Backblaze Hates My Wireless Keyboard and Mouse

[Michael McChesney]

I have a computer in my living room connected to my TV with almost 10 TB of files spread between 2 HDs & an SSD.  I had some of it backuped on external drives, but really didn't backup regularly enough.  I figured an online backup solution would be too expensive, but I saw LTT sponsor backblaze offered unlimited storage for $70/year.  I started my backup at 8:58 am on 9/9/2021 and am now almost 90% backed up.  I have had one problem though.  My mouse and keyboard freeze up on me.  I am using an inexpensive Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard that use one bluetooth dongle. .  At first it was something that only happened occasionally.  But as the month has gone on it has just gotten worse and worse,  I changed the batteries so I know it's not that.  Funny thing though, when I rebooted and paused the backup as soon as it restarted, both are working fine again.  

 

I am not so much looking for solutions as just wondering of anyone has had any similar experience? I was thinking the PCIE WiFi/Bluetooth card might have been getting overwhelmed, but the mouse and keyboard connect to a dongle.  The backup is almost finished and even if I only run it when I am not using my computer it will be fully backuped in less than a week.  While having the initial backup take this long has been a little annoying, it will be nice no longer feel guilty because I know better than not to keep my drives backed up.   

[LIGISTX]

41 minutes ago, Michael McChesney said:

I have a computer in my living room connected to my TV with almost 10 TB of files spread between 2 HDs & an SSD.  I had some of it backuped on external drives, but really didn't backup regularly enough.  I figured an online backup solution would be too expensive, but I saw LTT sponsor backblaze offered unlimited storage for $70/year.  I started my backup at 8:58 am on 9/9/2021 and am now almost 90% backed up.  I have had one problem though.  My mouse and keyboard freeze up on me.  I am using an inexpensive Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard that use one bluetooth dongle. .  At first it was something that only happened occasionally.  But as the month has gone on it has just gotten worse and worse,  I changed the batteries so I know it's not that.  Funny thing though, when I rebooted and paused the backup as soon as it restarted, both are working fine again.  

 

I am not so much looking for solutions as just wondering of anyone has had any similar experience? I was thinking the PCIE WiFi/Bluetooth card might have been getting overwhelmed, but the mouse and keyboard connect to a dongle.  The backup is almost finished and even if I only run it when I am not using my computer it will be fully backuped in less than a week.  While having the initial backup take this long has been a little annoying, it will be nice no longer feel guilty because I know better than not to keep my drives backed up.   

Is the backup using all of your CPU somehow? Maybe due to encrypting/dedupicating files?

[Michael McChesney]

37 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Is the backup using all of your CPU somehow? Maybe due to encrypting/dedupicating files?

My drives aren't encrypted, but that might be it.  I checked the settings and it has a setting for "maximum number of backup threads."  The recommended setting is 8 threads.  I am not sure if that is the same thing as CPU threads.  But even if it was I'm running a 9900K so I would think it would be able to handle playing a YouTube video and playing a game of spider solitaire with the other 8 threads.  But I've reduced the backup threads to 1 and restarted the upload.   So far it is letting me type this reply.  I'll increase the threads to 8 again when I am not using my computer. Thank you for the suggestion.

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, Michael McChesney said:

My drives aren't encrypted, but that might be it.  I checked the settings and it has a setting for "maximum number of backup threads."  The recommended setting is 8 threads.  I am not sure if that is the same thing as CPU threads.  But even if it was I'm running a 9900K so I would think it would be able to handle playing a YouTube video and playing a game of spider solitaire with the other 8 threads.  But I've reduced the backup threads to 1 and restarted the upload.   So far it is letting me type this reply.  I'll increase the threads to 8 again when I am not using my computer. Thank you for the suggestion.

1) a 9900k has 16 threads, not 8, it has 8 cores, each with hyper threading

2) I would agree, this shouldn't be an issue.... you should be limited by internet bandwidth way before the backblaze application threading unless its for some crazy reason running out to way more threads then needed to saturate your upload pipe. I would think setting it to say 10 would be fine. That should provide plenty of threads to saturate your upload bandwidth and shouldn't take much CPU power.

3) as far as encryption, I meant maybe the encryption backblaze is applying to the backup is eating CPU (it really shouldn't....), but encryption is not turned on by default. You 100% should have set a custom encryption key before you started the backup in order to secure your uploaded data, hopefully you did this? If not, I believe backblaze is storing all your data in plain text which means whatever your backing up is not exactly protected.

[Michael McChesney]

39 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

1) a 9900k has 16 threads, not 8, it has 8 cores, each with hyper threading

2) I would agree, this shouldn't be an issue.... you should be limited by internet bandwidth way before the backblaze application threading unless its for some crazy reason running out to way more threads then needed to saturate your upload pipe. I would think setting it to say 10 would be fine. That should provide plenty of threads to saturate your upload bandwidth and shouldn't take much CPU power.

3) as far as encryption, I meant maybe the encryption backblaze is applying to the backup is eating CPU (it really shouldn't....), but encryption is not turned on by default. You 100% should have set a custom encryption key before you started the backup in order to secure your uploaded data, hopefully you did this? If not, I believe backblaze is storing all your data in plain text which means whatever your backing up is not exactly protected.

I knew my PC has 16 threads.  What I meant was that even if the backup was using 8 the other 8 should have been enough.

 

I did not set up an encryption key.  Do you know if it is possible to encrypt the backup after it has been uploaded?  Or would I need to start the upload over?  I really do not want to spend another month on this backup.  Though I suppose worse case scenario, my only really sensitive files are on my C drive and that's only a couple hundred GBs.  

[Michael McChesney]

55 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

1) a 9900k has 16 threads, not 8, it has 8 cores, each with hyper threading

2) I would agree, this shouldn't be an issue.... you should be limited by internet bandwidth way before the backblaze application threading unless its for some crazy reason running out to way more threads then needed to saturate your upload pipe. I would think setting it to say 10 would be fine. That should provide plenty of threads to saturate your upload bandwidth and shouldn't take much CPU power.

3) as far as encryption, I meant maybe the encryption backblaze is applying to the backup is eating CPU (it really shouldn't....), but encryption is not turned on by default. You 100% should have set a custom encryption key before you started the backup in order to secure your uploaded data, hopefully you did this? If not, I believe backblaze is storing all your data in plain text which means whatever your backing up is not exactly protected.

Actually, my data is being encrypted.  They call it "invisible encryption" and my data is being encrypted before the upload.  That is probably what's responsible for the drain on my CPU.  

 

Thank you for the advice.