, the overview would be something like this:

• The "db server" conducts is database dumps on some nightly schedule
• the "backup staging server" conducts a sync of the dumps (and other important files.. logs and configs perhaps) stored on "db server" also on a nightly schedule via SSH (there are probably ways you could check for "db dump complete" signals, but I usually just guesstimate on time it takes the "db server" to create it's dump, and then create the schedule with some extra padding on top of that.)
• "backup staging server" then upon completing the sync, connects to the cloud backup, and places the backup there.

Take a look at restic (https://restic.net/) for doing b2 backups from the staging server. It's got hooks for b2, among other cloud storage providers. I'm a big fan, and it allows you to do incremental backups while providing encrypted containers.

Good Luck!

I will not be able to talk to it as well as restic’s article but the idea is that there are some natural breaks in many binary files. By looking for them, and I think in Restic’s case also knowing what you already have, you can break your file up better. So shifting all data by 1 byte may not change the bounds. And only require uploading one chunk.

The pros are less space on the backend, less bandwidth, and faster updates (the latter two may matter to consumers) The cons are increased complexity in coding and maybe processing. But, Backblaze computes hashes anyway. Not sure how the content based chunking compares to a pure hash.

I am not saying it’s worth it, especially since the II don’t dedupe across machines, but it is worth at least considering.

it does seem to have a gui option: https://rclone.org/gui/

basically you configure it and then test out the command that does what you need. and once you are sure about the command, you can use your system's task scheduler to run it on a regular basis 🤔

One of the features of rclone will mount the remote bucket to a path you choose. Your bucket can behave like just another directory on your machine, and you can use your favorite Linux file browser to browse, create/copy, and delete files.

Some programs that modify files in-place may not understand how to do that for a remote "blob" file; if you run into trouble with that scenario, copy the file to a real local filesystem (or a tmpfs ramdisk), modify it there, and copy it back to overwrite the rclone-mounted version.

There's a command line version (https://duck.sh/) but then that's not really easier to use than rclone. It looks to me like rclone itself might be able to give you the URLs already (rclone link...). I'm not totally sure if that command would tack on an extraneous authorization token with a public bucket, but maybe you can just ignore or strip out the "?Authorization=...".

Okay, so my solution was to install Rclone.

1. Config Rclone Remote by using rclone config
2. Follow this guide pretty much: https://rclone.org/b2/
3. Use the command rclone copy don't use sync!

Hey YevP, I've updated my post with information on what I'm trying to do. Couple of people suggested that I should use rclone.org, which doesn't seem like a bad command line program. I then had someone suggest Backblaze Personal, which I've got concerns about. I've listed those in the post, but basically if I should go with the personal plan regardless, then I could give it a try.

Fair enough - hopefully its as straightforward on Windows.

That makes sense. I looked into the rclone commands and it offers cryptcheck and cryptdecode. Are they the commands that you're talking about?

> does the API allow for straight deleting

Again, I am not an expert but it seems like it does. The caveat is that depending on how you have things set up, it may keep a copy. However you can either (a) turn that off or (b) purge it later.

The best thing to do is RTFM and see what it can do for yourself.

RClone has a nice table of what different APIs can do natively (and like I said, I mimics the missing actions but you should know what is happening)

I'm trying to figure out what your end goal is.

If you want to host a public set of info, like a website on B2, use https://rclone.org/b2/ to copy the website from your local drive. Copy it to an "allPublic" bucket.

If you want to share one or two files, you can backup your whole computer with the "Personal Backup Client" and use the "Share One File" feature to have individual files, but for many files it would be "clunky".

rclone also works well with B2, and IIRC it doesn't get more expensive until you hit 5 TB or thereabouts.

You can do a lot more fun stuff with B2 (than plain backups) if you enjoy playing with APIs.

1. OMG just stop. Thirty USB drives? Really?

2. Are you just worried about running out of drive letters? You could always mount to folders instead. That allows you a virtually unlimited number of drives to be mounted under Windows.

3. Or are you just running out of USB ports? Because that can easily be solved, too.

A better solution could be to move to fewer but larger drives or move to a NAS where you could add more space as needed.

I can't imagine being successful in remembering to add and remove drives in a controlled fashion so as not to have my data deleted. It's going to take forever to seed the cloud with your data and, if you're a day late, you're going to need to see 15 drives again? Ouch.

> is Backblaze seriously just two guys coding?

Ha! Sorry, that was mis-leading. Our Backblaze Personal Backup Client team is 4 people (but we have open recs to hire). But only two of us would normally work on the threading/performance code that would allow us to hit the 1 Gbit/sec.

Backblaze has almost 200 employees at this point, with about 50 software engineers doing programming and QA (testing), and another about 50 are in "Technical Operations" and datacenter technicians. We have a marketing and sales team team of around 30 - 40 (?) maybe (?). Then we have recruiting, HR, and accounting. The reason I'm unsure is because of the pandemic we all work remotely still and I don't get to see those groups, plus they hire and are autonomous now.

I heard we have 23 open software engineer recs the other day. One of our biggest challenges is hiring to keep up with our work load.

> needed to back up my harddrives as fast as possible because i needed the 4TB drive for something else

Oh, maybe it's for the best. Backblaze Personal Backup is a "backup", which means you are supposed to keep your local copy also! You should buy an additional hard drive when you need space. A new 4 TByte hard drive is now less than $100: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STEB4000100/dp/B00TKFEE8K On that page you can even select "16 TB" and get the price down to $19/TByte!!

Chinese here. The great firewall doesn't block you from the website, but it will sometimes stops me from logging in and inheriting backup state (when you are installing Backblaze using the exe file on a newly installed operating system) and will give an Backblaze error code “horse”. Connects to a VPN solved it. And once it is set up (it is actually uploading new files), the GFW doesn't block the backup, and no VPN is needed afterward. Restoring files from the website doesn't require VPN.

Anyway, do get a VPN (or similar stuff like a Shadowsocks airport) if you are coming here. The search engine that are not blocked by GFW is just piece of shit compared to Google, tons of useless, promoted, or just wrong information. Even as someone who grow up with it, I just struggle with using the internet if I'm using a computer without a VPN.

I personally do NOT recommend NordVPN as (a few years ago when I tried it) the NordVPN app doesn't support application bypass (some of the app will go through the VPN, some of them don't). Some of the China mainland app, which you will need to use if you are here, will not work if it sees your VPN's oversea IP address. So if you don't have application bypass, you will be constantly switching the VPN on and off and on and off all day.

1. Everything on that laptop is likely to end up in Chinese hands. I invite you to consider taking a burner instead.
2. If you’re using a vpn, it won’t matter.
3. If you’re not using a vpn, I invite you to consider doing so. I personally recommend NordVPN, but there are many excellent options available.

Thanks CobaltCommittee! I'm looking at getting this WD 2TB for time machine. My laptop has a 1TB HD. Do you think this a good choice? https://www.amazon.com/WD-2TB-My-Passport-Ultra-Silver-Portable-External/dp/B07GKK35BT/ref=psdc_595048_t2_B06W55K9N6?th=1

I plan to use b2 for backing up a nas as well. (FreeNAS 11.2 once it ships as it supports encryption) For the photos I think it works pretty well given the BS Photobucket pulled.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3205765/internet/photobucket-replaced-millions-of-images-with-ransom-demand.html

Electric heaters are pretty expensive source of heat. My thought with it being in the garage is I will use it pretty rarely, however over time I expect to have solar panels power my entire home with surplus so at that point I could run it for "Free" . Also this heater runs on 240 @ 30 amps which might make it kinda hard to just plug in unless your building management company is cool about running new electrical.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BG81AK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1