EDIT: see @anon41602260’s post below for an official answer from Backblaze support. Read through everything carefully and choose wisely!
It seems this is a relatively known issue but I couldn’t find a thread here, so I thought I would share. My internal SDD on my iMac was getting choked, and DaisyDisk indicated a huge (25 Gb) file called backblaze.bzpkg.
After doing some digging (see this Reddit thread where a Backblaze representative provided long answers), it appears that Backblaze keeps a log of every file transaction for data integrity purposes and this keeps growing and growing through the years. The recommended procedure is to uninstall Backblaze and start a full backup from scratch every few yers.
To do so
Download the Backblaze installer
It also serves as an uninstaller. Mount the .dmg, uninstall the app
Reboot your computer (otherwise macOS won’t purge the space)
Reinstall Backblaze, do not inherit backup space as this will negate the whole effort.
Be careful when doing so because, of course, the time for the backup to process, you will be without an offsite backup. If your connection speed permits, I find the best thing to do is to let the Mac backup during the 14-day trial period, then, when it’s done, to remove the old backup from Backblaze and use the liberated seat for the new backup. (In essence, it’s the same computer, but it works as a different seat for Backblaze.)
I recuperated huge amounts of space that way and my Mac feels much better!
So, does that mean if the “keep forever” option is active in Backblaze (at an additional cost), and one follows the procedure that the alleged Backblaze employee suggested, then the data is deleted from Backblaze and all the files stored in Backblaze going back the “3-4 years” are gone for good?
That’s crazy.
Also crazy that such an impactful thing is revealed in a thread buried in a corner of Reddit instead of some channel that Backblaze itself runs.
Honestly no idea.
What I know is that this procedure makes the Mac appear as a new machine, so you effectively start over. I’m fine with that.
I do, however, find this log file thing insane, indeed. Dropbox and iCloud do not do that and they sync minute things everywhere. I would think that one-way backups would be a much, much simpler matter. My 8-year old Synology does one-way backups to cloud services without such a need.
If you “do not inherit backup space” then how would your Backblaze client know which files have been backed up? I use Arqbackup and I have to inherit my old backup when I reinstall or I cannot restore any previous files.
Thanks for writing in . Some user experience bloated backblaze.pkg files which will cause user to have to delete and re-upload but this is not standard practice for every user and will not need to be executed by each and every user but select users. When issues such as this occur than Backblaze will troubleshoot the situation and determine if this is necessary. Do not execute or take any drastic measures such as this unless instructed by Backblaze support.
I added the emphasis.
Perhaps the title of this thread should change so readers know to contact Backblaze and open a ticket before taking action?
To compile things (gcc, etc) you can just install Command Line Tools for Xcode instead of the full xcode, you can find the download in https://developer.apple.com/xcode/resources/
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