Backblaze Cloud Backup 5.0: The Rapid Access Release

Announcing Backblaze Cloud Backup 5.0: The Rapid Access Release. We’ve been at the backup game for a long time now, and we continue to focus on providing the best unlimited backup service on the planet. A lot of the features in this release have come from listening to our customers about how they want to use their data. “Rapid Access” quickly became the theme because, well, we’re all acquiring more and more data and want to access it in a myriad of ways.

This release brings a lot of new functionality to Backblaze Computer Backup: faster backups, accelerated file browsing, image preview, individual file download (without creating a “restore”), and file sharing. To top it all off, we’ve refreshed the user interface on our client app. We hope you like it!

Speeding Things Up

New code + new hardware + elbow grease = Things are going to move much faster.

Faster Backups

We’ve doubled the number of threads available for backup on both Mac and PC. This gives our service the ability to intelligently detect the right settings for you (based on your computer, capacity, and bandwidth). As always, you can manually set the number of threads—keep in mind that if you have a slow internet connection, adding threads might have the opposite effect and slow you down. On its default settings, our client app will now automatically evaluate what’s best given your environment. We’ve internally tested our service backing up at over 100 Mbps, which means if you have a fast enough internet connection, you could back up 50GB in just one hour.

Faster Browsing

We’ve introduced a number of enhancements that increase file browsing speed by three times. Hidden files are no longer displayed by default, but you can still show them with one click on the restore page. This gives the restore interface a cleaner look, and helps you navigate backup history if you need to roll back time.

Faster Restore Preparation

We take pride in providing a variety of ways for consumers to get their data back. When something has happened to your computer, getting your files back quickly is critical. Both web download restores and Restore by Mail will now be much faster. In some cases up to 10 times faster!

Preview, Access, Share

Our system has received a number of enhancements—all intended to give you more access to your data.

Image Preview

If you have a lot of photos, this one’s for you. When you go to the restore page, you’ll now be able to click on each individual file that we have backed up, and if it’s an image, you’ll see a preview of that file. We hope this helps people figure out which pictures they want to download (this especially helps people with a lot of photos named something along the lines of: 2017-04-20-9783-41241.jpg). Now you can just click on the picture to preview it.

Access

Once you’ve clicked on a file (30MB and smaller), you’ll be able to individually download that file directly in your browser. You’ll no longer need to wait for a single-file restore to be built and zipped up; you’ll be able to download it quickly and easily. This was a highly requested feature and we’re stoked to get it implemented.

We’re leveraging Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and giving folks the ability to publicly share their files. In order to use this feature, you’ll need to enable Backblaze B2 on your account (if you haven’t already, there’s a simple wizard that will pop up the first time you try to share a file). Files can be shared anywhere in the world via URL. All Backblaze B2 accounts have 10GB/month of storage and 1GB/day of downloads (equivalent to sharing an iPhone photo 1,000 times per month) for free. You can increase those limits in your B2 Cloud Storage Settings. Keep in mind that any file you share will be accessible to anybody with the link. Learn more about File Sharing.

For now, we’ve limited the preview/access/share functionality to files 30MB and smaller, but larger files will be supported in the coming weeks!

Other Goodies

In addition to adding two-factor verification via ToTP, we’ve also been hard at work on the client. In version 5.0, we’ve touched up the user interface to make it a bit more lively, and we’ve also made the client IPv6 compatible.