Back Up an External Hard Drive (Mac)

You can use Backblaze Computer Backup to back up your external hard drives using the Backblaze Mac client.

Connect External Hard Drives

1. Open the Backblaze Client Preferences Panel.
2. Click Settings.
3. Select the Settings tab.
4. In the Select Hard Drives for Backup section, select the hard drive that you want to back up.
5. Click OK.

Connect External Hard Drives (MacOS 10.15 and Later)

If you have external or secondary hard drives connected to your Mac that you want to back up and your operating system is macOS 10.15 Catalina or a more recent OS version, you must grant "bzbmenu" access to your removable volumes.

Typically, macOS displays a dialog box that asks whether you want to grant bzbmenu permission to read your external or secondary hard drives. If you see this dialog box, click Yes or click Allow and no further steps are required.

Follow these steps if you click No, or you do not see the dialog box.

1. Navigate to your Mac Security & Privacy settings.
2. Click Files and Folders.
3. Under bzbmenu, select Removable Volumes.
4. Connect all of your selected external drives to your computer to allow bzbmenu to verify access on each individual drive, or you may continue to see the dialog box after you grant permission.

View Files Backed Up from an External Hard Drive

There are two options to ensure that the files on your external hard drive are backing up. 

Use the Backblaze Web UI to View Files

1. Sign in to your Backblaze account.
2. In the left navigation menu under Computer Backup, click View/Restore Files.
3. Scroll to the backup that contains your external hard drive files.

Use the Backblaze Client for Mac to View Files

1. Open the Backblaze Client Preferences Panel.
2. Click Settings.
3. Select the Reports tab.
4. Select Files Scheduled for Backup.
   A log displays only the next 1,000 files that are scheduled for backup. If your backup is up-to-date, this log will be empty.

Resume an External Hard Drive Backup after Renaming

If you change the name of your external hard drive, you must reselect it for backup.

1. Open the Backblaze Client Preferences Panel.
2. Click Settings.
3. Select the Settings tab.
4. In the Select Hard Drives for Backup section, select your renamed external hard drive or clear the external hard drives that you no longer want to back up. 
5. Click OK.

It may take some time for the backup to complete the process and resume backing up. You may see all of your files queued for back up, but a majority of them should recognize that they are already backed up, and "deduplicate" resulting in them updating on the server rather than re-uploading.