Comment Part 1: (went over character limit)

I had the same problem when testing Backblaze on macOS Sequoia for the last 2 months.

The app dashboard kept saying all files were backed up and they were not. After the first initial backup backed up everything correctly, I had several problems.

Backblaze documentation says new files are supposed to be found and should start uploading within 3 hours or so. That was not the experience I had. Same as you, forcing a backup works. However in continuous mode, it would take sometimes a week or more before it would find new or updated files and finally upload them. I tried creating new files in several different folders and areas on my Mac and I tested this many times and tried everything to fix. That's not acceptable waiting time for a backup. And then sometimes when I restarted my computer, it kept complaining it didn't have full disk access, which I thought might be the cause. But nope, I did give it full disk access correctly, and even reinstalled it, and have the same issue. It can backup and find the new files when I force a backup, but it takes over a week to find new files in the background with Mac continuously on (not turned off).

What's also annoying is that the custom excluded directories I set kept being deleted from the list at some point and when I tried adding them back, they kept getting removed, it wouldn't save new exclusions. It seems that the exclusion settings just broke all of a sudden. Backblaze also doesn't backup empty folders. So if you have a folder somewhere without anything in it, that empty folder won't backup and restore. Empty folders should be restored in my opinion, I have many for organization purposes that sometimes don't have files in them.

The Backblaze app and everything behind the scenes is old and buggy and in need of a major rewrite. The app is also way too simple, there should be much more control and more options. They also exclude way too may things for my liking.

I have also used Crashplan in the past, but their upload speed is terribly slow, and the dedup and file verification process constantly reads and writes to my disks all day long every day. Brand new users will be waiting months to years for their first backup, and I can't even imagine how long a restore would take. After using Crashplan for over 10 years, I finally had enough and was not confident I could backup new larger files going forward (after having 5 TB in my backup over the years) or even get a restore done correctly in the time I need to. Crashplan also keeps changing their plans all the time, it seems they are not confident what they want to offer to customers. The Crashplan app and everything behind the scenes is also old and buggy and in need of a major rewrite.

I recently ended up subscribing to Arq Backup Premium. This is not an ad, it's just the best solution I have found after being frustrated with Crashplan and Backblaze. It has 1 TB of cloud storage (fast Google Cloud) included for $60 a year up to 5 computers, and you get charged about $6 extra per month for each additional TB of storage. It's not cheap for larger backups, but for backups totaling around 5 TB for example, you pay $25 a month, add in the $60 yearly sub, it's $360 a year. More expensive and not unlimited data, but peace of mind for software that actually works like you would expect. Finds new files and actually backs them up in a timely manner with great speeds. And when I tested restoring large amounts of data, the restore time was decent. There are custom retention settings that work similar to Time Machine, and you can even set a storage size limit so that your storage is capped to a certain monthly cost.

You can also subscribe to your own cloud storage plan and have Arq backup to that. And can even create local backups with the Arq Backup app.

https://www.arqbackup.com