Mount Backblaze B2 on Linux — NetDrive's Experimental Ubuntu Build

A backup admin runs nightly snapshot jobs on a fleet of headless Ubuntu servers, archiving each night’s tarball to a Backblaze B2 bucket for offsite retention. The existing script already knows how to write to a local path with tar and rsync — rewriting it around B2’s native API or the b2 command-line tool means new authentication handling and new error codes to account for, for a job that was working fine before. NetDrive’s Linux build sidesteps the rewrite: it mounts the B2 bucket as an ordinary Ubuntu mount point, so the same script that already writes to /mnt/backups/nightly.tar.gz on a local disk can write to a B2-backed path instead, unchanged.

Mount Backblaze B2 on Ubuntu

NetDrive lets Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, SFTP, WebDAV and more appear as native drives on Windows and macOS — no syncing, no full downloads.

• Runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and later
• Backblaze B2 supported since NetDrive 3.5.434
• Existing scripts read and write through a normal mount point — no B2 API rewrite

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Why Mount a Bucket Instead of Scripting the B2 API

Talking to B2 directly means handling application key authentication, retries, and bucket-listing pagination in whatever language the backup tooling happens to be written in — solvable, but it’s infrastructure work that has nothing to do with the actual job of getting a tarball offsite. Mounting the bucket removes that layer: NetDrive resolves reads and writes against B2 through the mount point, so a tar job or a cp command interacts with it the same way it would with any other directory on the box.

Backblaze B2 has been a supported connection type in NetDrive since version 3.5.434 (2018-05-11), which also brought multipart upload for files 5GB and larger — B2 support has had time to mature rather than being a recent addition bolted onto the Linux build.

Installing NetDrive on Ubuntu

NetDrive for Linux ships outside Ubuntu’s default package repositories, so setup goes through GitHub rather than apt:

1. Go to github.com/NetDrive/installer and grab the release that matches your Ubuntu version.
2. Read that release’s notes before installing — a driver component has to go in first, or nothing will mount.
3. Install the NetDrive package itself.
4. Launch NetDrive once so the driver component loads; depending on your permission setup this may prompt for sudo.

The Linux build’s minimum supported version is Ubuntu 16.04, and it carries the same experimental label NetDrive’s own comparison page uses for Linux generally — Windows and macOS get the bulk of the testing. Updates arrive as GitHub releases instead of through apt upgrade, so checking for new versions is a manual step worth putting in whatever runbook covers the box.

Step-by-Step: Connect a B2 Bucket on Ubuntu

1. Open NetDrive’s Drive Manager and click + Add Drive.
2. Select Backblaze B2 from the list of connection types.

3. Enter your B2 Application Key ID and Application Key — generated from your Backblaze account, scoped to the bucket if you’d rather not hand the server account-wide access.
4. Enter the bucket name you want NetDrive to mount.
5. Set a mount point — a path like /mnt/b2-backups, or any empty directory you have write access to.
6. Click Connect. NetDrive authenticates and mounts the bucket at that path.

Verifying the Mount Before Your Backup Job Depends On It

Confirm the mount actually took from a terminal rather than trusting the GUI alone — reasonable due diligence on an experimental build, and worth doing before a cron job starts writing to the path unattended:

# Confirm the mount is listed
mount | grep b2-backups

# Or just try listing it
ls /mnt/b2-backups

If the directory comes back empty or the mount doesn’t show up, check that outbound HTTPS traffic on port 443 isn’t blocked by the server’s firewall before assuming the bucket credentials are wrong — a closed egress port is a more common culprit on locked-down build and backup servers than a bad Application Key.

What to Plan Around on the Linux Build

• A separate release cadence. The Linux driver is maintained on its own schedule, so a fix that ships for Windows or macOS doesn’t automatically land on Linux the same week.
• No apt integration. Installs and updates go through GitHub releases, not a PPA or a package manager.
• Windows and macOS as the hardened targets. NetDrive’s own guidance treats those two platforms as the ones that get the most testing. A nightly backup box or a CI runner reading fixtures from B2 is a reasonable fit for the Linux build; an unattended production pipeline is worth testing thoroughly first.

Wrap-up

Mounting a B2 bucket on Ubuntu gets a headless server the same drive-style access NetDrive provides on Windows and macOS, without a rewrite around B2’s native API. For the same provider on a more heavily tested platform, see Mount Backblaze B2 on Windows or Mount Backblaze B2 on macOS; for the broader Linux picture, see NetDrive on Ubuntu Linux; and for a use-case built around this exact provider, see Photography RAW Archives on Backblaze B2.

— Steve, NetDrive