Blober Concepts: Providers & Workflows

In Blober you save a transfer as a workflow and run it whenever you need it. Each run is a task.

A workflow holds a source, a destination and an action, and it can also hold a path template, filters and a deduplication policy. Workflows explains how to create one and what each setting does.

A task is a single run of a workflow. When you start a workflow, Blober creates a task that:

• finds the files matching the source selection
• processes each file according to the action
• tracks progress (files, bytes, status)
• logs operations and errors

Tasks have states: pending, running, paused, completed, failed, cancelled.

See the Progress guide for details.

The action decides what happens to the source files. Copy leaves them unchanged, Move deletes them once they are at the destination, Delete removes them without transferring anything, and Mutate changes their properties in place on providers that support it, such as an Azure blob's storage tier.

A path template builds each file's destination path from variables:

{file_created_date}/{filename}

This puts each file in a folder named after the day it was created.

Available variables include:

• {filename}, {filename_no_ext}, {file_ext}
• {file_created_date}, {file_modified_date}
• {file_created_year}, {file_created_month}, {file_created_day}, for folders such as 2024/12
• {current_date}, {current_datetime}
• {file_size}, {file_size_mb}
• {file_dir}, {source_dir}

{file_dir} is the relative directory beneath a selected source folder. It is empty for directly selected files and for files at the selected folder's root. See how the file_dir variable works for detailed cases.

{source_dir} is the name of the selected source folder. It is empty for directly selected files and for the entire storage. To keep the name of each selected folder without a template, tick Include Selected Folders in Advanced Path Template.

See Workflows for the full list, or the complete path-template guide for worked examples.

Filters control which files are included in a transfer. They use glob syntax:

• Include patterns: *.jpg, *.{png,gif}
• Exclude patterns: *.tmp, .DS_Store (entered in the dedicated Exclude Pattern field)
• Folder patterns: documents/**

Deduplication is a destination setting that decides what happens when a file already exists at the destination: skip it, overwrite it, or keep both. Not every destination supports it. It compares destination paths, not file contents.

See Deduplication for the policies, where the control appears, and how it differs from resuming a task.

Each provider needs credentials to sign in to the service:

• API keys: AWS, Wasabi, Backblaze (key ID and secret)
• Connection strings: Azure Blob
• OAuth: Google Drive, Google Photos (browser authorization)

Blober keeps credentials on your computer and never sends them to its servers.