Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

We are going to drop blackblaze over this

We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze”

We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable

If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so I can install you on my parents machine and never worry about it again. You decided saving on cloud storage was worth breaking this promise. Bad bad call

I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1]

This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no restrictions on file type or size" [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal

The issue with a client app backing up dropbox and onedrive folders on your computer is the files on demand feature, you could sync a 1tb onedrive to your 250gb laptop but it's OK because of smart/selective sync aka files on demand. Then backblaze backup tries to back the folder up and requests a download of every single file and now you have zero bytes free, still no backup and a sick laptop. You could oauth the backblaze app to access onedrive directly, but if you want to back your onedrive up you need a different product IMO.

I can understand in theory why they wouldn't want to back up .git folders as-is. Git has a serious object count bloat problem if you have any repository with a good amount of commit history, which causes a lot of unnecessary overhead in just scanning the folder for files alone.

I don't quite understand why it's still like this; it's probably the biggest reason why git tends to play poorly with a lot of filesystem tools (not just backups). If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just an example really), you wouldn't get so much unnecessary inode bloat.

At the same time Backblaze is a backup solution. The need to back up everything is sort of baked in there. They promise to be the third backup solution in a three layer strategy (backup directly connected, backup in home, backup external), and that third one is probably the single most important one of them all since it's the one you're going to be touching the least in an ideal scenario. They really can't be excluding any files whatsoever.

The cloud service exclusion is similarly bad, although much worse. Imagine getting hit by a cryptoworm. Your cloud storage tool is dutifully going to sync everything encrypted, junking up your entire storage across devices and because restoring old versions is both ass and near impossible at scale, you need an actual backup solution for that situation. Backblaze excluding files in those folders feels like a complete misunderstanding of what their purpose should be.

Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history.

I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of credits.

I do not trust my Backblaze backups anymore.

As an FYI you can recover from force pushes to GitHub using the GitHub UI[0] or their API[1]. And if you force push to one of your own machines you can use the reflog[2]. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78872853 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48110879 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24236065

They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.

However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.

Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?

IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.

But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.

Some companies are in the business of trust. These companies NEED to understand that trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain. After reading this article I will almost certainly never use or recommend Backblaze. (And while I don't use them currently, they WERE on the list of companies I would have recommended due to the length of their history.)

At some point, Backblaze just silently stopped backing up my encrypted (VeraCrypt) drives. Just stopped working without any announcement, warning or notification. After lots of troubleshooting and googling I found out that this was intentional from some random reddit thread. I stopped using their backup service after that.

It looks like the following line has been added to /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml which excludes my Dropbox folder from getting backed up:

</bzexclusions><excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="*" ruleIsOptional="f" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*" contains_1="/users/username/dropbox/" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />

That is the exact path to my Dropbox folder, and I presume if I move my Dropbox folder this xml file will be updated to point to the new location. The top of the xml file states "Mandatory Exclusions: editing this file DOES NOT DO ANYTHING".

.git files seem to still be backing up on my machine, although they are hidden by default in the web restore (you must open Filters and enable Show Hidden Files). I don't see an option to show hidden files/folders in the Backblaze Restore app.

I noticed this (thankfully before it was critical) and I’ve decided to move on from BB. Easily over 10 year customer. Totally bogus. Not only did it stop backing it up the old history is totally gone as well.

The one thing they have to do is backup everything and when you see it in their console you can rest assured they are going to continue to back it up.

They’ve let the desktop client linger, it’s difficult to add meaningful exceptions. It’s obvious they want everyone to use B2 now.

After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider.

Basically it works like this:

- I have syncthing moving files between all my devices. The larger the device, the more stuff I move there[2]. My phone only has my keepass file and a few other docs, my gaming PC has that plus all of my photos and music, etc.

- All of this ends up on a raspberry pi with a connected USB harddrive, which has everything on it. Why yes, that is very shoddy and short term! The pi is mirrored on my gaming PC though, which is awake once every day or two, so if it completely breaks I still have everything locally.

- Nightly a restic job runs, which backs up everything on the pi to an s3 compatible cloud[3], and cleans out old snapshots (30 days, 52 weeks, 60 months, then yearly)

- Yearly I test restoring a random backup, both on the pi, and on another device, to make sure there is no required knowledge stuck on there.

This is was somewhat of a pain to setup, but since the pi is never off it just ticks along, and I check it periodically to make sure nothing has broken.

[1] there is always weirdness with these tools. They don't sync how you think, or when you actually want to restore it takes forever, or they are stuck in perpetual sync cycles

[2] I sync multiple directories, broadly "very small", "small", "dumping ground", and "media", from smallest to largest.

[3] Currently Wasabi, but it really doens't matter. Restic encrypts client side, you just need to trust the provider enough that they don't completely collapse at the same time that you need backups.

Weirdly, reading this had the net impact of me signing up to Backblaze.

I had no idea that it was such a good bargain. I used to be a Crashplan user back in the day, and I always thought Backblaze had tiered limits.

I've been using Duplicati to sync a lot of data to S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier. It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file. It's a heavy enough process that I don't do anything nearly close to enough testing to make sure my backups are restorable, which is a self-inflicted future injury.

Here's the thing: I'm paying about $14/month for that S3 storage, which makes $99/year a total steal. I don't use Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/iCloud so the grievances mentioned by the author are not major hurdles for me. I do find the idea that it is silently ignoring .git folders troubling, primarily because they are indeed not listed in the exclusion list.

I am a bit miffed that we're actively prevented from backing up the various Program Files folders, because I have a large number of VSTi instruments that I'll need to ensure are rcloned or something for this to work.

I once had to restore around 2 TB of RAW photos. The app was a mess. It crashed every few hours. I ended up manually downloading single folders over a timespan of 2 weeks to restore my data. The support only apologized and could not help with my restore problem. After this I cancelled my subscription immediately and use local drives for my backups now, drives which I rotate (in use and locations).

I never trust them again with my data.

The fact that they’d exclude “.git” and other things without being transparent about it is scandalous

I can almost almost understand the logic behind not backing up OneDrive/Dropbox. I think it's bad logic but I can understand where it's coming from.

Not backing up .git folders however is completely unacceptable.

I have hundreds of small projects where I use git track of history locally with no remote at all. The intention is never to push it anywhere. I don't like to say these sorts of things, and I don't say it lightly when I say someone should be fired over this decision.

> My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when I made several errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git history for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was.

I know this is besides the point somewhat, but: Learn your tools people. The commit history could probably have been easily restored without involving any backup. The commits are not just instantly gone.

Backblaze is such a weird case. On one hand, it became the most trusted personal backup provider on reddit and HN, on another - their software is absolute junk, and as some comments in this thread are highlighting - even their restore can't be trusted.

I've never needed to restore anything, so can't say anything about this, but once, one of my devices deleted a file in Syncthing, and I went into Backblaze to see if they have any logs of deletions/file modifications (had it disabled in syncthing).

I don't remember the exact details, but I remember clearly that I felt like the entire thing was done by a junior engineer straight out of college. Trying to understand the names of some variables used there, I stumbled upon a reddit thread where the person who worked on the client was trying to explain why things were done the way they were - and I felt like it was me in my first 3 months of software engineering.

How did Backblaze gain this trust in the first place? Is it because nobody is offering "unlimited" storage at the same price point?

I just checked the Backblaze app and found that .iso was on the exclusion list. Just in case anyone here is as dumb as I...

I had a back and forth with them about .git folders a couple of years back and their defence was something like "we are a consumer product - not a professional developer product. Pay for our business offering"

But if that's truly their stance, then they are being deceptive about their non-business offering at the point of sale.

EDIT - see my other comment where I found the actual email

It's ironic that Backblaze themselves wrote a blog post a couple of years ago explaining why Dropbox isn't enough as a backup service and you need Backblaze as an additional layer of protection: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-google-drive...

That aged well...

AFAICT Backblaze does back up .git directories. I have many repos backed up. The .git directory is hidden by default in the web UI (along with all other hidden files), but there is an option to show them.

You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.

Ironically drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways (but potentially not reliable so I also understand why people do not like that).

But .git? It does not mean you have it synced to GitHub or anything reliable?

If you do anything then only backup the .git folder and not the checkout.

But backing up the checkout and not the .git folder is crazy.

I think this should not be attributed to malice, however unfortunate. I had also developed some sync app once and onedrive folders were indeed problematic, causing cyclic updates on access and random metadata changes for no explicit reason.

Complete lack of communication (outside of release notes, which nobody really reads, as the article too states) is incompetence and indeed worrying.

Just show a red status bar that says "these folders will not be backed up anymore", why not?

A lot of personal “nerd” options are listed in the thread (and like restic/borg are really good!) but nothing really centralized. Backblaze was a great fire and forget option for deploying as a last resort backup. I don’t think there are any competitors in that space if you are looking for continuous backup, centralized management and good pricing that doesn’t require talking to a salesperson to get things going and is pay as you go.

I highly recommend switching to something more like Arq and then using whatever backend storage that you want. There are probably some other open source ways to do it, etc, but Arq scratches the itch of having control over your backups and putting them where you want with a GUI to easily configure/keep track of what is going on.

Maybe there's something newer/better now (and I bought lifetime licenses of it long ago), but it works for me.

That said, I use Arq + Backblaze storage and I think my monthly bill is very low, like under $5. Though I haven't backed-up much media there yet, but I do have control over what is being backed-up.

On the topic of backing up data from cloud platforms such as Onedrive, I suspect this is stop the client machine from actively downloading 'files on demand' which are just pointers in explorer until you go to open them.

If you've got huge amounts of files in Onedrive and the backup client starts downloading everyone of them (before it can reupload them again) you're going to run into problems.

But ideally, they'd give you a choice.

I think this is a risk with anything that promotes itself as "unlimited", or otherwise doesn't specify concrete limits. I'm always sceptical of services like this as it feels like the terms could arbitrarily change at any point, as we've found out here.

(as a side note, it's funny to see see them promoting their native C app instead of using Java as a "shortcut". What I wouldn't give for more Java apps nowadays)

I’ve been using it for years, and the one time I needed to restore a file, I realized that VMware VMs files were excluded from the backup. They are so many exclusion that I start doing physical backup again.

Unrelated to the main point, and probably too late to matter, but you can access repo activity logs via Github's API. I had to clean up a bad push before and was able to find the old commit hash in the logs, then reset the branch to that commit, similarly to how you'd fix local messes using reflog.

My takeaway is that for data that matters, don't trust the service. I back up with Restic, so that the service only sees encrypted blobs.

Use restic with resticprofile and you won't need anything else. Point it to a Hetzner storagebox, the best value you can get. Don't trust fisher price backup plans

For those looking for something at a decent price for up to 5TB, take a look at JottaCloud, which is supported by rclone, and then you can layer restic on top for a complete backup solution.

JottaCloud is "unlimited" for $11.99 a month (your upload speed is throttled after 5TB).

I've been using them for a few years for backing up important files from my NAS (timemachine backups, Immich library, digitised VHS's, Proxmox Backup Server backups) and am sitting at about 3.5TB.

Time Machine has a similar issue. OneDrive silently corrupted hundreds of my files, replacing their content with binary zeros while retaining the original file size. I have Time Machine backups going back years, but it turns out TM does not backup Cloud files, even if you have them pinned to local storage! So I lost sales those files, including some irreplaceable family photos

I’ve added restic to my backup routine, pointed at cloud files and other critical data

This is really disturbing to hear as I've incorporated B2 into a lot of my flow for backups as well as a storage backend for Nextcloud and planned as the object store for some upcoming archival storage products I'm working on.

I know the post is talking about their personal backup product but it's the same company and so if they sneak in a reduction of service like this, as others have already commented, it erodes difficult-to-earn trust.

I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.

My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.

If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do? Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files they can 'see' just get magically backed up.

It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see), that's the same ugly situation.

Everyone is acting like this is obviously wrong, and they clearly should have communicated the change and made it visible in the exclusion settings.

However, there is a very good reason for not backing up what is in effect network attached storage. Particularly for OneDrive, as it often adds company SharePoint sites you open files from as mountpoints under your OneDrive folder (business OneDrive is basically a personal Sharepoint site under the hood). Trying to back them up would result in downloading potentially hundreds of gigabytes of files to the desktop only to them reupload them to OneDrive. That would also likely trigger data exfiltration flags at your corporate IT.

A Dropbox/OneDrive/Drive/etc folder is a network mount point by another name. (Many of them are not implemented as FUSE mounts or equivalent OS API, not folders on disk.) It's fundamentally reasonable for software that promises backing up the local disk not to backup whatever network drives you happen to have signed in/mounted.

It seems to me that Backblaze does NOT exclude ".git". It's not shown by default in the restore UI -- you must enable "show hidden files" to see it -- but it's there. I just did a test restore of my top-level Project directory (container for all of my personal Git projects) and all .git directories are included in the produced .zip file.

While there may be some issues with Backblaze there's no real trusted alternative with such a long history.

Regardless to the OP's issues:

- on macOS since 9.0.2.784 released in 2023 all .git folders are included in backups - Cloud drives are problematic to backup because they all use extension plugins to hide the network and your local disk only contains stubs instead of actual files. If Backblaze scans it fully it'll download everything and exhaust your disk space there's no easy solution here.

I don't buy for a minute they were trying to be "sneaky" to save some $$ I instead feel like for the majority of users they felt it was misleading to backup stubs only and would rather not brick user computers by downloading all the files. Remember they can't access your cloud disk directly so the only way they can get the file contents is by doing an fread and letting the cloud drive client sync the content on demand.

Yeah this is the core problem with how most backup tools handle Dropbox / iCloud / OneDrive now. Those folders aren’t really “normal files” anymore — a lot of the time they’re just placeholders, and touching them can trigger downloads or other weird behavior depending on the client. That said, just skipping the entire folder is kind of the worst possible outcome. Backup should be predictable. If something is on disk, it should get backed up. If it’s not, you should at least know that, not find out later when you need it. I’ve been working on Duplicati (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati) and one thing we’ve tried to be careful about is not silently ignoring data. If something can’t be backed up, it should be visible to the user.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about setting up duplicati.

I feel that's a systemic problem with all consumer online-backup software: They often use the barest excuse to not back things up. At best, it's to show a fast progress bar to the average user, and at worst it's to quietly renege on the "unlimited" capacity they promised when they took your money. [1]

Trying to audit—let alone change—the finer details is a pain even for power users, and there's a non-zero risk the GUI is simply lying to everybody while undocumented rules override what you specified.

When I finally switched my default boot to Linux, I found many of those offerings didn't support it, so I wrote some systemd services around Restic + Backblaze B2. It's been a real breath of fresh air: I can tell what's going on, I can set my own snapshot retention rules, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper. [2]

____

[1] Along the lines of "We have your My Documents. Oh, you didn't manually add My Videos or My Music for every user? Too bad." Or in some cases, certain big-file extensions are on the ignore list by default for no discernible reason.

[2] Currently a dollar or two a month for ~200gb. It doesn't change very much, and data verification jobs redownload the total amount once a month. I don't backn up anything I could get from elsewhere, like Steam games. Family videos are in the care of different relatives, but I'm looking into changing that.

So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?

Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.

Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?

One time around 2012, a friend of mine was upgrading his Windows/PC hardware, and he was a non-technical musician, and he called on me for a lot of help with the migration.

His daughter-in-law had gifted him a really nice new system. His old system wasn't too bad, either. He'd mostly been relying on an external USB HDD for data. He used Thunderbird for e-mail, which I am quite unfamiliar with.

As we worked on the migration, I collected all the apps and software he had been using, which he would need on the new system, and it wasn't much. I also complimented him on his "online hygiene" insofar as never clicking on suspicious links, or downloading suspicious software; his system had no malware and no shovelware, no unwanted browser bars or spyware was found.

We were completing the migration when I noticed a large discrepancy between the "new data" HDD space and the old data, but I needed to delete the old partition to complete the upgrade, and I flagged this with him: I said, "look this makes me uneasy: do you still want to move forward?" and he nodded approval, so I deleted the partition. Then we discovered that we had just lost many gigabytes of important data, such as was in his Firefox profile and his Thunderbird data, like all his email which had been downloaded locally. I turned white as a sheet and I was ready for him to sue me or something.

He was surprisingly sanguine about this, and he says, "What about Backblaze?" and I gaped at him, "You had an online backup of all this???" and he goes "Sure, here's how to install it..." and we installed his little Backblaze systray widget, and all his data began streaming back in. Nothing at all was lost, because he'd also been meticulous about using this app!

So that was the day I learned about Backblaze and their services, and I was intensely grateful to them for saving my bacon for sure, and we remained friends, and we finished the migration in one day, and he was grateful to me and my expertise, and not at all worried about the crippling data loss which I had incurred with my cavalier ignorance.

This is at the core an issue with how file-sync is being done now versus in the past.

If you have a folder shared with 10 people, most likely only a few files will be accessed by others and the rest is dormant on all but one machine. Downloading and storing all these files is an expense in transfer fees and to some extent a waste of local disk space.

For that reason, cloud sync tools no longer copy everything up front, but transfer on-demand. Most tools have an option where you can choose "Make available offline" that will make a specific folder always synced.

That said, silently excluding a folder is very problematic, even if there is a good reason for it.

I work on the open-source Duplicati backup tool (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati) and we take special care to not silently skip things as this is likely to cause problems when you want to restore later. For instance, you will get a lot of warnings if you try to make a backup of a cloud-synced folder, as the cloud-sync cannot keep up with the speed of the backup.

If you like the pricing of B2 but not the backup tool, you can use a B2 bucket (pay per usage, not flat rate) and have Duplicati back up to the bucket.

That's pretty crazy because I just set up personal backups with a different service (rsync.net, I was already using it for WP website backups) and my git folders were literally my first priority

I've been very content moving away from OneDrive/GDrive to a personal NAS setup with Synology/Ugreen. You can access a shared drive/photo drive and use Tailscale to mount your volume from anywhere.

I've also configured encrypted cloud backups to a different geographic region and off-site backups to a friend's NAS (following the 3-2-1 backup rule). It does help having 2.5Gb networking as well, but owning your data is more important in the coming age of sloppy/degrading infrastructure and ransomware attacks.

fwiw, the .git files are being backed... but..

1. You have to check "show hidden files" in the web ui (or the app) when restoring and

2. If you restore a folder that has a '.git' folder inside of it (by checking it in the ui) but you DID NOT check "show hidden files", then the '.git' (or any other hidden file/folder) does not get restored.

Which is.. unexpected.. if I check a folder to restore, I expect *everything* inside of it to be restored.

But the dropbox folder is, in fact, not there. Which is a surprise to me as well. :(

This is why I use Arq with Backblaze. They just see a bunch of encrypted files with random GUID filenames. They don't need to know what I'm backing up, just that I am backing it up.

Both Dropbox and OneDrive default to "online first" for most users (including Dropbox on macOS which has moved itself into File Provider). It is a technically sound and sane default for Backblaze to ignore these mounts, especially given their policy not to backup network drives. They really should have informed legacy users about it.

Technically speaking, imagine you're iterating over a million files, and some of them are 1000x slower than the others, it's not Backblaze's fault that things have gone this way. Avoiding files that are well-known network mount points is likely necessary for them to be reliable at what they do for local files.

It's important to recognize that these new OS-level filesystem hooks are slow and inefficient - the use case is opening one file and not 10,000 - and this means that things you might want to do (like recursive grep) are now unworkably slow if they don't fit in some warmed-up cache on your device.

To fix it, Backblaze would need a "cloud to cloud" backup that is optimized for that access pattern, or a checkbox (or detection system) for people who manage to keep a full local mirror in a place where regular files are fast. This is rapidly becoming a less common situation. I do, however, think that they should have informed people about the change.

WJW. This sort of blanket policy change should be called-out in ALL CAPS, bold-faced, and underlined as it changes one of the implicit assumptions with the service's execution.

The technical and performance implications of backing-up cloud mount-points are real, but that's zero excuse for the way this change was communicated.

This is a royal screw-up in corporate communications and I would not be surprised if it makes a huge negative impact in their bottom line and results in a few terminations.

It looks like the following line has been added to /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml which excludes my Dropbox folder from getting backed up:

I wonder if OP didn't realise there was this _Show Hidden Files_ option and their .git was indeed backed up.

That would be nice, they'd be able to get their history back!

> .git files seem to still be backing up on my machine

Try checking bzexcluderules_editable.xml. A few years ago, Backblaze would back up .git folders for Mac but not Windows. Not sure if this is still the case.

I wonder if OP didn't realise there was this _Show Hidden Files_ option and their .git was indeed backed up.

That would be nice, they'd be able to get their history back!

The fact that they’d exclude “.git” and other things without being transparent about it is scandalous

I can almost almost understand the logic behind not backing up OneDrive/Dropbox. I think it's bad logic but I can understand where it's coming from.

Not backing up .git folders however is completely unacceptable.

I just checked the Backblaze app and found that .iso was on the exclusion list. Just in case anyone here is as dumb as I...

That aged well...

(as a side note, it's funny to see see them promoting their native C app instead of using Java as a "shortcut". What I wouldn't give for more Java apps nowadays)

Use restic with resticprofile and you won't need anything else. Point it to a Hetzner storagebox, the best value you can get. Don't trust fisher price backup plans

For those looking for something at a decent price for up to 5TB, take a look at JottaCloud, which is supported by rclone, and then you can layer restic on top for a complete backup solution.

JottaCloud is "unlimited" for $11.99 a month (your upload speed is throttled after 5TB).

I've been using them for a few years for backing up important files from my NAS (timemachine backups, Immich library, digitised VHS's, Proxmox Backup Server backups) and am sitting at about 3.5TB.

I’ve added restic to my backup routine, pointed at cloud files and other critical data

While there may be some issues with Backblaze there's no real trusted alternative with such a long history.

Regardless to the OP's issues:

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about setting up duplicati.

One time around 2012, a friend of mine was upgrading his Windows/PC hardware, and he was a non-technical musician, and he called on me for a lot of help with the migration.

This is at the core an issue with how file-sync is being done now versus in the past.

That said, silently excluding a folder is very problematic, even if there is a good reason for it.

If you like the pricing of B2 but not the backup tool, you can use a B2 bucket (pay per usage, not flat rate) and have Duplicati back up to the bucket.

That's pretty crazy because I just set up personal backups with a different service (rsync.net, I was already using it for WP website backups) and my git folders were literally my first priority

I've been very content moving away from OneDrive/GDrive to a personal NAS setup with Synology/Ugreen. You can access a shared drive/photo drive and use Tailscale to mount your volume from anywhere.

fwiw, the .git files are being backed... but..

1. You have to check "show hidden files" in the web ui (or the app) when restoring and

Which is.. unexpected.. if I check a folder to restore, I expect *everything* inside of it to be restored.

But the dropbox folder is, in fact, not there. Which is a surprise to me as well. :(

This is why I use Arq with Backblaze. They just see a bunch of encrypted files with random GUID filenames. They don't need to know what I'm backing up, just that I am backing it up.

WJW. This sort of blanket policy change should be called-out in ALL CAPS, bold-faced, and underlined as it changes one of the implicit assumptions with the service's execution.

The technical and performance implications of backing-up cloud mount-points are real, but that's zero excuse for the way this change was communicated.

This is a royal screw-up in corporate communications and I would not be surprised if it makes a huge negative impact in their bottom line and results in a few terminations.

We are going to drop blackblaze over this

We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze”

We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable

This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no restrictions on file type or size" [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse.

Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.

"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"."

The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months.

Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.

It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.

Yea, that's pretty shady. Either don't call your service unlimited or bump up the prices so you can survive occasional datahoarder, called them out on it many years ago.

When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually given consideration to the cost of doing business and have priced that in already.

Unlimited means without limits or restrictions.

If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.

I actually emailed them years ago about it. Asked them point blank what'd happen if I dumped 20+ TB of encrypted, undeduplicable backups onto their storage servers. They actually replied that there'd be no problem, but I didn't buy it. Not at all surprised to see this now.

Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte

Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history.

I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of credits.

I do not trust my Backblaze backups anymore.

I had similar experience as well. They upgraded their client and server software something like 5 years ago which put forward different restrictions on character set used for password. I have used a special character which was no longer allowed. When I needed to restore files after disk failure I could not log in either in the app or on the website. The customer service was useless -- we are sorry, your fault. I have lost 1 TB of personal photos due to this as a paying customer. Never trust Backblaze.

I have the same experience with Backblaze. 3 years ago I tried to restore my files from Backblaze, using their desktop client.

First thing I noticed is that if it can't download a file due to network or some other problem then it just skips it. But you can force it to retry by modifying its job file which is just an SQLite DB. Also it stores and downloads files by splitting them into small chunks. It stores checksums of these chunks, but it doesn't store the complete checksum of the file, so judging by how badly the client is written I can't be sure that restored files are not corrupted after the stitching.

Then I found out that it can't download some files even after dozens of retries because it seems they are corrupted on Backblaze side.

But the most jarring issue for me is that it mangled all non-ascii filenames. They are stored as UTF-8 in the DB, but the client saves them as Windows-1252 or something. So I ended up with hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like Ñ„Ð¸ÐºÐ°Ñ†, and I can't just re-encode these names back, because some characters were dropped during the process.

I wanted to write a script that forces Backblaze Client to redownload files, logs all files that can't be restored, fixes the broken names and splits restored files back into chunks to validate their checksums against the SQLite DB, but it was too big of a task for me, so I just procrastinated for 3 years, while keeping paying monthly Backblaze fees because it's sad to let go of my data.

I wonder if they fixed their client since then.

Do you have any more details? This is a pretty big deal. The differentiators between Backblaze and Hetzner mostly boil down to this kind of thing supposedly not being possible.

Remember, when you are running backups, you do not have any backups until you have tested your restore procedures.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/BackupTest...

You should naturally test your ordinary restore procedures (single-file, one directory, spot-checks) on the regular, and you should also form a viable disaster recovery plan, based on your projected risks. What if your house burns down? What if you're burglarized? What if your password manager loses all passwords? etc.

If you've never successfully run a disaster-recovery drill, then you don't have a plan.

"Those who fail to plan, plan to fail!"

> Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history.

> I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of credits.

This happened to me with CrashPlan for Windows many years ago, because of some Volume Shadow Copy Service thing. I noped out of there right after.

And as a double FYI this means a force push does not permanently delete sensitive data! Beware. Rotate that API key, even if it's a pain in the arse.

They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.

Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?

IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.

But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.

Dropbox and GDrive desktop clients can be configured to sync files to a local directory. Backing them up with an additional platform would probably need some sort of logic like you described for VCS.

> trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain

Eh, I don't agree. Case in point: Microsoft.

Or in other words: a sucker is born every minute.

The one thing they have to do is backup everything and when you see it in their console you can rest assured they are going to continue to back it up.

They’ve let the desktop client linger, it’s difficult to add meaningful exceptions. It’s obvious they want everyone to use B2 now.

What are you using now? Asking for a friend

Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.

It is true that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.

To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.

Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:

1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files. 2. We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud

We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.

We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.

We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

We are here to help.

After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider.

Basically it works like this:

- Nightly a restic job runs, which backs up everything on the pi to an s3 compatible cloud[3], and cleans out old snapshots (30 days, 52 weeks, 60 months, then yearly)

- Yearly I test restoring a random backup, both on the pi, and on another device, to make sure there is no required knowledge stuck on there.

This is was somewhat of a pain to setup, but since the pi is never off it just ticks along, and I check it periodically to make sure nothing has broken.

[1] there is always weirdness with these tools. They don't sync how you think, or when you actually want to restore it takes forever, or they are stuck in perpetual sync cycles

[2] I sync multiple directories, broadly "very small", "small", "dumping ground", and "media", from smallest to largest.

[3] Currently Wasabi, but it really doens't matter. Restic encrypts client side, you just need to trust the provider enough that they don't completely collapse at the same time that you need backups.

I also have a lil script that rolls dice on restic snapshot, then lists files and picks a random set to restore to /dev/null.

I still trust restic checksums will actually check whether restore is correct, but that way random part of storage gets tested every so often in case some old pack file gets damaged

We need to talk about The Cone of Backups(tm), which you and I seem to have separately derived!

Props for getting this implemented and seemingly trusted... I wish there was an easier way to handle some of this stuff (eg: tiny secure key material => hot syncthing => "live" git files => warm docs and photos => cold bulk movies, isos, etc)... along with selective "on demand pass through browse/fetch/cache"

They all have different policy, size, cost, technical details, and overall SLA/quality tradeoffs.

Weirdly, reading this had the net impact of me signing up to Backblaze.

I had no idea that it was such a good bargain. I used to be a Crashplan user back in the day, and I always thought Backblaze had tiered limits.

> Here's the thing: I'm paying about $14/month for that S3 storage, which makes $99/year a total steal. I don't use Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/iCloud so the grievances mentioned by the author are not major hurdles for me. I do find the idea that it is silently ignoring .git folders troubling, primarily because they are indeed not listed in the exclusion list.

A big difference here is that Backblaze only keeps deleted/changed files for 30 days. Deleted files can go unnoticed for some time, especially if done by a malicious app or ignorant AI.

I'd pay that extra few dollars for peace of mind.

"Maybe they're only incompetent in the ways that have been enumerated in this blog post" does not seem like much of a sales pitch. Baffling.

You lose a bit of control. With S3 you can preprocess (transform, index, filter, downcode, etc) before storing. You can index metadata in place (names, sizes, metadata) for low-cost searching.

As for testing recovery, you can validate file counts, sizes + checksums without performing recovery.

A few shell scripts give you the power of advanced enterprise backup, whereas backblaze only supports GUI restores.

> I've been using Duplicati to sync a lot of data to S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier.

There are actually a lot of cheaper S3-compatible services out there, (like Backblaze B2, or Cloudflare R2). They pricing may work out to just backup to these directly. Certainly gives you far more control than Backblaze Backup.

The comments are full of people saying the restore didn't work. If that's not important to you, you could save the extra $99 and just not bother backing it up. Given your use case and space, I'd just get a storage box from hetzner and enable nightly zfs snapshots

You should consider Backblaze B2. It's not unlimited, but it's S3 compatible storage at a competitive price, without the limitations of Personal Backup.

It's a good deal until they silently stop backing up some of your files.

I never trust them again with my data.

If you're pulling 2TB of data you should be ordering it on a drive from them and saving yourself the hassle.

> The commits are not just instantly gone.

Indeed, the commits and blobs might even have still been available on the GitHub remote, I'm not sure they clean them on some interval or something, but bunch of stuff you "delete" from git still stays in the remote regardless of what you push.

How did Backblaze gain this trust in the first place? Is it because nobody is offering "unlimited" storage at the same price point?

> How did Backblaze gain this trust in the first place? Is it because nobody is offering "unlimited" storage at the same price point?

Yes, the unlimited storage is one factor. Their detailed write ups about hard drive reliability and transparency on how they build their racks (I think they essentially opened sourced the design) established a lot of credibility as well. Plus in my experience they just worked.

I paid for Backblaze for years but finally cancelled when I junked my last desktop and never got around to installing it on my laptop. I did use their restore functionality a couple of times and it was slow and kind of clunky but it worked.

I’m sad to hear they’ve started dropping stuff from the backup like this. I’ve been contemplating signing back up but most of the stuff I care about is in iCloud or OneDrive so if they aren’t backing that up, it’s pretty useless to me.

I was very surprised when I gave them a go after hearing good stuff about them here and on other techy parts of the internet:

After using their website and their app for a few hours I pretty much immediately decided to not proceed with them as the software was clearly not built by a team that has great competency in software development. This was a year ago so they've had plenty of time to polish it.

You sort of let that kind of stuff pass for a hardware company, but backblaze is not a hardware company. There's more to backup than just ensuring the disks at the data centre are replaced in a timely manner.

When I first started using Backblaze, I also tested several of the competitors at the time (Carbonite, CrashPlan etc) and as bad as Backblazes software was, it was still by far the best out of the options.

And from comments here I don't see any other user-friendly options being proposed, it's all just suggestions to glue together some open source software with object storage and be your own sysadmin.

That's the CTO. And yes, it has been evident for years that backblaze doesn't actually know how to write software, they are unfamiliar with many basic things.

But if that's truly their stance, then they are being deceptive about their non-business offering at the point of sale.

EDIT - see my other comment where I found the actual email

Well I do pay for their business product, I have a "Business Groups" package with a few dozen endpoints all backing up for $99/year per machine.

According to support's reply just now, my backups are crippled just like every other customer. No git, no cloud synced folders, even if those folders are fully downloaded locally.

(This is also my personal backup strategy for iCloud Drive: one Mac is set to fully download complete iCloud contents, and that Mac backs up to Backblaze.)

Professional? We indeed use git at the company where I work, but there we have a dedicated backup system used by professionals. No BB involved.

I, on the other hand, as a private consumer, use git for all my hobby projects and note-taking. And my language learning. Of course I do, or I couldn't keep track of what I'm doing over the years, and I wouldn't be able to sort things out. There's nothing professional there, are BB saying that if you try to do something in an orderly and controlled manner, then it's "professional" and shouldn't be backed up? If that's their stance then no wonder people are leaving BB. I for sure won't ever recommend them again.

That's ridiculous. I use Git for tons of personal projects.

You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.

I commented on this topic elsewhere on this page. This is an email from 2021. Maybe they changed policy but here:

> Bob (Backblaze Help)

> Aug 5, 2021, 11:33 PDT

> Hello there,

> Thank you for taking the time to write in,

> Unfortunately .git directories are excluded by Backblaze by default. File

> changes within .git directories occur far too often and over so many files

> that the Backblaze software simply would not be able to keep up. It's beyond

> the scope of our application.

> The Personal Backup Plan is a consumer grade backup product. Unfortunately we

> will not be able to meet your needs in this regard.

> Let me know if you have any other questions.

> Regards,

> Bob The Backblaze Team

I'd be really curious to know why that's working for you and not me. I just tried restoring and none of my .git directories were included; just the working copy. I tried with both the web and desktop restore tool.

There's no mention of .git being excluded in the Settings or on their support page (https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-bac...); they just silently decided to not back up a bunch of my files without telling me... wonderful.

Thanks. Silently ignoring .git folders would be much more egregious than not backing up cloud drives in my opinion. The latter is at least somewhat understandable, though they should have been more transparent about it.

Does the UI atleast hint there's hidden files or is it only by going to the filters you can find this out?

It seems incredibly stupid for a BACKUP PROGRAM to not list the hidden files instead of indicating they're hidden (e.g. _(hidden)_.git)

Ironically drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways (but potentially not reliable so I also understand why people do not like that).

But .git? It does not mean you have it synced to GitHub or anything reliable?

If you do anything then only backup the .git folder and not the checkout.

But backing up the checkout and not the .git folder is crazy.

I use backblaze and have repos I dont push for this reason so I am a bit stunned lol

Microsoft makes no guarantees on onedrive, you are responsible for backing up that data. Of course they try hard to keep it safe, but contractually they give no promises

> drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways

No they are not. This is explicitly addressed in the article itself.

Oftentimes the important data that needs restoring is in the checkout: uncommitted and unstaged changes that represent hours of work.

I have multiple drives that started out as their own os. Each of them has a Dropbox folder in the standard location. Each of them has a different set of files in them (I deduped at one point), with some overlap of different versions. I no longer use Dropbox, so none of these are synced anywhere.

They don't need to be in my case, I'm only using them now because of existing shortcuts and VM shares and programs configured to source information from them. That doesn't mean I don't want them backed up.

Same for OneDrive: Microsoft configured my account for OneDrive when I set it up. Then I immediately uninstalled it (I don't want it). But I didn't notice that my desktop and documents folders live there. I hate it. But by the time I noticed it, it was already being used as a location for multiple programs that would need to be reconfigured, and it was easier to get used to it than to fix it. Several things I've forgotten about would likely break in ways I wouldn't notice for weeks/months. Multiple self-hosted servers for connecting to my android devices would need to reindex (Plex, voidtools everything, several remote systems that mount via sftp and connected programs would decide all my files were brand new and had never been seen before)

Complete lack of communication (outside of release notes, which nobody really reads, as the article too states) is incompetence and indeed worrying.

Just show a red status bar that says "these folders will not be backed up anymore", why not?

What’s worse, random metadata change or a completely missing data?

Maybe there's something newer/better now (and I bought lifetime licenses of it long ago), but it works for me.

That said, I use Arq + Backblaze storage and I think my monthly bill is very low, like under $5. Though I haven't backed-up much media there yet, but I do have control over what is being backed-up.

I have used Arq for years. It has always been the least problematic, least intrusive, most reliable backup and restore option for me. Appreciative to Stefan Reitshamer for creating and maintaining it.

Arq saved me a few hours of work recently when VS Code's GitHub Copilot looped out on a Playwright screenshot (>8k pixel height) and I had to manually edit the JSONL chat history, but accidentally restored to the previous checkpoint. That was one time I really appreciated that I set Arq to back up hourly. (I only restore from Arq maybe 2-3 times a year.)

I wish lifetime licences were still sold.

If you've got huge amounts of files in Onedrive and the backup client starts downloading everyone of them (before it can reupload them again) you're going to run into problems.

But ideally, they'd give you a choice.

This is a pain, to be sure, but surely there is some sort of logic you could implement to detect whether a file is a Real File that actually exists on the device (if so, back it up) or a pointer to the cloud (ignore it by default, probably, but maybe provide a user setting to force it to back up even these)

Came here to say this. Files in OneDrive get removed from your local storage and are downloaded ON DEMAND. given that you can have 1TB+ onedrive folder, backblaze downloading all of that is gonna throttle your connection and fill up your disk real fast.

My takeaway is that for data that matters, don't trust the service. I back up with Restic, so that the service only sees encrypted blobs.

Same, I use Restic + Backrest (plus monitoring on Healthchecks, self-hosted + Prometheus/AlertManager/Pushover), with some decent structure - local backups every half-an-hour to raid1, every hour a backup to my old NAS, every day a backup to FTP in Helsinki, and once a week some backups to Backblaze (via Restic). Gives me local backups, observability, remote backups spread across different providers - seems quite safe :) I highly recommend to everyone figuring out a good backup strategy, takes a day or two.

Edit: on top of that I've built a custom one-page monitoring dashboard, so I see everything in one place (https://imgur.com/B3hppIW) - I'll opensource, it's decent architecture, I just need to cleanup some secrets from Git history...

What cloud backend are people using for restic? B2/S3/something else? I'm still just backing up to other machines using it (though I'd also heavily recommend restic)

I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.

Everyone is acting like this is obviously wrong, and they clearly should have communicated the change and made it visible in the exclusion settings.

____

So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?

Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.

Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?

I'm going to drop Backblaze for my entire company over this.

I need it to capture local data, even though that local data is getting synced to Google Drive. Where we sync our data really has nothing to do with Backblaze backing up the endpoint. We don't wholly trust sync, that's why we have backup.

On my personal Mac I have iCloud Drive syncing my desktop, and a while back iCloud ate a file I was working on. Backblaze had it captured, thankfully. But if they are going to exclude iCloud Drive synced folders, and sounds like that is their intention, Backblaze is useless to me.

This is very well put, and echoes my sentiments! I had installed Backblaze on my own home machine many, many years ago, and it has saved my bacon a few times. Since then I've also installed it on any family members' machines that required backup and recommended it to friends. And I've been happy to pay for the service.

The deal was that Backblaze backs things up and I don't have to worry about it. Learning that it does not back things up is a punch to the gut. I am familiar with the exclusions and I have a look at that list to make I'm not missing anything from my backups. I had always thought the exclusions list was exhaustive.

Excluding other files and folders without telling me about it breaks the deal. Dropbox is important to several of the users I installed it for. Ignoring .git folders is another one that affects me and I had not known about. Ouch.

I will now have to look for alternatives. It has to be easy to install, run seamlessly on non-technical users' machines and be reliable.

I find it hard to be think of a worse breach of trust for a backup service than not to back up files!

I'm going to join the exodus, though for a different reason. Switched to Orbstack and ever since Backblaze refuses to back up saying "disk full" as Orbstack uses a 8TB sparse disk image. You can exclude it, but if they won't (very easily) fix a known issue by measuring file sizes properly I don't feel confident about the product.

Also taking recommendations for a simple services I can install on my dads windows machine and my moms Mac that will just automatically backup the main drive to the cloud just in case

my parents also lost data that was supposed to be backed up on backblaze because they didn't use that computer for a month and when they turned it back on the hard drive was dead. apparently backblaze silently deletes backups more than 30 days old even if they are the newest backup and then happily keeps billing you for not storing your data.

Natasha from Backblaze here. This is a situation people rely on backups for, and I can understand how frustrating it is to run into this when you need a restore.

I also want to be clear, this wasn’t about saving on storage. It came from cases where backing up cloud-synced folders (like Dropbox) was leading to unreliable or incomplete restores because of how those files are managed under the hood.

When Dropbox began using reparse points for synced files, those files no longer behaved like standard local files. Because of that, Backblaze Computer Backup can’t reliably back them up or restore them. The current behavior is focused on ensuring we only back up data we can reliably restore, and we are actively exploring ways to better support Dropbox and data touched by other sync services.

Why not just use backblaze as cold storage and use restic or another tool with a GUI to backup to it?

Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.

Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:

We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.

We are here to help.

Dropbox itself should already keep version history of files for 30 days with the free plan, or more if you pay.

This is the same reason I always had Backblaze -- stick it on all my computer-illiterate relatives' PCs and then I know there is a fool-proof backup when something invariably goes wrong.

Shoutout to Arq backup which simply gives you an option in backup plans for what to do with cloud only files:

- report an error

- ignore

- materialize

Regardless, if you make it back up software that doesn’t give this level of control to users, and you make a change about which files you’re going to back up, you should probably be a lot more vocal with your users about the change. Vanishingly few people read release notes.

That seems like a pretty straightforward issue to solve, to simply backup only those files that are actually on the system, not the stubs. If it's on your computer, it should able to get backed up. If it's just a shadow, a pointer, it doesn't.

Making the change without making it clear though, that's just awful. A clear recipe for catastrophic loss & drip drip drip of news in the vein of "How Backblaze Lost my Stuff"

The whole "just sync everything, and if you can't seek everything, pretend to sync everything with fake files and then download the real ones ad-hoc" model of storage feels a bit ill-conceived to me. It tries to present a simple facade but I'm not sure it actually simplifies things. It always results in nasty user surprises and sometimes data loss. I've seen Microsoft OneDrive do the same thing to people at work.

That would make sense for online-only files, but I have my Dropbox folder set to synchronize everything to my PC, and Backblaze still started skipping over it a few months ago. I reached out to support and they confirmed that they are just entirely skipping Dropbox/OneDrive/etc folders entirely, regardless of if the files are stored locally or not.

The primary trouble I have with backblaze was that this change was not clearly communicated, even if perhaps it could be justified.

That doesn't really make a lot of sense, though. Reading a file that's not actually on disk doesn't download it permanently. If I have zero of 10TB worth of files stored locally on my 1TB device, read them all serially, and measure my disk usage, there's no reason the disk should be full, or at least it should be cache that can be easily freed. The only time this is potentially a problem is if one of the files exceeds the total disk space available.

Hell, if I open a directory of photos and my OS tries to pull exif data for each one, it would be wild if that caused those files to be fully downloaded and consume disk space.

This is a complexity that makes it harder, but not insurmountable.

It would be reasonable to say that if you run the file sync in a mode that keeps everything locally, then Backblaze should be backing it up. Arguably they should even when not in that mode, but it'll churn files repeatedly as you stream files in and out of local storage with the cloud provider.

Unless it does something very weird it won't trigger all those files to download at the same time. That shouldn't be a worry.

And, as a separate note, they shouldn't be balking at the amount of data in a virtualized onedrive or dropbox either considering the user could get a many-terabyte hard drive for significantly less money.

The issue really isn't that it's not backing up the folder (which I can see an argument for both sides and various ways to do it) - it's that they changed what they did in a surprising way.

Your backup solution is not something you ever want to be the source of surprises!

Cloud placeholders have been a feature for years, plenty of programs have mitigations for this behavior.

I've actually spent some time debugging why git causes so many issues with the backup software I use (restic).

Ironically, I believe you have it backwards: pack files, git's solution to the "too many tiny files" problem, are the issue here; not the tiny files themselves.

In my experience, incremental backup software works best with many small files that never change. Scanning is usually just a matter of checking modification times and moving on. This isn't fast, but it's fast enough for backups and can be optimized by monitoring for file changes in a long-running daemon.

However, lots of mostly identical files ARE an issue for filesystems as they tend to waste a lot of space. Git solves this issue by packing these small objects into larger pack files, then compressing them.

Unfortunately, it's those pack files that cause issues for backup software: any time git "garbage collects" and creates new pack files, it ends up deleting and creating a bunch of large files filled with what looks like random data (due to compression). Constantly creating/deleting large files filled with random data wreaks havoc on incremental/deduplicating backup systems.

I don’t think this is the right way to see this.

Why should a file backup solution adapt to work with git? Or any application? It should not try to understand what a git object is.

I’m paying to copy files from a folder to their servers just do that. No matter what the file is. Stay at the filesystem level not the application level.

FWIW some other people in this thread are saying the article is wrong about .git folders not being backed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765788

That's a really important fact that's getting buried so I'd like to highlight it here.

I think it's understandable for both Backblaze and most users, but surely the solution is to add `.git` to their default exclusion list which the user can manage.

I think they shouldn't back up git objects individually because git handles the versioning information. Just compress the .git folder itself and back it up as a single unit.

It's probably primarily because Linus is a kernel and filesystem nerd, not a database nerd, so he preferred to just use the filesystem which he understood the performance characteristics of well (at least on linux).

> If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just an example really)

See Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/)

P.S. There's also (https://www.sourcegear.com/vault/)

> SourceGear Vault Pro is a version control and bug tracking solution for professional development teams. Vault Standard is for those who only want version control. Vault is based on a client / server architecture using technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and IIS Web Services for increased performance, scalability, and security.

Git packs objects into pack-files on a regular basis. If it doesn't, check your configuration, or do it manually with 'git repack'.

You don’t see ZFS/BTRFS block based snapshot replication choking on git or any sort of dataset. Use the right job for the tool or something.

> .git files seem to still be backing up on my machine

Try checking bzexcluderules_editable.xml. A few years ago, Backblaze would back up .git folders for Mac but not Windows. Not sure if this is still the case.

This is the same reason I always had Backblaze -- stick it on all my computer-illiterate relatives' PCs and then I know there is a fool-proof backup when something invariably goes wrong.

Cloud placeholders have been a feature for years, plenty of programs have mitigations for this behavior.

What are you using now? Asking for a friend

Not OP, but I have been using borg backup [1] against Hetzner Storage Box [2]

Borg backup is a good tool in my opinion and has everything that I need (deduplication, compression, mountable snapshot.

Hetzner Storage Box is nothing fancy but good enough for a backup and is sensibly cheaper for the alternatives (I pay about 10 eur/month for 5TB of storage)

Before that I was using s3cmd [3] to backup on a S3 bucket.

[1] https://www.borgbackup.org/

[2] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd

[3] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd

I use rsync.net. You can use basically any SSH tool or rclone interface. They have a cheaper plan for "experts" if you want to forgo zfs snapshots,https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=experts.

I have used Arq for way over a decade. It does incremental encrypted backups and supports a lot of storage providers. Also supports S3 object lock (to protect against ransomware). It’s awesome!

Restic to almost any cloud storage provider. It works perfectly, it is client-side encrypted with easily-configurable retention policies. I have been using it happily for many years (and also restored some files from the backups).

Wasabi + rclone works well for me. Previous BB customer.

Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.

Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:

We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.

We are here to help.

I also have a lil script that rolls dice on restic snapshot, then lists files and picks a random set to restore to /dev/null.

I still trust restic checksums will actually check whether restore is correct, but that way random part of storage gets tested every so often in case some old pack file gets damaged

That's a really good idea, imma steal it.

We need to talk about The Cone of Backups(tm), which you and I seem to have separately derived!

They all have different policy, size, cost, technical details, and overall SLA/quality tradeoffs.

Does syncthing work yet?

~ 5 years ago, I had a development flow that involved a large source tree (1-10K files, including build output) that was syncthing-ed over a residential network connection to some k8s stuff.

Desyncs/corruptions happened constantly, even though it was a one-way send.

I've never had similar issues with rsync or unison (well, I have in unison, but that's two-way sync, and it always prompted to ask for help by design).

Anyway, my decade-old synology is dying, so I'm setting up a replacement. For other reasons (mostly a decade of systemd / pulse audio finding novel ways to ruin my day, and not really understanding how to restore my synology backups), I've jumped ship over to FreeBSD. I've heard good things about using zfs to get:

saniod + syncoid -> zfs send -> zfs recv -> restic

In the absence of ZFS, I'd do:

rsync -> restic

Or:

unison <-> unison -> restic.

So, similar to what you've landed on, but with one size tier. I have docker containers that the phone talks to for stuff like calendars, and just have the source of the backup flow host my git repos.

One thing to do no matter what:

Write at least 100,000 files to the source then restore from backup (/ on a linux VM is great for this). Run rsync in dry run / checksum mode on the two trees. Confirm the metadata + contents match on both sides. I haven't gotten around to this yet with the flow I just proposed. Almost all consumer backup tools fail this test. Comments here suggest backblaze's consumer offering fails it badly. I'm using B2, but I haven't scrubbed my backup sets in a while. I get the impression it has much higher consistency / durability.

A big difference here is that Backblaze only keeps deleted/changed files for 30 days. Deleted files can go unnoticed for some time, especially if done by a malicious app or ignorant AI.

I'd pay that extra few dollars for peace of mind.

Thanks so much! That is super valuable input.

I do notice in their GUI that they offer a >30 memory for extra $:

30-Day Version History (Current) Included

1-Year Version History

Forever Version History $.006/GB/Month for versions changed or deleted more than 1 year ago

They are not giving much information here at all. The above is not a pasting artifact; their page literally doesn't give any indication of how they price the 1-year history. Presumably it's not just as simple as click to 12x your retention for free.

Meanwhile, it's even more unclear whether that $.006/GB is assessed for change deltas or for the total file size. Indeed, it's not clear if it's assessed against your entire fileset or just files that changed.

I'll have to email them, I guess.

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

Discussion

Discussion

A good decade

A disturbing trend

Sync is not backup

The betrayal

Promises wept