Backblaze B2

B2 is Backblaze's cloud storage system.

Paths are specified as remote:bucket (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:bucket/path/to/dir .

Here is an example of making a b2 configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process. To authenticate you will either need your Account ID (a short hex number) and Master Application Key (a long hex number) OR an Application Key, which is the recommended method. See below for further details on generating and using an Application Key.

No remotes found - make a new one n) New remote q) Quit config n/q> n name> remote Type of storage to configure. Choose a number from below, or type in your own value [snip] XX / Backblaze B2 \ "b2" [snip] Storage> b2 Account ID or Application Key ID account> 123456789abc Application Key key> 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789 Endpoint for the service - leave blank normally. endpoint> Remote config -------------------- [remote] account = 123456789abc key = 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789 endpoint = -------------------- y) Yes this is OK e) Edit this remote d) Delete this remote y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all buckets

rclone lsd remote:

Create a new bucket

rclone mkdir remote:bucket

List the contents of a bucket

rclone ls remote:bucket

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote bucket, deleting any excess files in the bucket.

rclone sync -i /home/local/directory remote:bucket

Application Keys

B2 supports multiple Application Keys for different access permission to B2 Buckets.

You can use these with rclone too; you will need to use rclone version 1.43 or later.

Follow Backblaze's docs to create an Application Key with the required permission and add the applicationKeyId as the account and the Application Key itself as the key .

Note that you must put the applicationKeyId as the account – you can't use the master Account ID. If you try then B2 will return 401 errors.

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

The modified time is stored as metadata on the object as X-Bz-Info-src_last_modified_millis as milliseconds since 1970-01-01 in the Backblaze standard. Other tools should be able to use this as a modified time.

Modified times are used in syncing and are fully supported. Note that if a modification time needs to be updated on an object then it will create a new version of the object.

Restricted filename characters

In addition to the default restricted characters set the following characters are also replaced:

Character Value Replacement \ 0x5C ＼

Invalid UTF-8 bytes will also be replaced, as they can't be used in JSON strings.

Note that in 2020-05 Backblaze started allowing \ characters in file names. Rclone hasn't changed its encoding as this could cause syncs to re-transfer files. If you want rclone not to replace \ then see the --b2-encoding flag below and remove the BackSlash from the string. This can be set in the config.

SHA1 checksums

The SHA1 checksums of the files are checked on upload and download and will be used in the syncing process.

Large files (bigger than the limit in --b2-upload-cutoff ) which are uploaded in chunks will store their SHA1 on the object as X-Bz-Info-large_file_sha1 as recommended by Backblaze.

For a large file to be uploaded with an SHA1 checksum, the source needs to support SHA1 checksums. The local disk supports SHA1 checksums so large file transfers from local disk will have an SHA1. See the overview for exactly which remotes support SHA1.

Sources which don't support SHA1, in particular crypt will upload large files without SHA1 checksums. This may be fixed in the future (see #1767).

Files sizes below --b2-upload-cutoff will always have an SHA1 regardless of the source.

Transfers

Backblaze recommends that you do lots of transfers simultaneously for maximum speed. In tests from my SSD equipped laptop the optimum setting is about --transfers 32 though higher numbers may be used for a slight speed improvement. The optimum number for you may vary depending on your hardware, how big the files are, how much you want to load your computer, etc. The default of --transfers 4 is definitely too low for Backblaze B2 though.

Note that uploading big files (bigger than 200 MB by default) will use a 96 MB RAM buffer by default. There can be at most --transfers of these in use at any moment, so this sets the upper limit on the memory used.

Versions

When rclone uploads a new version of a file it creates a new version of it. Likewise when you delete a file, the old version will be marked hidden and still be available. Conversely, you may opt in to a "hard delete" of files with the --b2-hard-delete flag which would permanently remove the file instead of hiding it.

Old versions of files, where available, are visible using the --b2-versions flag.

NB Note that --b2-versions does not work with crypt at the moment #1627. Using --backup-dir with rclone is the recommended way of working around this.

If you wish to remove all the old versions then you can use the rclone cleanup remote:bucket command which will delete all the old versions of files, leaving the current ones intact. You can also supply a path and only old versions under that path will be deleted, eg rclone cleanup remote:bucket/path/to/stuff .

Note that cleanup will remove partially uploaded files from the bucket if they are more than a day old.

When you purge a bucket, the current and the old versions will be deleted then the bucket will be deleted.

However delete will cause the current versions of the files to become hidden old versions.

Here is a session showing the listing and retrieval of an old version followed by a cleanup of the old versions.

Show current version and all the versions with --b2-versions flag.

$ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt $ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt 8 one-v2016-07-04-141032-000.txt 16 one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt 15 one-v2016-07-02-155621-000.txt

Retrieve an old version

$ rclone -q --b2-versions copy b2:cleanup-test/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt /tmp $ ls -l /tmp/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt -rw-rw-r-- 1 ncw ncw 16 Jul 2 17:46 /tmp/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt

Clean up all the old versions and show that they've gone.

$ rclone -q cleanup b2:cleanup-test $ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt $ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt

Data usage

It is useful to know how many requests are sent to the server in different scenarios.

All copy commands send the following 4 requests:

/b2api/v1/b2_authorize_account /b2api/v1/b2_create_bucket /b2api/v1/b2_list_buckets /b2api/v1/b2_list_file_names

The b2_list_file_names request will be sent once for every 1k files in the remote path, providing the checksum and modification time of the listed files. As of version 1.33 issue #818 causes extra requests to be sent when using B2 with Crypt. When a copy operation does not require any files to be uploaded, no more requests will be sent.

Uploading files that do not require chunking, will send 2 requests per file upload:

/b2api/v1/b2_get_upload_url /b2api/v1/b2_upload_file/

Uploading files requiring chunking, will send 2 requests (one each to start and finish the upload) and another 2 requests for each chunk:

/b2api/v1/b2_start_large_file /b2api/v1/b2_get_upload_part_url /b2api/v1/b2_upload_part/ /b2api/v1/b2_finish_large_file

Versions

Versions can be viewed with the --b2-versions flag. When it is set rclone will show and act on older versions of files. For example

Listing without --b2-versions

$ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt

And with

$ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test 9 one.txt 8 one-v2016-07-04-141032-000.txt 16 one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt 15 one-v2016-07-02-155621-000.txt

Showing that the current version is unchanged but older versions can be seen. These have the UTC date that they were uploaded to the server to the nearest millisecond appended to them.

Note that when using --b2-versions no file write operations are permitted, so you can't upload files or delete them.

B2 and rclone link

Rclone supports generating file share links for private B2 buckets. They can either be for a file for example:

./rclone link B2:bucket/path/to/file.txt https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket/path/to/file.txt?Authorization=xxxxxxxx

or if run on a directory you will get:

./rclone link B2:bucket/path https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket/path?Authorization=xxxxxxxx

you can then use the authorization token (the part of the url from the ?Authorization= on) on any file path under that directory. For example:

https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket/path/to/file1?Authorization=xxxxxxxx https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket/path/file2?Authorization=xxxxxxxx https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket/path/folder/file3?Authorization=xxxxxxxx

Standard Options

Here are the standard options specific to b2 (Backblaze B2).

--b2-account

Account ID or Application Key ID

Config: account

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_ACCOUNT

Type: string

Default: ""

--b2-key

Application Key

Config: key

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_KEY

Type: string

Default: ""

--b2-hard-delete

Permanently delete files on remote removal, otherwise hide files.

Config: hard_delete

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_HARD_DELETE

Type: bool

Default: false

Advanced Options

Here are the advanced options specific to b2 (Backblaze B2).

--b2-endpoint

Endpoint for the service. Leave blank normally.

Config: endpoint

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_ENDPOINT

Type: string

Default: ""

--b2-test-mode

A flag string for X-Bz-Test-Mode header for debugging.

This is for debugging purposes only. Setting it to one of the strings below will cause b2 to return specific errors:

"fail_some_uploads"

"expire_some_account_authorization_tokens"

"force_cap_exceeded"

These will be set in the "X-Bz-Test-Mode" header which is documented in the b2 integrations checklist.

Config: test_mode

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_TEST_MODE

Type: string

Default: ""

--b2-versions

Include old versions in directory listings. Note that when using this no file write operations are permitted, so you can't upload files or delete them.

Config: versions

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_VERSIONS

Type: bool

Default: false

--b2-upload-cutoff

Cutoff for switching to chunked upload.

Files above this size will be uploaded in chunks of "--b2-chunk-size".

This value should be set no larger than 4.657GiB (== 5GB).

Config: upload_cutoff

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_UPLOAD_CUTOFF

Type: SizeSuffix

Default: 200M

--b2-copy-cutoff

Cutoff for switching to multipart copy

Any files larger than this that need to be server side copied will be copied in chunks of this size.

The minimum is 0 and the maximum is 4.6GB.

Config: copy_cutoff

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_COPY_CUTOFF

Type: SizeSuffix

Default: 4G

--b2-chunk-size

Upload chunk size. Must fit in memory.

When uploading large files, chunk the file into this size. Note that these chunks are buffered in memory and there might a maximum of "--transfers" chunks in progress at once. 5,000,000 Bytes is the minimum size.

Config: chunk_size

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_CHUNK_SIZE

Type: SizeSuffix

Default: 96M

--b2-disable-checksum

Disable checksums for large (> upload cutoff) files

Normally rclone will calculate the SHA1 checksum of the input before uploading it so it can add it to metadata on the object. This is great for data integrity checking but can cause long delays for large files to start uploading.

Config: disable_checksum

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_DISABLE_CHECKSUM

Type: bool

Default: false

--b2-download-url

Custom endpoint for downloads.

This is usually set to a Cloudflare CDN URL as Backblaze offers free egress for data downloaded through the Cloudflare network. This is probably only useful for a public bucket. Leave blank if you want to use the endpoint provided by Backblaze.

Config: download_url

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_DOWNLOAD_URL

Type: string

Default: ""

--b2-download-auth-duration

Time before the authorization token will expire in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d.

The duration before the download authorization token will expire. The minimum value is 1 second. The maximum value is one week.

Config: download_auth_duration

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_DOWNLOAD_AUTH_DURATION

Type: Duration

Default: 1w

--b2-memory-pool-flush-time

How often internal memory buffer pools will be flushed. Uploads which requires additional buffers (f.e multipart) will use memory pool for allocations. This option controls how often unused buffers will be removed from the pool.

Config: memory_pool_flush_time

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_MEMORY_POOL_FLUSH_TIME

Type: Duration

Default: 1m0s

--b2-memory-pool-use-mmap

Whether to use mmap buffers in internal memory pool.

Config: memory_pool_use_mmap

Env Var: RCLONE_B2_MEMORY_POOL_USE_MMAP

Type: bool

Default: false

--b2-encoding

This sets the encoding for the backend.

See: the encoding section in the overview for more info.