The Mystery of Backblaze’s bzdatacenter folder (updated!)

I’ve been using Backblaze for my off-site backup for over a year now. (You can read about my initial experiences with the service, if you’d like.) While doing some file / folder size analysis, I came across a rather large-sized Backblaze folder inside my root level Library folder.

Tunneling down the BackBlaze folder led me to discover that there is approximately 2.6 GB of data files are located inside the bzdatacenter folder. More specifically, they seem to be .dat files that indicate when backups were performed.

I’d like to be able to clear those files, if I can, to reclaim my 2.6GB. I’ve sent a note into Backblaze to find out more about the bzdatacenter folder. Internet searches didn’t yield much, so I’ll try and follow-up with Backblaze’s response here.

Update: Here’s the response I received from Yev of Backblaze, when I asked if it was possible to use symbolic links to point the bzdata folder and its contents to a separate drive:

Krishna,

No, if you create a symbolic link to, say, an external drive, and then remove the drive from the computer, it will break Backblaze as the link will be pointing to nothing, and since those files are imperative to the backup, we absolutely do not recommend it, otherwise your backup will not be available.

If you are hoping to save space, I believe the folder taking up a lot of the room is the “bzcurrentlargefile”, it will grow by the largest file you are currently uploading, and then free-up the space. You can exclude larger files which should free-up your space in that particular folder, you can do so by opening the Backblaze control panel, going to Settings, Exclude from Backup, and change it from the default 4GB, to a lower amount.

Thank you,
Yev
Backblaze

Yev also was kind enough to alert me to update to the latest version of the Backblaze client software, as my backups had for some peculiar reason not been updating for at least two days.

Fast response from Backblaze – kudos to their team for their thorough response to my question.

-Krishna