rclone + Backblaze

A Field Guide

This is a friendly walkthrough for moving a project folder from one place in our B2 archive to another, safely and in a way you can repeat without thinking too hard. You do not need to be an IT person. If you can follow a recipe, you can do this. Read the first few sections once to build the mental picture, then keep the cheat sheet at the end handy for the day-to-day.

1. The mental model (read this once)

rclone is a free tool you run in the terminal that moves files to, from, and within cloud storage. Think of it as a very fast, very literal assistant: it does exactly what you tell it, nothing more and nothing less. That literalness is why a little care up front can save you a big headache later.

Backblaze B2 is the cloud storage where our archived projects live. In this guide we are copying a project folder (a.k.a. a prefix) from one spot in B2 to another spot in B2.

What is a “prefix”?

B2 does not really have folders the way your computer does. It keeps one big flat list of files, and each file has a long name that includes its path, like 2026/26016_CZ_final/shot_01.mov. The part in front of the file name, 2026/26016_CZ_final/, is called a prefix. For everyday purposes you can read “prefix” as “folder.” When this guide says “copy from one prefix to another,” it means “copy from one folder to another.”

The shape of a B2 address

Every location you point rclone at looks like this:

b2:bucket-name/prefix/path

Broken into pieces:

  • b2: is the remote: your saved connection to Backblaze, set up once inside rclone. The colon is part of it and is required.
  • bucket-name is the top-level container, like Utopic-Cloud-Archive.
  • Everything after that first slash is the prefix (your folder path).

So b2:Utopic-Cloud-Archive/2026/26016_CZ_final means: the 2026/26016_CZ_final folder inside the Utopic-Cloud-Archive bucket.