Offload Drive moves the files you rarely touch — photo libraries, video projects, old archives — off your Mac and into your own encrypted cloud, so you actually get the disk space back. Unlike Dropbox or iCloud, it isn’t a synced copy that keeps your Mac full — it’s a separate drive that lives online, one click from anything.
Backup and sync apps copy your files and leave the originals on your Mac — your disk stays full. Offload Drive moves them off, so you actually get the space back.
Move the big stuff off your Mac, pay raw-storage prices for it, and keep it encrypted so nobody can peek through — not us, not Backblaze.
Move old photo libraries, video projects and archives off your Mac entirely. Originals are deleted locally only after the encrypted upload is verified — so you get gigabytes back, safely.
File contents and even file names are scrambled locally with the battle-tested rclone crypt format. Backblaze — or anyone who ever breaches it — sees only noise.
A native in-app browser lists your whole backup with real file dates and global search across every file — no mounting, no waiting, no beachballs.
One click shows every photo or video across your entire backup as a gallery — full-screen viewing, video playback, and arrow-key paging through thousands of memories.
A baseline SHA-1 manifest plus on-demand verification re-downloads files and re-hashes them — detecting even a single flipped bit before you'd ever need to.
Watch uploads tick by from the menu bar icon itself — percentage, speed, ETA. Drag files onto the menu to back them up.
Your data sits in your own bucket in the open rclone format. Even without the app, free open-source tools + your password recover everything.
Consumer clouds sell fixed tiers with their keys to your data. B2 sells raw storage — Offload Drive makes it feel like a consumer product.
500 GB of family photos ≈ $3/month on B2.
Offload Drive is coming to the Mac App Store. Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
The in-app wizard walks you through these exact steps — here's the whole thing, so you know there's no magic and no middleman.
Sign up at backblaze.com/sign-up/cloud-storage. The first 10 GB are free — no card required to start.
Open in Backblaze →In B2 Cloud Storage → Buckets, click “Create a Bucket”, pick a unique name (e.g. yourname-offload), and set Files in Bucket to Private. Leave server-side encryption off — Offload Drive encrypts before upload.
Open in Backblaze →In Account → Application Keys, click “Add a New Application Key”. Scope it to your bucket, Read & Write. Copy the keyID and applicationKey it shows you once.
Open in Backblaze →Open the app — the setup wizard asks for those three values, generates a strong encryption password (save it!), tests the connection, and you're live.
The wizard generates it and makes you confirm you've stored it safely (a password manager is perfect). It never leaves your Mac — which also means nobody can recover it for you. Without it, your backup is unreadable. That's the point.
Offload Drive is a macOS menu-bar app that moves files off your Mac into your own private, encrypted Backblaze B2 cloud — freeing up local disk space. Back up files and folders, browse and search everything you've stored, preview photos, videos and documents in-app, and verify your backup is bit-perfect — while paying Backblaze's raw storage price of about $6 per terabyte per month.