Backblaze

I’ve had Backblaze for years, backing up my Mac plus and external drive with all my family photos and videos. Never needed to restore anything until a couple of days ago. My external drive failed and I choose to restore the entire drive. First, restore from the Mac app is really slow. I left my computer on with the restore in progress and after 2 days I want to check. At about 75% restore, the app stated to skip files and download speed went down to 0%. Log files shows authentication problem. I restart my Mac and retry, the app asks my password again and I continue the download. The skipped files remain skipped. According to Backblaze, this is a known issues with large restore. They suggest to retry by skipping existing files. I retry and again, so slow anyway, and after 2 days authentication problem again, password to reenter. I’m now restoring manually a folder a time. What’s the point to pay for a service that it’s not reliable the moment it’s needed?

Just a spinning / thinking indicator. Never loads. Useless app. UPDATE: Adter uninstalling and reinstalling, it seems to be working again. Increasing rating from 1-star to 3-stars. For now.

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.