Is anyone else finding that Backblaze is using up lots of energy and killing their battery life on their Mac?
I’m seeing my battery drop about twice as fast as normal with Backblaze possibly stuck creating file lists.
I’ve seen this a few times over the last month, and I’ve restarted as needed. I’ve also tried restricting when Backblaze runs, which solves the problem but kind of ruins the point.
Yes, I also saw this. When I first got my Air I installed it and noticed it was using more battery than anything else consistently. After a month (and having completed the full back up two weeks prior), it was still doing this so I removed it.
A colleague of mine with the M1 MBP also noticed it, so it’s not just with the Air.
My solution was to put Backblaze on one of my Intel Macs which I run as a server and have that do all the backing up.
I just started using BackBlaze a month ago after getting my new M1. Would it work just as well for me to schedule a time to run/update the BackBlaze backups once a week like I do anyway for my external backup drives? That way I only run BB once a week thus avoiding the battery drain.
Hmm, I do have a question. BB doesn’t backup on my M1 unless it is plugged in. Does it still drain the battery when not backing up while the laptop is not plugged in?
I’m not sure, I just saw that it often came up as using significant power. The poster above claims scheduling works but I’ve not tried.
I haven’t noticed this, I don’t think my battery has been below 50% and I only charge it a couple of times a week. (Isn’t that pretty awesome to say about a Mac?)
I have an M1 Mini, but I had started noticing that BB can make the M1 come to a crawl with hogging all the RAM. I know something must have gotten crossed, because it wasn’t doing this prior. There was an obscene number of files (in the millions trying to upload that made no sense). I ended up deleting and redoing the whole process. So far it’s been smooth for a few weeks.
I decided not to have BB load up on launch. Instead, I have created a repeating reminder in OmniFocus to do a BB back up on a weekly basis, in addition to my external hard drive back ups. That should cover me sufficiently, especially since nearly 99% of all my files are also in the cloud.
I’ll confess to not reading the release notes, so I don’t know whether it’s a fix for this problem — but Backblaze just dropped a new version of its software.
FWIW - I set Backblaze to backup once per day at 1:00 a.m. when I shouldn’t be using my MacBook Air anyway.
Of course I also have an abundance of other local backups, so having Backblaze be, essentially, a daily backup is fine with me. YMMV.
I actually had that set already, but I think the problem was the service getting stuck trying to build its file list.
I’ve now set it to not back up when on battery, rebooted (again), and I’ve sent a support request in.
Sadly, if it keeps doing this, I’ll have to abandon BB as I value my cool computer more than this service. It’s “Producing File Lists…” again, so I’ll see if it makes any progress this time (956 remaining files, 40,409 MB). Oh, and pause backup does nothing.
edit: posted that, and immediately the service has moved on to transferring files, so maybe it’s going to be ok.
Backblaze support sent me a script to run to collect log files (I think I saw someone else questioning this recently). Out of trust, I ran it and it created a 250MB file they wanted me to send back, which I haven’t yet (I’ve asked them about it, what’s in it). It’s a zip of logs, and the expanded zip is 2.68GB. At that compression ratio, it must just be text log files I reckon.
Also, their support website requires me to lower my Safari security settings, so I’m not using that either (also something I’ve asked about).
Anyway, right now, I’m going right off Backblaze as a product. Their approach to user security and privacy seems really weird to me and although that’s not why I use their service, it does make me uneasy with them.
If I may ask, what will you go to, that offers competitive pricing ?
Offline!
I love the idea of BB, and I hope this gets sorted, but I can live without it. Very little volume of my data would be sorely missed (I would still have a backup, promise). If it cost more than it did, I probably wouldn’t bother.
Oh man. Just as I was thinking of giving this a go…
You still can. I have an OF repeating task to run BB once a week (which is in addition to the backups I do to two external drives in separate locations). This gives me the advantage of a solid backup in BB while not dealing with battery drain issues.
So you can manually run it?
If so, BB is back on the table…
Top man. Thank you very much
I switched to not include my external drives in my back up, and everything seemed to get a lot better.
However, when Backblaze is running my MacBook Air definitely warms up more than even fairly heavy use.
I’m actually going to switch to run back blaze on a networked Mac Mini instead, but if that was not an option for me I would either stop using BB or as others have said switch to only running it once a week, which seems to be absolutely fine.
Maybe I’ve been lucky, or just haven’t noticed, but Backblaze has been just fine on my M1 MBP. I don’t notice the laptop becoming warm, or loss of battery life, and it’s never been in the Battery menu Using Significant Energy section, that I’ve noticed. (Mostly it’s just Safari that appears there consistently. I should probably close a few [dozen] tabs…)
I have Backblaze set for continuous backup. (And Time Machine. And Arq. You become a bit paranoid after losing a hard drive to failure…)
Two maybe important details:
I set my new M1 MacBook Pro up from scratch, clean, rather than migrate from my old laptop. All of the old data that I wanted to preserve was copied manually.
I didn’t adopt the Backblaze backup from another machine. It too was installed and set up cleanly, separately, no connection to other machines, other than my Backblaze account.
And, I don’t have BB loading upon startup.