If you have multiple Macs, do you use Backblaze on all of them, or just your primary?
I have a desktop Mac Mini in my office and a MacBook Pro that I use for travel and working from home. The Mac Mini is my primary computer. It’s got the big SSD and syncs all my cloud files. I try not to keep as many local copies of files on the laptop since the SSD is smaller.
My MacBook Pro is new. I just migrated to it this week, and since then I’ve been getting the Backblaze reminder to inherit my backups. But I’ve been thinking about just uninstalling it completely from my laptop. I’ve got less RAM on this machine, and these days as I have been doing more with Claude and Claude Code, I have become much more aware of my growing RAM needs. So dropping the overhead of Backblaze seems like a good way to get some back.
Between Google Drive and iCloud Drive, basically everything I need, except for maybe my Downloads folder is synced on these machines. And I’m running Time Machine on the laptop.
So as I write this, I guess I’m asking the MPU community for permission to do this? What am I not thinking about?
Having just got a MacBook Neo as an iPad replacement, I now have it and my much-more-powerful MacBook Pro.
It took me a few days to realise I do not need to have any form of backup on the Neo. The stuff I care about is in iCloud. Although I have been reading lately that Backblaze no longer backs up files from iCloud. Which I find deeply concerning and also rather confusing, considering Apple explicitly talked about backup software being able to download iCloud files on demand to back them up.
I have a Mac Studio as my backblaze drive and then backup my MacBook pro to an external drive using carbon copy cloner and then that’s connected to the studio for backup.
I’m pretty sure that CCC does a backup of the iCloud stuff and as it’s a file on an external drive rather than being recognised as iCloud they just get backed up. But I don’t use iCloud for files, it’s all in OneDrive for me.
Over the past few years i’ve consolidated from three Macs (two desktop, one laptop) each running BackBlaze to three Macs (one desktop, one laptop) with Backblaze only on the desktop.
I view the laptop as disposable/ephemeral data. Anything important has source of truth on the desktop or stored in the cloud. Primarily Dropbox with a little iCloud.
I still run CarbonCopy Cloner on the desktop, but stopped running clones of any other system. I have never run Time Machine, back when it was unreliable I tried it and never got onboard, and since then my needs were met with CCC, Cloud storage, and BackBlaze,
FWIW, I don’t think memory or system usage of BlackBlaze should be a deciding factor. If you want belts and suspenders, don’t cut it thinking you’ll get back more ram or performance that actually makes a significant difference.
It sounds like your setup is similar to mine. I have one Mac which rarely leaves home and use an iPad and iPhone for just about everything. The Google Drive and iCloud data I use every day is backed up by my Mac as well as anything I download from my iPad.
The only time I do a manual backup of a mobile device is when I’m unable to connect to the internet and need to back up some important photos, etc.
I have a Mini with a 4 drive enclosure attached. All the Macs in the house backup to one of the drives with CCC. Another drive holds all our media files. Both are backed up to BackBlaze with a single computer subscription. I also have a Time Machine drive that is not backed up. I periodically restore files from BackBlaze to make sure the backups are working. Other than testing I haven’t needed to use the BackBlaze backups.
Gonna have to be a somewhat complicated “me too”. My Mac mini server computer is on Backblaze. My wife’s and my iMacs back up to it nightly using Chronosync+ChronoAgent. The iMacs and my MacBook also backup with TimeMachine to the server, but this drive partition doesn’t go to Backblaze. I use Resilio Sync to have a private cloud among all the home computers and its copy on the server is backed up to Backblaze.
Having a 24/7 computer with massive drive capacity (the server) is the key to having this all work.
What am I not thinking about?