Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/08/24/how-to-restore-files-from-backblaze/
Do you subscribe to Backblaze—or perhaps you’re looking into the online backup service? While backup is easy and automatic, restoring takes more work. Josh Centers explains the process of restoring files over the Internet and reveals a little-known way to restore a single file at a time.
You should also be aware of what files & folders are NOT being backed up by Backblaze. If you happen to name an important file using one of the many extensions it’s set to ignore, or put the file in the wrong directory, you’re out of luck. Also since applications and most system files aren’t backed up, you cannot reply on your Backblaze backup alone to restore an entire system. And you better remember all the additional things you installed, or you will be spending a lot of time completing reconstruction after a big disaster. For these reasons I don’t consider Backblaze alone sufficient as the only offsite backup in a “3-2-1 Backup” strategy.
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Can you discuss BackBlaze archiving? Is there a way to restore a version of a file that is not the most recent?
Yes, and Backblaze is pretty up-front about this.
Yes, they’re upfront. But unfortunately many of the default types/folders it skips can’t be removed, even if you’re willing to pay for the storage.
It might be useful to explain how to restore from Backblaze B2 as well as from the main Backblaze.
We updated the article to explain this more fully. In essence, when you start the file selection process, two pop-up menus let you control which versions appear. Backblaze stores versions from the last 30 days, after which you can get only the most recent version.
As I and several other people have experienced in the past, BackBlaze has been known to lose track of encryption keys, disabling user’s ability to restore encrypted backup files. When this happened to me, their support was entirely unsympathetic, gave me back money for the rest of my subscription and told me not to return. As you can imagine, seeing as I had done nothing wrong nor been belligerent about the matter, I am inspired to warn others of their behavior. It is my great hope that they have recently got their technical and support acts together. [Please don’t consider censoring this post as it and I are entirely legitimate.]
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Backbkaze B2 is just online cloud service storage, so there wouldn’t be a single way to restore from it - it would depend entirely on how you backed up to it. Backblaze doesn’t provide a client to back up to B2. (I use Arq myself on my home computers, but a client I have backing up from their Synology NAS to B2 using Synology’s backup app, so the restoration process is different in each case.)
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Thanks for sharing. How long ago did that happen?