Since introducing B2 Cloud Storage nearly four years ago, we’ve been busy adding enhancements and new functionality to the service. We continually look for ways to make B2 more useful for our customers, be it through service level enhancements, partnerships with leading Compute providers, or lowering the industry’s lowest download price to 1¢/GB. Today, we’re pleased to announce the beta release of our newest functionality: Copy File.

What You Can Do With B2 Copy File

This new capability enables you to create a new file (or new part of a large file) that is a copy of an existing file (or range of an existing file). You can either copy over the source file’s metadata or specify new metadata for the new file that is created. This all occurs without having to download or reupload any data.

This has been one of our most requested features, as it unlocks:

Rename/Re-organize. The new capabilities give customers the ability to reorganize their files without having to download and reupload. This is especially helpful when trying to mirror the contents of a file system to B2.

Synthetic Backup. With the ability to copy ranges of a file, users can now leverage B2 for synthetic backup, which is uploading a full backup but then only uploading incremental changes (as opposed to reuploading the whole file with every change). This is particularly helpful for uses such as backing up VMs, where reuploading the entirety of the file every time it changes creates user inefficiencies.

Where to Learn More About B2 Copy File

The endpoint documentation can be found here:

b2_copy_file: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_copy_file.html

b2_copy_part: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_copy_part.html

More About the Beta Program

We’re introducing these endpoints as a beta so that developers can provide us feedback before the endpoints go into production. Specifically, this means that the APIs may evolve as a result of the feedback we get. We encourage you to give Copy File a try and, if you have any comments, you can email our B2 beta team at b2beta@backblaze.com. Thanks!