The end of an era: Goodbye, Backblaze. I don’t trust you.
For years, I’ve used Backblaze to back up my computer and files. Just about 5 terabytes. The app has always performed pretty badly, so I typically turned off continuous scanning and used a launchd script to run a backup once per night. For years, this worked. No fuss, no muss. And then earlier this year, Backblaze released a client that got rid of the command-line option I had been using, so this broke my setup. They didn’t send any announcement about the breaking change, and I had to find out about it when I received a warning that my computer had not been backed up in several days.
I reached out to support, and right off the bat, what do I get? An AI response that hallucinated a solution. I finally got hold of a person who basically said, yep, the command was removed and there’s no replacement… Except, there is a replacement: bzcli. Okay, so I’m going to give some grace on the bullshit answer. I updated my launchd script and moved on with life.
A few weeks later, though, I go to restore a file. The client says “All backed up as of 7:21 AM” or whatever. But what do I see online? Nope: the files I need haven’t been backed up in more than two weeks! That was the camel that broke my back.
Backblaze has one job: to back up my data. For the client to tell me, yep, all is well and you’re all backed up, but not actually be backed up? Nope. Unacceptable.
I’m not wasting time trying to troubleshoot this. I don’t work for Backblaze. I requested a refund. I suggest you do the same. If you think your data is safely backed up, I encourage you to actually verify that it’s true, because I caught the Backblaze client blatantly lying.
I’ve since moved to Borg and sneakernet, despite the exorbitant cost of hard drives. My 8 TB hard drive now costs twice what I paid for it a few years ago.