My point… if I open “iCloud Drive” in Finder, I can see my Documents folder because I have “sync Documents and Desktop” turned on. The contents of Documents ARE backed up. From iCloud.
This is my real bugbear with Backblaze. Whatever they are saying about it being difficult… they are already dealing with it! They also actually said they had worked with Apple on backing up iCloud (presumably that’s how Documents is done) and yet they actually don’t back up most of iCloud Drive at all.
There are no facts at all from Backblaze in this discussion. The only facts I am aware of, from my and some friends’ experience, is that they are selectively coping with iCloud Drive by backing up Documents (and possibly Desktop) when synced, but they do not, for some reason, back up anything else.
So far, it’s not bad communication. It’s disinformation. They have said things that just confuse everyone more than had they kept quiet.
Which is fine because I don’t need it to download the things not on my hard drive.
EDIT
Also, though, I didn’t have that setting checked to “materialize” cloud-only files, but it seems to have snagged them when I verify the download on the website. Weird that it’s working.
"We added the ability to either ignore or “materialize” dataless files to Arq 7.21. Please click on your backup plan (top left), click “Edit” on the right, click on the Options tab, and change the dateless-files behavior to ignore or materialize as you wish.
If you choose “materialize”, Arq opens the file with a flag that tells macOS to tell the “file provider” to make the file data local. Then Arq reads it. Where the file provider stores the data, and how long the file provider keeps the file data around, is up to the file provider.”
According to this Mac OS is supposed to move the file after backup. Have you found where the materialized files are located on your drive, or are you just seeing your drive filling up?
I wonder if marking your iCloud files as “Keep Downloaded” waiting a while then unchecking “Keep Downloaded” would cause iCloud to move the files back?
I just noticed that there is a “Remove Download” option when you right click on a file/folder in iCloud. Using that causes the cloud icon to reappear
The key point is that Backblaze can only back up files that are stored in a fully local, non-iCloud-managed location on your Mac.
Turning off “Optimize Mac Storage” for iCloud Drive is not enough by itself. If the files are still inside iCloud-managed folders (including ~/Library/Mobile Documents), they will not be backed up, even if they look downloaded in Finder.
To have those iCloud Drive files backed up, you need to move or copy them out of iCloud Drive into a standard local folder (like Documents or Desktop), then Backblaze will back them up. [1]
For iCloud Photos, Backblaze will back up your photos only if they are stored locally on your Mac (not just in iCloud).
Probably ignorant on file structures, but it makes no sense to me that BackBlaze can back up Photos that are local but not documents if they are local. Both are iCloud stored.
This is just a guess. But since Photos can be stored on any volume, Apple doesn’t treat them the same as files that are required to be on the internal drive?
Now that my Arq backup is finished, I’ve started restoring files, focusing mainly on files in iCloud. I like how you can drag and drop from the Arq app directly into finder.
Since my Backblaze has auto-renewed, I’m going to keep using both and make a decision when my Backblaze subscription comes up for renewal again.
So I’ve also experimented with Backblaze restore and it is also backing up all the files in iCloud, even those that are NOT in Desktop or Documents. You have to navigate to strange paths in your ~/Library folder, but they’re all there. For example, Obsidian stores files in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents
I also see my Photos library is backed up, but how do people actually restore individual photos? The names are completely obscure FFFC16A6-4DB3-4846-844E-0C7A672400D5.jpeg I don’t see how you could ever find the photo that is missing.
Luckily I haven’t had to do this yet, but how do people handle this situation? Do you just restore the entire Photos Library.photoslibrary?
I would love to hear from others on this. My understanding (which might be entirely wrong) is Photos being backed up by Time Machine (or any other solution) will back up the entire Photos database. So if you want to restore a deleted photo from 2 months ago, you entire Photos library will be restored to it’s state from two months ago and newer photos would not be in there.
I use Arq backup and recently did a a test restore of a Photos Library.photoslibrary from late January. Yes, you can open a restored .photolibrary file and use it the same way you use your System Photo Library IF you have originals downloaded to your Mac.
Yes. I restored the .photoslibrary file to my desktop, double clicked to open it and verify it was good. Then I deleted it. I do test restores of all types of files, from time to time, to make sure my backups are good.
Purely technically, if you knew the name of the file you probably would not have to restore the entire photo library. But the odds of you knowing the name of the file that you are missing would seem to be relatively low.
Finding a missing photo was much easier before Apple started renaming our original photos to hexadecimal codes. In fact, I was able to recover photos for friends by importing the originals folder to a new Photos library.
I’ve read that Apple made the change to improve iCloud syncing, but I never noticed any improvement.
