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Connecting Shade to Backblaze

Shade supports Bring-Your-Own-S3 (BYOS3) with multiple providers such as AWS, GCP, MinIO, Wasabi, Backblaze, and more. Here’s how to connect Shade with your existing Backblaze account.

Provisioning a New Bucket in Backblaze

Although provisioning a new bucket is not strictly necessary, we highly recommend provisioning a new bucket for Shade. Shade is unable to use files in existing buckets due to the nature of ShadeFS. Shade will create two new folders blobs and chunks to any bucket that you connect to it.

If you do not have a Backblaze account already, you can create an account here. To create a new bucket in Backblaze, sign in to your account, head to Buckets, and “Create Bucket”.

Following the steps and prompts, ensure that you keep track of your bucket name, and your bucket region (as these are important and will be used in a later step). In this case, our bucket name is “shade-new-bucket” and the region (not depicted) is us-east-005.

ShadeFS does not require any other specific properties to be set on the bucket. You may opt to replicate data, log, or set up versioning as you prefer for your business.

Configuring CORS

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing is an important characteristic that allows buckets to be accessible from other origins (such as https://app.shade.inc). This is critical for Shade to access and download original media for you from our app. Backblaze makes it easy to share this origin. We recommend allowing all origins. However, if you prefer a more restricted origin, it is required to whitelist *.shade.inc as an allowed-origin.

Creating Access Keys

Shade accesses Backblaze buckets via the S3 protocol, this means that Shade requires a bucket name, a bucket region, access key, and secret key in order to access this bucket.

Head to Access Keys > Create Access Key and provision a Master or Application Key. Here, we provision an application key specifically for our bucket.

Ensure, you have Read and Write enabled.

Once you create a new key, copy the created key ID (Access Key for Shade) and applicationKey (Secret key for Shade) to your clipboard and save this for the next few steps.

Creating a BYOS Drive in Shade

Reaching this point, you should have successfully acquired the following items:

  1. Shade Workspace

  2. Bucket Name

  3. Bucket Region

  4. KeyID (Access Key)

  5. applicationKey (Secret Key)

If you do not have a workspace already, you can create one here.

Within your Shade workspace, you can now create a drive. Selecting the plus button next to “My drives” > BYOS drive.

Select a Template

Our templates help you get set up quickly with Shade with additional metadata and views that help you organize your files and assets. For more information about our AI you can check out our academy. In this case, we have selected Video Production.

Creating our Backblaze Drive

Next, we decide on our drive name and select our provider Backblaze.

Adding Our Backblaze Credentials

From the previous steps, we add our Backblaze credentials including our bucket name, region, access key and secret key.

This has to be the bucket name that you created in Backblaze. This is not the same as the drive name that you created on the previous screen.

Uploading your first file

Once you have followed the previous steps, you are now able to upload your first file to your Shade drive. If configured successfully, you should be able to upload your file and mount the Shade drive to your computer from the Shade Desktop App

Troubleshooting Tips

If you have more questions - feel free to contact us at [email protected] or join our discord.

I can’t upload, what’s going on?

If you are unable to upload, please check your CORS settings on your bucket or your secret / access keys and its associated permissions.

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