Now, Backblaze is back with the official launch of its Mac client (in beta, naturally), and we scored 300 invites for Ars Technica readers. Backblaze is a service that we checked out in June for Windows users that has a 'set it and forget it' approach like Mac OS X's Time Machine the client backs up nearly everything on the computer to make sure no crucial bytes are lost.

And I have file-level restore possible.Competition in the online backup market is heating up now that bandwidth and storage are cheap enough for the average consumer. Then those are individually encrypted files which Backblaze can backup. When I am done with them, I use rclone to sync and encrypt them to my main external (where I have tons of space). I keep my sparsebundles on a fast SSD which is not backed up with Backblaze. As such, the real answer is test it out before 'trusting' anything.īTW, it is the requirement that you have the full point-in-time of the the bands that has led me to a different strategy for my files I have in a sparsebundle backed up by tools that do not give the full snapshot (e.g. It is also worth noting that a backup is not complete until you have tried to restore and verified it has worked. So if you need to restore them to a previous state (as opposed to the current), make sure you restore the entire thing. Thankfully, Backblaze gives a full point-in-time snapshot. However, it means that your bands must be correct for that point in time.

This is really great for things like Backblaze since changes should, at most, only affect the changed bands. Sparse bundles are, as the name suggests, actually a lot of smaller files (bands) and not a single file. Are you saying your Mac that you are backing up is acting as the Time Machine server creating the sparsebundles?Įither way, It should work but you need to be really careful about restoration.

Time machine backblaze