How to Restore a Backblaze Snapshot Regardless of Size Without Needing a Hard Drive Shipped

No longer does one need a hard drive shipped from Backblaze to download your snapshot. Ignore the backblaze download utility and instead use the command line tool. With a few technical steps, you can download a snapshot, no matter the size. Just be prepared to turn off sleep function for your computer and leave it on overnight, depending on size of snapshot. This worked for a 2.5 TB snapshot I downloaded.

Steps:

Before doing anything, select your files in restore mode and create a snapshot.

1] In backblaze portal, under b2 cloud storage -> application keys, create a key with read access to all buckets. Take note of the key id and key itself, store in a notepad/text edit document.

2] Download backblaze command line tool from https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-command-line-tools and extract the excutable. Put it somewhere in your path like c:/windows/system32 (or for linux, /bin). For Linux, use chmod +x /bin/b2 to allow it to execute. For Windows, you may need to right click the b2-windows.exe file and select properties -> unblock.

3] Find your snapshot id under b2 cloud storage -> browse. It’ll be something like b2-snapshot-ab235fae2cc6. Copy it into the text document.

4] Find your snapshot name under b2 cloud storage -> snapshots. It’ll end with .zip — make sure to copy the name with the .zip extension and put in the text document.

5] Authorize the backblaze command line tool by opening command prompt and navigating to a location with plenty of space for your snapshot, i.e. type cd d:/mybackupdrive/restore. Then type b2-windows.exe account authorize [application_key_id] [application_key]

Note: find the key id and key in the text document from earlier.

Note 2: depending on your operating system, the command line tool might be called b2-linux, b2, or something else.

6] Now type b2-windows.exe file download “b2://[snapshotid]/[snapshotname]” “./[snapshotname]”

Note 3: find the snapshot id and snapshot name in the text document from earlier.

Note 4: the download command will not show correct progress, staying at 0% for a long time. But it is working, and the file will grow if you watch it in explorer/finder. Once it reaches 100%, if it stays stuck, wait a few minutes, then ctrl-c to kill it. The file should be whole.

7] Use 7zip (or unzip on Linux) to extract the files to a place of your choosing. On Windows this will be exponentially faster than trying to extract with Windows explorer. https://www.7-zip.org/download.html

8] Once you verify files are good, delete the application key you made earlier.