![]() I don't want the 10 year old in the family to disable Backblaze because it slows down the computer. When I started writing Backblaze in 2007 that was always on my mind. I asked my 10 year old niece why the backup drive was unplugged and she answered, "that slows down the computer so I unplug it". Information for Windows customers: Time Machine is a Macintosh backup program that is continuous and keeps your data backed up to a local external drive. My mindset of "please be invisible" came from a moment when I saw my sister's family had unplugged their Time Machine backup drive in 2006. ![]() I personally want my backup software to NOT use 100% of my bandwidth and NOT make my streaming video hiccup and NOT make my computer slow down while I'm trying to get other things done. But immediately after that, personally I want my backup software to be invisible. To me, there is only "fully backed up" and "not fully backed up", so the backup software should be fast enough to keep you fully backed up as you change/modify/add files to your computer. The reviewers who rate backup software by producing a chart of which backup software runs the fastest kind of amuse me. Personally I consider it a failure if Backblaze uses more than 1% of 1 core of your CPU under normal circumstances, and 5% of your CPU once per hour while actually transmitting. Most of the design of Backblaze was based on going slower, on purpose, to stay under the radar and not bother the customer. It runs for YEARS in the background keeping you safe WITHOUT you watching it or checking on it. You don't have to watch it because it will alert you if there is a problem (by email and by popup dialog). I believe this comes from a mental model of "backups are totally manual, and I must watch them while backing up, so the faster the backup the less time I must sit here watching it".īackblaze shines at being an automatic, continuous, silent, and in the background backup. There is a mindset of some reviewers and customers that the fastest backup is the best backup. I have hardwired gigabit 1000/1000, but 100 threads crippled my streaming apps into subpar quality. You can read about how we do that here: All of that can be the bottleneck, not your local network anymore. To be clear one of the main bottlenecks is not your local network or local SSDs, it is the fact that Backblaze is uploading and saving the files on our server side on slow spinning drives, and each file is stored on 20 different slow spinning disks inside 20 different computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. And if you watch your "bandwidth used" chart you should be able to upload at up to 500 Mbits/sec but that's about the most you will ever see, and sometimes it is less. That picture is very "busy", but you should see a bunch of things called bztrans_thread uploading and EXACTLY ONE bztransmit process which is coordinating the backup as the main command thread. You can watch "Activity Monitor" on the mac, or "Task Manager" on Windows, and here is a screenshot what you should see for the bandwidth being used to upload: Oh, after changing the setting in #1 above you might want to do the thing once to make sure it picks up the new settings. Like turn off all power savings modes so your computer doesn't go to sleep. But Backblaze loses a little progress each time you click so try not to play with it or pause it more than once every 4 hours, and make sure it runs all night long while you are asleep. ![]() It is TOTALLY FINE once every 4 hours to click once (don't double click it or anything) and let it settle for 15 seconds, then click once and have it progress forward again. If you happen to have 32 GBytes of RAM feel free to set it to 100 threads, it probably won't hurt anything except RAM use.Ģ) Avoid pausing the backup too often. The only reason NOT to use more threads is if you are limited on RAM, so a computer with 8 GBytes of RAM should maybe limit it to 25 threads or less, but if you have 16 GBytes of RAM you will be totally fine with 50 threads. Here are two pieces of advice:ġ) Go into the "Settings." and find the Performance tab and don't do automatic throttling, change it to use "At Most 50 threads". Backblaze backs up in file size order, small files first. The second half should go faster than the first half. Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and wrote a lot of the code that uploads files.
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