Data Holders: How Blober Fits Your Workflow

For a data holder, Blober is one desktop app that moves, organizes and backs up files across all the places they have ended up: object storage, consumer clouds like GoPro Cloud, Dropbox, a NAS and local drives. You set up a workflow once, for example GoPro Cloud to Backblaze B2 sorted into date folders, and run it again whenever you want to catch up. You buy it once, with no recurring or per-GB fees.

Data holders are people and organizations whose work depends on keeping large volumes of files accessible, organized and safe for years, sometimes decades. They include:

• photographers and videographers with terabytes of RAW footage and project archives
• researchers and academics keeping datasets, papers and experimental outputs
• small businesses managing client records, invoices, contracts and media assets
• IT administrators responsible for infrastructure backups and compliance archives
• content creators with video, audio and design libraries spread across platforms
• legal and medical professionals bound by retention rules for sensitive records
• personal archivists preserving family photos, home videos and documents

Few data holders plan to have files in five places. Files start on a laptop, a NAS or an external drive, then spread across cloud services: Google Drive for sharing, Dropbox for syncing, an S3 bucket for backups. Platforms hold on to what they store, with GoPro Cloud keeping the footage, iCloud the photos and OneDrive the documents. Eventually folder names drift, backups fall behind, and some files have three copies while others have none, and no single tool shows all of it.

Blober is the only app that connects directly to GoPro Cloud, so no other single tool covers this whole list.

To copy files from one provider to another, Blober downloads from the source and uploads to the destination as it goes, without saving a full copy on your disk, so no half-downloaded files are left on a local drive. Your credentials stay on your computer and never pass through third-party servers. The data itself does travel over your own connection: a 2 TB migration runs at the speed of your internet link and counts against your bandwidth and any ISP data cap. A copy or move inside one account (the same bucket or storage account, and the same region for S3) first tries the provider's own server-side copy, which moves no data through your computer.

A path template sorts files into folders as they transfer. With this template:

/{file_created_date}/{filename}

a flat dump of 50,000 files becomes one folder per day:

/2025-06-14/GX015742.MP4
/2025-06-14/IMG_4521.CR3
/2026-01-03/IMG_0032.HEIC

Templates can use the dates, names, extensions, sizes and folders each provider reports, but not camera models or other EXIF data from inside files. They work on any transfer: cloud to cloud, cloud to local, or local to cloud.

• If your connection drops or the computer restarts, the transfer resumes where it left off.
• Re-running a workflow with the default Skip policy leaves out any file already at its destination path. A changed file with the same name is skipped too, so choose Overwrite when you want updates copied.
• Files in the tens of gigabytes go up as multipart uploads.

A run needs no supervision once it starts. Blober has no scheduler, so each run starts when you start it.

Most cloud migration tools charge per GB or sell annual subscriptions with data caps, and for data holders who move terabytes regularly those costs compound:

You buy Blober once, and the price stays the same whether you transfer 1 TB or 100 TB.

8 TB of footage sits across GoPro Cloud, a local NAS and Google Drive, and finished work goes to clients through Dropbox. With Blober, the videographer:

• copies all the footage from GoPro Cloud to Backblaze B2 as a cold archive
• moves finished projects from the NAS to Cloudflare R2 for client delivery
• sorts files into date folders with a path template
• re-runs a Google Drive to B2 copy to refresh a second backup

One tool replaces four manual processes, and the total cost is one Blober license.

The business keeps 500 GB of compliance documents in Azure Blob Storage and its day-to-day files in Google Workspace, and regulations require an off-site backup. With Blober, the admin:

• transfers the compliance archive from Azure to Backblaze B2 as a secondary backup
• copies the important Google Drive folders to a local NAS at the end of each day
• keeps the default Skip policy, so each run copies only the files that aren't on the NAS yet

That meets the audit requirement for geographic redundancy without a second enterprise cloud account.

The lab has 12 TB of experimental datasets in AWS S3, generates new data every week, and its grants require keeping data for 10 years. With Blober, the lab:

• migrates completed datasets from S3 Standard to Backblaze B2 (80% storage cost reduction)
• keeps active datasets in S3, close to its compute
• sorts transferred files into date folders with a path template
• relies on resumable transfers for multi-GB dataset files

Storage costs drop sharply, and the preservation requirement is met.

rclone is a capable open-source command-line tool, and many data holders start there. For ongoing data management it has limits:

rclone suits scripted, automated pipelines. Blober is for data holders who want reliable transfers without writing shell scripts.

1. List every provider and local device where you keep files.
2. Choose an affordable long-term destination, such as Backblaze B2 or Wasabi.
3. Connect each provider in Blober, through OAuth or with an API key.
4. Set up your first migration: pick a source and a destination, and add a path template.
5. Start the run. Resumable transfers, skipped duplicates and the path template handle the rest.

Can Blober run backups on a schedule? No. Blober has no scheduler, so you start each run yourself. With the default Skip policy, a re-run copies only the files that aren't at the destination yet.

Do cloud-to-cloud transfers use my internet connection? Yes, when the source and destination are different providers or accounts. Blober streams each file through your computer, so the transfer counts against your bandwidth and any ISP data cap, though it doesn't save a full copy to your disk.

Can a path template sort files by camera model or EXIF date? No. Path templates can't use camera models or other EXIF data from inside files. They use only the dates, names, extensions, sizes and folders the source reports, and a template like /{file_created_date}/{filename} gives one folder per day.