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.

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?

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.