- Backblaze Time Machine Backup System
- Backblaze Time Machine Backup
- Backblaze Backup Time Machine Drive
Shelby1975 wrote:
I use time machine, and have been very pleased with it. I would also like to use Backblaze for off site backup. Will these two work together and not cause any problems?
In general, they should stay out of each other's way.
Be sure BackBlaze is not trying to back up your Time Machine backups (I understand that's automatic, but it won't hurt to check).
I don't know exactly how it works, but some such apps keep some fairly large files on your system, apparently some sort of indexing or status data, that changes rapidly. By default, Time Machine will back that up, which may result in large TM backups (and backing-it up likely won't accomplish anything anyway). So check their documentation, and/or see #A2 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), for a couple of apps that will show exactly what's backed-up. If you find something like that, exclude those files/folders from Time Machine, per #10 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
Time Machine is awesome, but saving files to single physical hard drive is, well, not safe at all. So, I guess, what I need is to back up Time Machine's backup to a cloud and make sure that my files are being stored in more than one copy in different locations. Then possibility of losing files is too insignificant to bother ever. Mac Only: If Migration Assistant or a Time Machine backup was used to transfer the data from the old computer to the new, the Backblaze software will need to be uninstalled and reinstalled before proceeding. When you set up Time Machine, your Mac wants to use an entire external drive exclusively for backups. Here’s how you can get around that and use a Time Machine drive both for backups and file storage. Using a 2 TB external drive for Time Machine backups of a Mac with a 128 GB solid-state drive doesn’t make much sense. This file is where Backblaze stores information about what is stored on their servers and copies of files being uploaded or about to be uploaded. I would exclude this from Time Machine backups, as it will often change and contains nothing you're not already backing up elsewhere.
Dec 24, 2010 8:39 AM
I recently switched over to Backblaze B2 to store my website backups, and it’s been a great experience. Each B2 bucket has its own lifecycle rules which determines how long to keep previous file versions. My backup B2 bucket is configured with unlimited file versions, which means my nightly incremental WordPress backups, in theory, should be fully restorable at any point in the past. While the data is all safe, there isn’t a good way to do a full time machine style restore.
Rclone gets pretty close however lacks necessary B2 specifics to fully reconstruct.
The drive will be listed in Backblaze's 'Select Hard Drives to Backup' as Time Machine and will not be selectable. If you'd like to back up that drive to Backblaze, you can discontinue using Time Machine, delete its backups, and select it for backup to Backblaze.
Rclone is a powerful tool for moving data to and from many cloud providers including support for Backblaze B2. While Rclone can see B2 file versions using an argument --b2-versions there isn’t an official way to reconstruct the entire folder structure at a particular time. Adding a B2 specific restore in time feature has been discussed however it’s waiting for someone to actually work on adding the new functionality.
Why use B2 for restore in time?
Backups can get really expensive fairly quickly. Currently my customers are using around 1TB of data. If I were to do what most web hosts do and offer a nightly snapshot for the last 30 days my storage usage would increase to 30TBs. Not to mention all of the CPU and memory required to actually make those snapshots.
Backblaze Time Machine Backup System
Backblaze Time Machine Backup
With B2 storage and file versions enabled only one copy of each site synced regularly is required. That keeps storage requirements and computing costs fairly low with potential of offering some pretty insane restorability. Imagine being able to restore your website from a years ago instead of just the last 30 days. That’s the type of thing that I’m hoping to accomplish using a B2 time machine.
Alternative workarounds using Rclone exists
In the meantime a few scripting alternatives have been created to mimic a restore in time backup. They use Rclone along with some clever syncing and file renaming. One of those solutions is one I wrote in bash which uses Rclone’s --b2-versions, --min-age, sync and copyto to do a restore in time from B2. It’s not perfect however it’s fairly close. See more on that project over on Github.
A B2 specific restore in time feature for Rclone would be amazing.
Backblaze Backup Time Machine Drive
Rclone is a written in Go, which are really fast. That means anything bundled into Rclone directly would be significantly faster to alternative approaches. The Rclone project itself means a B2 time machine restore would be widely accessible to other Rclone users. Until that happens I plan on using my Backblaze B2 Time Machine script.