Backblaze and Boot Drive Clones

As a System Administrator most of my apps live in the Utilities category of the App Store. I mostly use them to help others, but from time to time I need those tools to help myself.

When it comes to backup solutions my preferred service is Backblaze (affiliate link) although I also keep a couple of clones around thanks to CarbonCopyCloner.

So today when I got to unwrap a brand new MacBook Pro I didn’t bother using Migration Assistant and just cloned my old MacBook Pro to the new machine via CarbonCopyCloner. Thanks to the wonder of Thunderbolt I migrated my 250GB SSD to the new machine in less than half an hour. After some iCloud password notifications, reauthorizing Dropbox and a few firmware upgrades my machine was ready.

I’m still amazed by the speed Thunderbolt and SSD drives deliver. I’m expecting migrations to take all night, like they used to do in the time of PowerBooks and Firewire, and here I was migrating my main working machine in what was basically an extended lunchbreak.

One issue occurred though: I forgot to migrate Backblaze and I got an error message after a while telling me my drive was missing a bzvol file needed to complete the backups.

The guides I found on [Backblaze’s website](- https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9ptx) only mentions this issue when talking about external hard drives and clones, but it turns out there’s an easy fix:

Fix

  1. Go to System Preferences and open Backblaze.
  2. Go to Settings and select the first tab.
  3. You’ll find that your main drives (Macintosh HD probably) is listed twice in the bottom field.
  4. One is checked and will say (missing), the other is unchecked. Select the one that’s unchecked and accept the dialog that follows.
  5. Backblaze will scan your drive. Once it’s finished you can safely close System Preferences.
  6. All done, your backup now looks at the good drive and forgets the old one. And you won’t need to reupload anything!