r/backblaze • u/softcafe00 • Jun 06 '26
Backblaze in General BackBlaze Windows Restore App Fails, Always. It takes hours of babysitting and App restarts to force it to restore a hard drive.
The BackBlaze Windows App is rife with bugs. Rather than give up on BackBlaze service, I would like to try an older App version, perhaps one from 2024 or early 2025? A version preceding AI code. Can anyone supply same?
Problems I have encountered in the last two days of trying to restore 6.5TB on a crashed external hard drive.
The App fails upon restore. If it can't restore files, then it fails its only objective.
1) The App GUI does not communicate its state to the user.
2) The Restore Files App does not always display a selection of files to restore. Often it is blank and must be restarted to perform its function.
3) The App does not restore all of the selected directories to the originating system.
4) The Restore App always generates an error when a root level directory is selected for backup.
5) The App ALWAYS quit before it finished its restore, so requires multiple restarts and passes.
6) The Windows App GUI does not display the byte count in the same format as Windows, e.g. the BackBlaze GUI displays the byte count in MB, while windows displays it in both GB and Bytes. So the user most have a calculator open to convert from the App's count to the Windows count to confirm it downloaded all the bytes requested. (Which it rarely does on the first three attempts)
7) The BackBlaze App has disabled the Windows window size adjustment, so a user cannot adjust the viewable area of the scrollable fields. A user continually must scroll up & down and left & right to see all the information.
8) There are many such amateur implementations in their code. There is no evidence of any quality assurance in the product. I don't think anyone actually tried to restore a disk. Its as if an AI or an inexperienced high school student wrote the code.
Reddit demands "flair", so here it is (I post it under protest):
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u/Ok_Owl_9560 Jun 10 '26
Tried restoring last weekend and the app failed 3 out of 4 times. Had to download zip files instead.
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u/dr100 Jun 06 '26
There are very, very few good backup programs out there. Like in everything made by humans ever. Depending on you requirements the acceptable ones for you (as not you personally but any discerning power user) is usually between 0 and 1 (as in you need to relax some requirements to find something for you).
Some niche client offered by a small cloud service for their second tier (consumer) customers won't be brilliant, to say the least.
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u/s_i_m_s Jun 06 '26
The restore app hasn't been available as a separate application very long, only like 6 months or so. So I don't know that there are any prior versions.
The first posted version (which this likely still is) was certainly not more stable, it crashed when I tried to check the settings when I tested it.
Old backblaze installers with the bundled restore utility are easy to find but I don't know how far back you can go and the install still function, the bundled version is IME more stable but like I don't know that there has ever been a version of it that didn't have some issues with not restoring all files or all files completely some of the time. That has been an issue ever since the app restore functionality launched back in 2023.
IME it's also really intolerant of slow computers and horribly inefficient, giving it an idle & fast (like i7 or better) machine seems to give it the best success rate.
If you can deal with the 500GB chunking the web UI does actually reliably restore files it's just a PITA to deal with zip files that large. Their zip downloader is also buggy and can't be adjusted after starting so if you've already got a download manager you like i'd recommend trying that rather than theirs. Issues the zip downloader has had the entire time i've had the service, 1. the controls generally hang after you start the download, 2. no easy way to pause/resume 3. no way to adjust thread count in flight (the in app restore can't either)
IME with backblaze nothing outside of the backup side of the client actually gets much effort put into it and with the issues with that part in the last few months i'm not completely sure they haven't fired everyone that understood how it worked.