rclone/docs/content/b2.md

title	description	date
B2	Backblaze B2	2015-12-29

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. You will need your account number (a short hex number) and key (a long hex number) which you can get from the b2 control panel.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
q) Quit config
n/q> n
name> remote
What type of source is it?
Choose a number from below
 1) amazon cloud drive
 2) b2
 3) drive
 4) dropbox
 5) google cloud storage
 6) swift
 7) hubic
 8) local
 9) onedrive
10) s3
type> 2
Account 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:

Make 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 /home/local/directory remote:bucket

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 set on upload, read on download and shown in listings. They are not used in syncing as unfortunately B2 doesn't have an API method to set them independently of doing an upload.

SHA1 checksums

The SHA1 checksums of the files are checked on upload and download and will be used in the syncing process. You can use the --checksum flag.

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 still be available.

The old versions of files are visible in the B2 web interface, but not via rclone yet.

Rclone doesn't provide any way of managing old versions (downloading them or deleting them) at the moment. When you purge a bucket, all the old versions will be deleted.

Bugs

Note that when uploading a file, rclone has to make a temporary copy of it in your temp filing system. This is due to a weakness in the B2 API which I'm hoping will be addressed soon.

API

Here are some notes I made on the backblaze API while integrating it with rclone which detail the changes I'd like to see. With a couple of small tweaks Backblaze could enable rclone to not make a temporary copy of all files and fully support modification times.