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If you use the Backblaze online-backup system on a Mac and you haven’t upgraded to version 8.5, I recommend doing so; the user experience is far better than in older versions.

I was using a version that was a System Preferences panel, which has always been annoying to use; for example, after I clicked the “Backup Now” button, there would be no visible response at all for sometimes up to a few minutes before it told me that it was scanning my hard drive.

After I updated macOS to Ventura 13.x, the Backblaze experience got a little worse, because it was no longer easy to find Backblaze in the new Settings app.

So I decided to go look on the Backblaze site to see if there was a new version for Ventura. There wasn’t, but the latest version was newer than the version I had, so I installed the latest version.

And the latest version is much better. It’s a standalone app instead of a Settings panel. The installer ran so fast that I didn’t think it had done anything. It seamlessly got rid of the old version and set up the new one. When I click “Backup Now” in the new version, it immediately reacts, and the scanning-your-hard-drives dialog now has a progress bar.

Also, there are now settings that appear to let you manually reduce the system resources that the app uses. In the past, I haven’t let Backblaze run automatically because it slowed my computer to a crawl while it was running; I’m hoping that the new setting will let me run it more often while still using my computer.

All very pleasing.

(In theory, Backblaze is supposed to let you know when there’s a new version available; in practice, I didn’t receive any sort of notification about this. It’s possible that the standalone-app version has been available for a long time and I just didn’t know about it.)