r/backblaze

I needed to download a B2 Snapshot from the Web, ~6 or 7GB is fine but the Backblaze session timeout for login is so short that if you try to download anything over 7GB, the download fails due to the login session expiring by the time the download finishes.

Backblaze, please fix this..

Like a lot of people here I back up my Proton Drive from a headless Linux server (restic, nightly) to whatever, Synology, pCloud, you name it.

The usual route is rclone's protondrive backend, and like others here I watched it get slower and slower until a flat folder with 785 photos took 160 seconds to list on a good day and never finished on a bad one. Six-hour hangs, dead mount points. The throttling is pattern-based: rclone walks the whole tree with thousands of metadata calls every night, and Proton's API understandably stops picking up. The part that surprised me: the official Drive SDK (github.com/ProtonDriveApps/sdk, MIT) is already good enough to fix this yourself. I built a small read-only gateway with it:

- metadata lives in a local SQLite cache, kept fresh through the SDK's event stream (the same mechanism the official apps use, polled once a minute)

- the tree is exposed as WebDAV on localhost, so restic reads it through a boring rclone webdav mount

- file contents are never stored, just streamed on demand, decrypted and integrity-verified by the SDK

Results on the same account that was being throttled: that 785-file folder lists in 0.106 seconds. First full snapshot (3,069 files, 42 GiB) took 22 minutes.

The nightly incremental run now takes 0.82 seconds and makes zero calls to Proton unless something actually changed. Restore came back bit-for-bit identical. It follows the SDK rules: identifies as external-drive-*, event-based, no recursive scans, personal use only (which the license explicitly allows). It can't write anything, so the worst it can do to your Drive is read it well 😊

Two things I ran into that might interest the Proton devs if they're reading: the incubating account package isn't on npm yet (vendoring works fine), and getSeekableStream() deadlocks under parallel load (32 of 70 concurrent ranged reads hung, reproducible; the regular download path is rock solid). Happy to file a proper issue with details.

Full write-up with all source code (free to reuse for personal setups): Medium (free) article

Not affiliated with Proton, just a subscriber who wanted his 3 a.m. backups back, and if the native Linux client lands before you build this, even better. That's the outcome I'm actually rooting for.

Set up automated DB backups to S3 months ago and just... never checked again. Cron runs, script does its thing, assume it's fine.

Then I realized I'd have zero idea if it silently broke. Bucket permission change, script error, cron just dying — I wouldn't find out until the day I actually needed a backup and it wasn't there.

Anyone actually monitor this or just trust it? Has this bitten anyone before?

Occasionally, I get a Backblaze popup window warning me that I need to grant Backblaze permissions. I click on "Learn more" and follow the instruction on the page to grant full disk access. However, every time, it turns out that Backblaze components are already granted full disk access, so then I am left wondering what prompts the warning. I haven't logged how often this happens, but I'll throw "weekly" out there.

Environment:

• M4 Macbook Pro
• macOS: v26.5.1
• Backblaze Client: v9.2.2.898

Drives selected for backup:

• Macintosh HD ( internal SSD )

warning

Full disk access screen

I've reported this to Backblaze support a few minutes ago, but I figured that I might get a helpful response here.

I've rebooted several times, and that didn't change the issue. That only thing I can think of at the moment is to uninstalled and resintall the Backblaze app.

Please implement something very simple that is almost industry standard for recurrent charges. Not all of us live in America where we just leave our cards wide open for everyone and anyone to charge them on recurrent scams. You will realise that most apps rely on you forgetting that you have a subscription.

In other countries we have the ability to turn off our cards so that we only pay for the subscriptions that we actually want to retain and not every other thing that we sign up for. For every other service when you want to reactivate your card, there is a button that allows you to reactivate your card and then pay immediately. This exists in Spotify, where after you update your card there is "charge now". It exists in Google, where after you reactivate your card there is "charge now" or "pay now". It exists in Apple. It exists in charge GPT. It exists in Anthropic. It exists in Adobe. It exists everywhere except this one company called Backblaze.

Backblaze expects you to activate your card and leave it wide open for wherever they feel like they will remember to charge you. Can you please adapt your UI experience to make sense and be conscious of the subscription culture.