Advice on nuke & pave with Backblaze

1

Hello all,

After several calls to Apple Support - the conclusion is that my Mac Mini needs to be nuked and paved.

I have a BB backup of everything on the Mini. I want to effectively switch off BB, and make local backups this side, and then nuke, with BB being none the wiser. My thinking is that if something goes wrong, I will then at least have BB as a full back-up [Time Machine is not an option, unfortunately].

BB’s help files aren’t too helpful. Hoping someone here has done this recently.

Do I uninstall BB completely, or simply disable automatic backups? Any suggestions?

2

I would contact Backblaze’s support for their recommendation of best practices in this situation.

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3

Agreed, I’ve had to contact BB support just the once but they were very quick in responding and helpful.

4

FWIW I did a nuke and pave two weeks back and utterly forgot about Backblaze until they told me they hadn’t backed me up in a while, and was everything ok? From there it was a simple matter of inheriting the backup state from them to the re-imaged computer. It was pretty seamless and slick, and didn’t take anywhere near as long as i thought it might.

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5

I’ve been through this process before. After doing a “nuke and pave” you can treat of your Mac as a brand new Mac.

Make sure that you use Inherit Backup State. Backblaze is smart enough to realize what’s already been backed up and will only backup new files.

You’ll find more info here:

On a side note, after inheriting the backup state, the Backblaze estimate may show something like “your computer will be backed up in 3 months”, even though most of your data is backed up. I found that this number came down very quickly as Backblaze processed the contents of the drive(s).

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6

Yes, this was exactly my experience. All told, the process took perhaps a half hour.

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7

In my case quite a bit longer (I think it was at least a few hours)…probably because I’m backing up an 8 TB external HD in addition to my 1 TB internal SSD.

8

Many thanks all!

BB support replied and has confirmed the suggestions above.
The nuked Mini doesn’t have quite the same files back again – but am happy with what I have now, so will ‘inherit the backup state’ when all set-up is done, and take things from there.

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