Backblaze

Is it a clouds storage or a service app?

Backblaze is an amazing cloud storage system. Here is how I use it and why I think it’s incredible. I use a Mac Studio at home with multiple external drives plugged in. Backblaze’s desktop application allows me to back up all of those drives and access the files on them in the exact way I’ve organized them. Additionally it serves as a backup for my backups with time-machine. With this mobile application I can access all of those files on my phone whenever I need to. I can also move files over to my work computer at any time. Exactly what I was looking for and I actively recommend this to people.

The backup on my computer is fine, but the app is almost completely non-functional. I can log in but can’t see or download any files in the app.

I was a long time customer until I discovered that an external hard drive that was backed up was deleted before the 30 day time limit. I contacted support about the issue, they weren’t too sure, so they had re-upload the drive’s content. I started to do that, but I didn’t upload the entire drive just in case it happened again. About three weeks later, the drive’s contents were deleted again. Even though I paid for the one year extension. I contacted support again and basically was told that there was nothing they could do and the ticket was closed. I complained about the service, but never got a response from anyone at the company. Shortly after that, I cancelled the service.

I'm writing this on behalf of a client of mine. I had recommended Backblaze based on internet recommendations but I hadn't tried it myself. Ugh. The backup mysteriously failed on her Mac for 32 days. It was non-obvious that it had. When I was checking it out, I wasn't sure that it had but I wasn't absolutely sure about that. Then I contacted customer support for help. My first attempt at trying to get it to work again failed. It was a bit unclear because it had a disk scanning progress bar that was stuck at 100% for several hours but I also got an alert that the backup had failed. This was confusing… I then contacted customer support and did an uninstall and reinstall which also failed with unclear error messages. After that, I gave up and asked for the subscription to be canceled. In my mind, a great backup should be more like Apple’s Time Machine: you should be easily able to check when it was backed up and see what files were backed up. You should have clear error messages.

can't see my files

The program does not work. It gets stuck in the initial backup and won’t finish the job. Will be canceling service. Customer support is horrible.

This app is great but as a photographer/videographer I would like to have thumbnails for pictures and video files. That way I don’t have to download it before knowing what it is.

The app seems to have improved, judging from the reviews over the years. Some bugs seem to remain, which is silly and should be cleaned up so it does not reflect on Backblaze as a whole. For example, for an initial backnI have going, the number of remaining files is current, but the time of last upload is just wrong (says it’s one week, which seems to be the time the entire backup started).

Works well functionally, but the fact that I can’t see images or videos without downloading is a major flaw to me. It’s one of the main reasons I would choose a competitor.