23 ms·

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

• trvz 5mo ago
  Meanwhile, Backblaze still happily backups up the 100TB+ I have on various hard drives with my Mac Pro.
  • mcherm 5mo ago
    Does it? How do you know? If they start excluding random content (eg: .git) without effective notice, maybe they AREN'T backing up everything you think they are.
    • trvz 5mo ago
      You don’t do quarterly restore tests?
      • Semaphor 5mo ago
        How do you do that? My naive idea: Download 100 TB every 3 month to a 2nd device, create a list of files restored, validate checksums with the original machine, make a list of files differing and missing, check which ones are supposed to be missing? That sounds like a full time job.
        • andriy_koval 5mo ago
          Now days its: hi claude, write script in language I hate the less which will ...
      • sieabahlpark 5mo ago
        [dead]
• lpcvoid 5mo ago
  Hetzner storagebox. 1TB for under 5 bucks/month, 5TB for under 15. Sftp access. Point your restic there. Backup game done, no surprises, no MBAs involved.
  • poisonborz 5mo ago
    Until there is. Backblaze was also trusted years ago. Selfhost, it became easy enough.
    • notrealyme123 5mo ago
      Selfhosting Offsite is hard. Accessing services via standard protocols like ssh/webdav and just pushing your encrypted blobs there is a good middle ground. They can't control what you upload, and you can easily point your end-point somewhere else if you need to move.
  • creatonez 5mo ago
    Hetzner Storage Box is not even remotely a similar product to B2, considering the only reliability offered is the disks being in RAID. There is no geo-redundancy at all. The number of simultaneous connections is also quite limited, though this might not matter for many use cases.
    • Dylan16807 5mo ago
      B2 has no geo-redundacy by default. It's RAID across a bunch of neighboring servers.
    • justsomehnguy 5mo ago
      I feel what you need to chose between $5/m and 99.999% SLA
• BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
  Commenting on the presentation, not the content: Why is there a white haze over the entirety of this website?
  • creatonez 5mo ago
    Hi-DPI displays have convinced web designers it's okay to use ludicrously thin fonts with barely any contrast.
    • BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
      I was waiting for some kind of pop up, so I could click "Deny all" and then the text would be readable. But no. It just stayed essentially greyed out, like reading it is an invalid option (which turns out to be the case).
• Terr_ 5mo ago
  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.
  • rrreese 5mo ago
    Yes, you're exactly right. Once they decide not to exclude certain filetypes it puts the burden on the endusers who are unequipped to monitor these changes.
  • aitchnyu 5mo ago
    Umm, why didnt you find a GUI manager like Vorta (this one is Borg exclusive IIRC)?
    • Terr_ 5mo ago
      With restic I don't need some kind of special server daemon on the other end, I can point my backup destination to any mountable filesystem, or relatively dumb "bucket" stores like S3 or B2. I like having the sense of options and avoiding lock-in. [1] As for GUIs in general... Well, like I said, I just finished several years of bad experiences with some proprietary ones, and I wanted to see and choose what was really going on. At this point, I don't think I'd ever want a GUI beyond a basic status-reporting widget. It's not like I need to regularly micromanage the folder-set, especially when nobody else is going to tweak it by surprise. _____ [1] The downside to the dumb-store is a ransomware scenario, where the malware is smart enough to go delete my old snapshots using the same connection/credentials. Enforcing retention policies on the server side necessarily needs a smarter server. B2 might actually have something useful there, but I haven't dug into it.
• o10449366 5mo ago
  I've recently been looking for online backup providers and Backblaze came highly recommended to me - but I think after reading this article I'll look elsewhere because this kind of behavior seems like the first step on the path of enshittification.
• netdevphoenix 5mo ago
  I only use Backblaze as a cold storage service so this doesn't affect me but it's worth knowing about changes in the delivery of their other services as it might become widespread
• benguild 5mo ago
  The fact that they’d exclude “.git” and other things without being transparent about it is scandalous
• patates 5mo ago
  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?
  • eviks 5mo ago
    What’s worse, random metadata change or a completely missing data?
    • patates 5mo ago
      If the constant meta changes (or other peculiarities involving those folders) make the sync unusable, then it can be both. In that case, you stop syncing and communicate. So my idea is that it's a competency problem (lack of communication), not malice. But it's just a theory, based on my own experience. In any case, this is a bad situation, however you look at it.
• dathinab 5mo ago
  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.
  • nikanj 5mo ago
    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
  • Timwi 5mo ago
    Oftentimes the important data that needs restoring is in the checkout: uncommitted and unstaged changes that represent hours of work.
  • dnnddidiej 5mo ago
    I use backblaze and have repos I dont push for this reason so I am a bit stunned lol
  • Hendrikto 5mo ago
    > 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.
    • Tempest1981 5mo ago
      Parent is using "backuped" to mean "likely in some cloud (latest version)". And that may explain why BB excludes .git folders. You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history", I believe? Another important consideration.
      • gilrain 5mo ago
        > You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history", I believe? No, they are using it to mean “backed up”. Like, “if this data gets deleted or is in any way lost locally, it’s still backed remotely (even years later, when finally needed)”. I’m astonished so many people here don’t know what a backup is! No wonder it’s easy for Backblaze to play them for fools.
• fuckinpuppers 5mo ago
  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.
  • jgrizou 5mo ago
    What are you using now? Asking for a friend
    • microtonal 5mo ago
      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!
      • massysett 5mo ago
        How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour just to scan my files for changes.
        • sreitshamer 5mo ago
          (Arq developer here) By default Arq tries to be unobtrusive. Edit your backup plan and slide the “CPU usage” slider all the way to the right to make it go faster.
    • e40 5mo ago
      Wasabi + rclone works well for me. Previous BB customer.
    • mrighele 5mo ago
      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/ https://www.borgbackup.org/ [2] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd https://s3tools.org/s3cmd [3] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd https://s3tools.org/s3cmd
• 100ms 5mo ago
  Managing backup exclusions strikes again. It's impossible. Either commit to backing up the full disk, including the 80% of easily regenerated/redownloaded etc. data, or risk the 0.001% critical 16 byte file that turns out to contain your Bitcoin wallet key or god knows what else. I've been bitten by this more times than I'd like to admit managing my own backups, it's hard to expect a shrink-wrapped provider to do much better. It only takes one dumb simplification like "my Downloads folder is junk, no need to back that up" combined with (no doubt, years later) downloading say a 1Password recovery PDF that you lazily decide will live in that folder, and the stage is set. Pinning this squarely on user error. Backblaze could clearly have done better, but it's such a well known failure mode that it's not much far off refusing to test restores of a bunch of tapes left in the sun for a decade.
  • mr_mitm 5mo ago
    If there is a footgun I haven't considered yet in backup exclusions, I'd like to know more. Shouldn't it be safe to exclude $XDG_CACHE_HOME? Unfortunately, since many applications don't bother with the XDG standard, I have to exclude a few more directories, so if you have any stories about unexpected exclusions, would you mind sharing?
    • 100ms 5mo ago
      I don't remember why I started doing it, but I don't bulk exclude .cache for some reason or other. I have a script that strips down larger known caches as part of the backup. But the logic, whatever it was, is easy to understand: you're relying on apps to correctly categorise what is vs. isn't cache. Also consider e.g. ~/.cache/thumbnails. It's easy to understand as a cache, but if the thumbnails were of photos on an SD card that gets lost or immediately dies, is it still a cache? It might be the only copy of some once-in-a-lifetime event or holiday where the card didn't make it back with you. Something like this actually happened to me, but in that case, the "cache" was a tarball of an old photo gallery generated from the originals that ought to have been deleted. It's just really hard to know upfront whether something is actually important or not. Same for the Downloads folder. Vendor goes bankrupt, removes old software versions, etc. The only safe thing you can really do is hold your nose and save the whole lot.
• faangguyindia 5mo ago
  I backup my data to s3 and r2 using local scripts, never had any issues Don't even know why people rely on these guis which can show their magic anytime
  • bjord 5mo ago
    you don't understand why pre-rolled critical backup solutions might be appealing to (especially non-technical) people? also, you pay per-GB. the author is on backblaze's unlimited plan.
  • palata 5mo ago
    This. I use Restic, the cloud service doesn't know about what I send, it's just encrypted blobs as far as it is concerned.
    • Terr_ 5mo ago
      > encrypted blobs I like how you can set multiple keys (much like LUKS) so that the key used by scheduled backups can be changed without messing with the key that I have memorized to restore with when disaster strikes. It also means you can have multiple computers backing up (sequentially, not simultaneously) to the same repository, each with their own key.
  • ralfd 5mo ago
    > Don't even know why people Most people (my mom) don't know what s3 and r2 is or how to use it.
  • CodesInChaos 5mo ago
    * S3 is super expensive, unless you use Glacier, but that has a high overhead per file, so you should bundle them before uploading. * If your value your privacy, you need to encrypt the files on the client before uploading. * You need to keep multiple revisions of each file, and manage their lifecycle. Unless you're fine with losing any data that was overwritten at the time of the most recent backup. * You need to de-duplicate files, unless you want bloat whenever you rename a file or folder. * Plus you need to pay for Amazon's extortionate egress prices if you actually need to restore your data. I certainly wouldn't want to handle all that on my own in a script. What can make sense is using open source backup software with S3/R2/B2 as backing storage.
• klausa 5mo ago
  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.
  • christoff12 5mo ago
    wut
  • willis936 5mo ago
    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.
    • klausa 5mo ago
      I’m on my phone so forgive the formatting, but here’s my entire support exchange: - - - Hey, I tried restoring a file from my backup — downloading it directly didn't work, and creating a restore with it also failed – I got an email telling me contract y'all about it. Can you explain to me what happened here, and what can I do to get my file(s?) back? - - - Hi Jan, Thanks for writing in! I've reached out to our engineers regarding your restore, and I will get back to you as soon as I have an update. For now, I will keep the ticket open. - - - Hi Jan, Regarding the file itself - it was deleted back in 2022, but unfortunately, the deletion never got recorded properly, which made it seem like the file still existed. Thus, when you tried to restore it, the restoration failed, as the file doesn't actually exist anymore. In this case, it shouldn't have been shown in the first place. For that, I do apologize. As compensation, we've granted you 3 monthly backup credits which will apply on your next renewal. Please let me know if you have any further questions. - - - That makes me even more confused to be honest - I’ve been paying for forever history since January 2022 according to my invoices? Do you know how/when exactly it got deleted? - - - Hi Jan, Unfortunately, we don't have that information available to us. Again, I do apologize. - - - I really don’t want to be rude, but that seems like a very serious issue to me and I’m not satisfied with that response. If I’m paying for a forever backup, I expect it to be forever - and if some file got deleted even despite me paying for the “keep my file history forever” option, “oh whoops sorry our bad but we don’t have any more info” is really not a satisfactory answer. I don’t hold it against _you_ personally, but I really need to know more about what happened here - if this file got randomly disappeared, how am I supposed to trust the reliability of anything else that’s supposed to be safely backed up? - - - Hi Jan, I'll inquire with our engineers tomorrow when they're back in, and I'll update you as soon as I can. For now, I will keep the ticket open. - - - Appreciate that, thank you! It’s fine if the investigation takes longer, but I just want to get to the bottom of what happened here :) - - - Hi Jan, Thanks for your patience. According to our engineers and my management team: With the way our program logs information, we don't have the specific information that explains exactly why the file was removed from the backup. Our more recent versions of the client, however, have vastly improved our consistency checks and introduced additional protections and audits to ensure complete reliability from an active backup. Looking at your account, I do see that your backup is currently not active, so I recommend running the Backblaze installer over your current installation to repair it, and inherit your original backup state so that our updates can check your backup. I do apologize, and I know it's not an ideal answer, but unfortunately, that is the extent of what we can tell you about what has happened. - - - I gave up escalating at this point and just decided these aren’t trusted anymore. The files in question are four year old at this point so it’s hard for me conclusively state, so I guess there might be a perfect storm of that specific file being deleted because it was due to expire before upgraded to “keep history forever”, but I don’t think it’s super likely, and I absolutely would expect them to have telemetry about that in any case. If anyone from Backblaze stumbles upon it and wants to escalate/reinvestigate, the support ID is #1181161.
• mcherm 5mo ago
  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.)
  • baal80spam 5mo ago
    > 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.
    • taormina 5mo ago
      That's why Microsoft isn't a company that relies on trust and doesn't really care about it. They rely on inertia to continue to exist because they used to be popular and so now we can't just get rid of them all at once.
    • subhobroto 5mo ago
      In my circles at least, people aren't using Microsoft products on their own. At home they either use Macs or Linux. We grew up compiling Linux kernels when Microsoft was busy spreading FUD about how dangerous it would be to unleash open source and use open source. That using Linux on something critical like servers would lead to absolute chaos because the kernel wasn't written by someone who knew how to move Mt. Fuji. I imagine Backblaze will soon realize why good PR firms are so expensive.
    • davkan 5mo ago
      Nobody who’s actually considered Microsoft trusts Microsoft. It’s just the devil you know and it’s not like there’s reasonable or trustworthy alternatives in most cases.
• noirscape 5mo ago
  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.
  • ciupicri 5mo ago
    > If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just an example really) See Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/ https://fossil-scm.org/) P.S. There's also (https://www.sourcegear.com/vault/ 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.
  • maalhamdan 5mo ago
    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.
• Jolter 5mo ago
  To the author: please use a darker font. Preferably black. I’m only in my 40’s, I don’t require glasses (yet) and I have to actively squint to read your site on mobile. Safari, iPhone. I’m pretty sure you’re under the permitted contrast levels under WCAG.
  • readingnews 5mo ago
    Completely agree with this comment. Had to cut / paste it into vim and q! when done, was getting a headache.
    • maalhamdan 5mo ago
      document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(p => p.style.color = 'black'); Use this command in the developer tools console to change the color.
    • prmoustache 5mo ago
      Even as a Vim user I find this completely overkill when you can just press the reader mode button on the browser.
  • vovavili 5mo ago
    I instinctively use Dark Reader on any page with a white background so I was genuinely surprised by your comment at first.
  • argsnd 5mo ago
    Safari’s reader mode is good for this. All you have to do is long press the icon on the left edge of the address bar.
    • Jolter 5mo ago
      Yes, it’s a great workaround but website owners should not make me do that.
    • dwayne_dibley 5mo ago
      LONG PRESS????!?! you legend. How does one find these things out.
• venzaspa 5mo ago
  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.
  • einr 5mo ago
    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)
    • yangm97 5mo ago
      It used to be the case that placeholder files were very obvious but now OneDrive and iCloud (possibly others) work more like an attached network storage with some local cache, and that was a good move for most programs because back then a file being evicted from storage looked like a file deletion.
  • simplyinfinity 5mo ago
    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.
    • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
      No reason for that to be true.
• palata 5mo ago
  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.
  • mijoharas 5mo ago
    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)
    • palata 5mo ago
      I run restic with rclone, which is not only compatible with S3-like storage (which include many, like Hetzner, OVH, Exoscale) but many others, from mega to pcloud through Google Drive. For stuff I care about (mostly photos), I back them up on two different services. I don't have TBs of those, so it's not very expensive. My personal code I store on git repositories anyway (like SourceHut or Codeberg or sometimes GitHub).
      • mijoharas 5mo ago
        Yep, I was wondering which services people would recommend. I had been thinking about B2, I just haven't prioritised it.
    • lukewarm707 5mo ago
      cloudflare
  • alfanick 5mo ago
    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 https://imgur.com/B3hppIW) - I'll opensource, it's decent architecture, I just need to cleanup some secrets from Git history...
• stratts 5mo ago
  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)
• throwaway81998 5mo ago
  This is terrifying. Aren't Backblaze users paying per-GB of storage/transfer? Why should it matter what's being stored, as long as the user is paying the costs? This will absolutely result in permanent data loss for some subset of their users. I hope Backblaze responds to this with a "we're sorry and we've fixed this."
  • mrighele 5mo ago
    I think the author is referring to the personal backup plan [1] which has a fixed monthly amount [1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
• knorker 5mo ago
  Is this grey-on-black just meant for LLMs to see for training, or is the intention that humans should be able to read it too?
• breakingcups 5mo ago
  Holy Hannah, this is such bullshit from Backblaze. Both the .git directory (why would I not SPECIFICALLY want this backed up for my projects?) and the cloud directories. I get that changing economics make it more difficult to honor the original "Backup Everything" promise but this feels very underhanded. I'll be cancelling.
• eviks 5mo ago
  > There was the time they leaked all your filenames to Facebook, but they probably fixed that. That's a good warning > Backblaze had let me down. Secondly within the Backblaze preferences I could find no way to re-enable this. This - the nail in the coffin
• AegirLeet 5mo ago
  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.
• solarkraft 5mo ago
  So what are HN’s favorite alternatives? Preferably cheap and rclone compatible. Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?
  • freedomben 5mo ago
    > So what are HN’s favorite alternatives? I assume when asking such a question, you expect an honest answer like mine: rclone is my favorite alternative. Supports encryption seamlessly, and loaded with features. Plus I can control exactly what gets synced/backed up, when it happens, and I pay for what I use (no unsustainable "unlimited" storage that always comes with annoying restrictions). There's never any surprises (which I experienced with nearly every backup solution). I use Backblaze B2 as the backend. I pay like $50 a month (which I know sounds high), but I have many terabytes of data up there that matters to me (it's a decade or more of my life and work, including long videos of holidays like Christmas with my kids throughout the years). For super-important stuff I keep a tertiary backup on Glacier. I also have a full copy on an external harddrive, though those drives are not very reliable so I don't consider it part of the backup strategy, more a convenience for restoring large files quickly.
    • solarkraft 5mo ago
      That’s why I like rclone, but I’m concerned with where to actually put the stuff. Those $50 indeed sound high to me. I think I’d be fine depending on the Glacier backup, is that rclone compatible? What do you pay for it?
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lizknope 5mo ago
    The cheapest is a computer at a relative or friend's house. I have my backup server at my parents house. We both have gigabit fiber so it works well.
  • brycewray 5mo ago
    Backblaze's B2 storage is fine if used with a separate app over which you have more control. Others here have mentioned Arq. I have used it, as well as Kopia[0] and Blinkdisk[1] (Blinkdisk is essentially Kopia but with a nicer UI). Can recommend all three highly; the latter two are FOSS. [0]: https://kopia.io/ https://kopia.io/ [1]: https://blinkdisk.com/ https://blinkdisk.com/
• azalemeth 5mo ago
  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_backup_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
  • embedding-shape 5mo ago
    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.
    • littlecranky67 5mo ago
      Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
      • LaGrange 5mo ago
        It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.
      • embedding-shape 5mo ago
        They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
        • 5mo ago
• Hendrikto 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • embedding-shape 5mo ago
    > 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.
• pastage 5mo ago
  Not backing up cloud is a good default. I have had people complain about performance when they connected to our multiple TB shared drive because their backup software fetched everything. There are of course reasons to back that up I am not belittling that, but not for people who want temporary access to some 100GB files i.e. most people in my situation.
• XCSme 5mo ago
  Initially I thought this was about their B2 file versions/backups, where they keep older versions of your files.
  • Hamuko 5mo ago
    B2 is not a backup service. It’s an object storage service.
    • xmcp123 5mo ago
      Weird, because in the Reddit thread linked above they call themselves a backup service.
      • XCSme 5mo ago
        I guess you were as confused as me, as I only asociate BackBlaze with B2, I haven't used any other of their services.
• SCdF 5mo ago
  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.
  • ramses0 5mo ago
    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.
    • hedora 5mo ago
      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.
• avidphantasm 5mo ago
  I recently stopped using Backblaze after a decade because it was using over 20GB of RAM on my machine. I also realized that I mostly wanted it for backing up old archival data that doesn’t change ever really. So I created a B2 bucket and uploaded a .tar.xz file.
• basilgohar 5mo ago
  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.
  • e40 5mo ago
    I had issues with the personal backup product and was told the solution was to create a new account. I moved to Wasabi immediately using rclone. On macOS.
• ncheek 5mo ago
  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.
  • motrm 5mo ago
    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!
  • Nnnes 5mo ago
    > .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.
• cyanydeez 5mo ago
  rhey alao stopped taking my cc and email me on a no+reply email about it like they dont want to get paid
• mdevere 5mo ago
  If this is true, I'll need to stop using Backblaze. I have been relying on them for years. If I had discovered this mid-restore, I think I would have lost my mind.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• bakugo 5mo ago
  Blackblaze's personal backup solution is a mess in general. The client is clearly a giant pile of spaghetti code and I've had numerous issues with it, trying to figure out and change which files it does and doesn't backup is just one of them. The configuration and logging formats they use are absolutely nonsensical.
• Vingdoloras 5mo ago
  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.
• kameit00 5mo ago
  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.
  • 51Cards 5mo ago
    If you're pulling 2TB of data you should be ordering it on a drive from them and saving yourself the hassle.
    • Anamon 5mo ago
      I restored a 2 TB drive via the net no problem from them some years back, although I didn't use the client, but downloaded one massive ZIP file from the web interface. Well, "no problem" is an overstatement. Once you need a restore, you learn that their promise of end-to-end encryption is actually a lie. (As in, you have to break the end-to-end encryption to restore since everything has to be decrypted on their servers.)
      • lamasery 5mo ago
        I've backed up and restored ~14-15TB[0] with their B2 product. IIRC sync each way took three or four days, not really that bad. I used rclone, though, not any official client. And that's B2, not their "unlimited" backup service. [0] My home file server, migrating a four-disk mirrored-pairs ZFS array to RAID5 including replacing the smaller pair of disks with ones matching the larger pair, so the old ZFS filesystem had to be totally destroyed in the process and I needed somewhere to put the data for the like 15 minutes the logical disk wouldn't exist in any form. The alternative would have been to build an entire new four-disk array, doubling the disk cost of the project and requiring some kind of second host-machine. This approach saved me $400 or more, probably wouldn't have attempted it otherwise, cost would have been too high. Ended up costing somewhere in the tens of dollars as I recall.
• proactivesvcs 5mo ago
  The article links to a statement made by Backblaze: "The Backup Client now excludes popular cloud storage providers [...] this change aligns with Backblaze’s policy to back up only local and directly connected storage." I guess windows 10 and 11 users aren't backing up much to Backblaze, since microsoft is tricking so many into moving all of their data to onedrive.
• tomkaos 5mo ago
  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.
• Havoc 5mo ago
  Ouch. The only reason their “well figured out what to include and exclude” policy made sense was an implicit assumption that they’d play it safe
• pjdesno 5mo ago
  Why should Backblaze back up their competitors’ data? And what use is it to you for it to do so?
  • conception 5mo ago
    It’s my data not their competitors’.
• minebreaker 5mo ago
  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...
• corndoge 5mo ago
  I like backblaze for backups, but I use restic and b2. You get what you pay for. Really lame behavior from backblaze as I always recommended their native backup solution to others and now need to reconsider.
• noisy_boy 5mo ago
  Just switched from Backblaze to Cloudflare R2 (using restic). Now it makes me think if I should check for such issues with R2 as well.
• yard2010 5mo ago
  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
• donatj 5mo ago
  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.
• politelemon 5mo ago
  I'd like to apologise to everyone for this situation. It's very likely because I've just started using it recently.
• hiisukun 5mo ago
  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.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo ago
    Most have pointed out that the OneDrive exclusion makes sense due to its complexity. But I see no one here defending the undocumented .git exclusion. That’s pretty egregious - if I’m backing up that directory it’s always 100% intentional and it definitely feels like a sacrifice to the product functionality for stability and performance. Not documenting it just twists the knife.
  • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
    If you want to access your file, it gets downloaded. If Backblaze wants to check if your file has been changed, it doesn’t need to have the file downloaded - that’s what modification time is for. And file size.
• Neil44 5mo ago
  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.
  • danpalmer 5mo ago
    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.
    • bayindirh 5mo ago
      > 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. When you have a couple terabytes of data in that drive, is it acceptable to cycle all that data and use all that bandwidth and wear down your SSD at the same time? Also, high number of small files is a problem for these services. I have a large font collection in my cloud account and oh boy, if I want to sync that thing, the whole thing proverbially overheats from all the queries it's sending.
      • vladvasiliu 5mo ago
        But if the files are only on the remote storage and not local, chances are they haven't been modified recently, so it shouldn't download them fully, just check the metadata cache for size / modification time and let them be if they didn't change. So, in practice, you shouldn't have to download the whole remote drive when you do an incremental backup.
• peteforde 5mo ago
  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.
  • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
    If you don’t really want backups you can save a lot more money by not signing up for Backblaze.
    • peteforde 5mo ago
      Are they known for accidentally erasing your backups? I get that this is not a restorable image, but for $100 a year I'm not expecting that.
  • justin66 5mo ago
    "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.
    • peteforde 5mo ago
      I'm happy to pay an annual fee for a one-size fits all approach that I don't have to think about. I read the post and I'm just saying that his blockers are not blockers for me. I would ask you: what is the better alternative? That's not a rhetorical question; they don't have my credit card details for another two weeks.
• weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
  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
• lukewarm707 5mo ago
  i think at this point i have had enough of the majority of consumer products and just use production. backup to real s3 storage. llms on real api tokens. search on real search api no adverts. google account on workspace and gcp, no selling the data. etc. only way to stop corpos treating you like a doormat
• nstj 5mo ago
  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 https://stackoverflow.com/a/78872853 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48110879 https://stackoverflow.com/a/48110879 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24236065 https://stackoverflow.com/a/24236065
  • bombcar 5mo ago
    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.
    • nstj 5mo ago
      This is a lesser understood corollary of my comment :). Thanks for calling it out ;)
    • globular-toast 5mo ago
      That goes for any time you send data to a third party or over a channel you don't control. Compromised is compromised. There is no going back. I hate things like "email recall" in Outlook or deleting messages in Teams etc because it trains normies into thinking you can recover from a compromise.
• jackdh 5mo ago
  I was always roughly of the mind that Backblaze was just too close to the "If it's too good to be true it probably is", seems like that may have been a good decision.
• nekusar 5mo ago
  ANY company, and I do mean any, that offers "unlimited" anything is 100% a scam. At best its a temporary growth hack to entice people who havent had technology rug-pulls. And when profits dwindle and the S curve is near the upper coast, you can guarantee that "unlimited" will get hidden restrictions, exclusions, "terms of service" changes, nebulous fair use policies that arent fair, and more dark patterns. And every one of them are "how do we worsen unlimited to make more money on captive customers?" We're also seeing this play out in real time with Anthropic with their poop-splatter-llm. They've gone through like 4 rug-pulls, and people STILL pay $200/month for it. Every round, their unlimited gets worse and worse, like I outlined above. Pay as you go is probably the more fair. But SaaS providers reallllllly hate in providing direct and easy to use tools to identify costs, or <gasp> limit the costs. A storag/backup provider could easily show this. LLM providers could show a near-realtime token utilization. But no. Dark patterns, rug-pulls, and "i am altering the deal, pray i do not alter it further".
• massysett 5mo ago
  I just looked in my Backblaze restore program, and all my .git folders are in there. I did have to go to the Settings menu and toggle an option to show hidden files. This is the Mac version.
• infogulch 5mo ago
  I found out the hard way that backblaze just deletes backed up data from external hard drives that haven't been connected in a while. I had like 2TB total.
• dangus 5mo ago
  Ultimately the author is ranting about something that is likely an unintended bug where some update along the line reset the default exclusions list. It almost seems like they’re taking it personally as some kind of intentionally slight against them. Most users would not want Backblaze to back up other cloud synced directories. This default is sensible.
  • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
    Hidden default to not backup is incompetent not sensible.
    • dangus 5mo ago
      It’s not hidden it’s right there in the exclusions list.
      • wtallis 5mo ago
        If the user didn't put it there, it's hidden. Nobody routinely inspects the detailed configuration settings of their backup system, especially when it does appear to be working if you see it transferring data to the cloud and spot-check a file or two. Any addition to the exclusions list that wasn't added by explicit user action is a hidden change and a data loss bug.
        • dangus 5mo ago
          At some point the user is responsible for verifying their backups, right? You can’t just buy a product, login, and close your eyes. I’ve witnessed my parents’ Time Machine backups (the simplest backup system of all time) sitting stale because they unplugged the hard drive. They are ultimately responsible for paying attention to the little icon that tells them that the system is overdue for a backup. I agree that there might be a bug if the exclusion list was modified without user intervention, though I don’t think this blog post convinces me that that’s guaranteed to be what happened. For all we know the author just didn’t notice this exclusion before. And, again, I think excluding OneDrive and Dropbox is sensible. Most users are not intending to duplicate those backups.
• ethin 5mo ago
  This "let's not back up .git folders" thing bit me too. I had reinstalled windows and thought "Eh, no big deal, I'll just restore my source code directory from Backblaze". But, of course, I'm that kind of SWE who tends to accumulate very large numbers of git repositories over time (think hundreds at least), some big, some small. Some are personal projects. Some are forks of others. But either way, I had no idea that Backblaze had decided, without my consent, to not back up .git directories. So, of course, imagine how shocked and dismayed I was when I discovered that I had a bunch of git repositories which had the files at the time they were backed up, but absolutely no actual git repo data, so I couldn't sync them. At all. After that, I permanently abandoned Backblaze and have migrated to IDrive E2 with Duplicati as the backup agent. Duplicati, at least, keeps everything except that which I tell it not to, and doesn't make arbitrary decisions on my behalf. Edit: spelling errors and cleanup
• balderdash 5mo ago
  not helpful for non-mac users, but i really like the way arq separates the backup utility from the backup location. I feel like the the reason backblaze did this was to save money on "unlimited" storage and the associated complexity of cloud storage locations.
  • conception 5mo ago
    Arq is on windows now!
• philjohn 5mo ago
  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.
• sourcegrift 5mo ago
  The only right approach these days is a vps with a zfs partition with auto-snapshots, compression, and deduplication on and a syncthing instance running. Everything else is bound to lose money, and/or data (a comment mentions they lost a file and got 3 whole months FREE)
• Vegenoid 5mo ago
  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.
  • Ajedi32 5mo ago
    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.
    • Ajedi32 5mo ago
      Okay nevermind, I just checked and none of my git repos are being backed up; just the working copy. That's pretty awful.
  • andybak 5mo ago
    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
    • layer8 5mo ago
      > 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. I don’t really understand that. I’m using Windows File History, and while it’s limited to backing up changes only every 15 minutes, and is writing to a local network drive, it doesn’t seem to have any trouble with .git directories.
• himata4113 5mo ago
  restic and with cloudflare r2 (safety) or new hetzner storage boxes(cost effectiveness) are almost cheaper than backblaze 'unlimited' with full control and 'unlimited' history. I still like backblaze, they've been nice for the days where I was running windows. Their desktop app is probably one of the best in the scene.
• seniorThrowaway 5mo ago
  Should really qualify this headline with which backblaze product.
  • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
    If you can’t trust one of their products, you can’t trust the company.
• igtztorrero 5mo ago
  I use Kopia Backup software, sending all my important files to a compatible S3 bucket, using retention-mode: compliance as ransomware protection. I have access to every incremental snapshot Kopia makes using kopia-ui.
• mcast 5mo ago
  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.
• decadefade 5mo ago
  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.
• keitmo 5mo ago
  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.
• module1973 5mo ago
  Time to make the move over to linux and use Duplicati with Backblaze or any other bucket. You get the benefit of encrypted backups, have more control over what to back up, and will be notified upon failure.
• overtone1000 5mo ago
  Restic+Backblaze
• sieabahlpark 5mo ago
  [dead]
• julianozen 5mo ago
  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
  • ibizaman 5mo ago
    Why not just use backblaze as cold storage and use restic or another tool with a GUI to backup to it?
    • cortesoft 5mo ago
      That is a lot more expensive if you have more than a small amount of data.
    • julianozen 5mo ago
      Well this wasn’t the promise backblaze made a decade ago when we started using their products. Now I need a new solution that will work for my parents
      • ibizaman 5mo ago
        Of course, I wouldn’t use their client anymore. Actually, I would have never used it from the start as it’s not open source. I think for backups there’s no better guarantee than that. I don’t mean because you could look at the source code, I mean because in my experience open source products tend to care more about their users than not. At least for such foundational tools.
    • reddalo 5mo ago
      Backblaze Computer Backup != B2 Cloud Storage You can't connect to their Computer Backup service through third-party software.
• conception 5mo ago
  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.
• dashesyan 5mo ago
  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
• josecapurro 5mo ago
  This is not a Backblaze issue. When trying to copy files from a OneDrive folder, the operation fails if the file must be sync'd first. I, for one, do not think it is fair to blame Backblaze for the shortcomings of another application who breaks basic funtionality like copying files. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/onedriveforbusiness/copy-operation-never-starts/4142701/replies/4145205 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/onedriveforb...
• runjake 5mo ago
  I already dropped Backblaze over this stuff and I do not intend to ever consider using them again. Now, I: - Put important stuff in a SyncThing folder and sync that out to 2 different nodes. - Clone stuff to an encrypted external drive at home. - Clone stuff to an encrypted external drive at work and hide it out in the datacenter (fire suppression, HVAC, etc). It's janky but it works. I used to use a safe deposit box but that got too tedious.
• tompagenet2 5mo ago
  This is an absolutely massive loss for me. I had no idea it wasn't backing up my OneDrive files. A horrible way to find out and a massive loss of trust.
• coldtea 5mo ago
  Dropping them like I accidentally picked up shit...
• nla 5mo ago
  I left them years ago when they wouldn't package a download for restore. Total waste of money and false sense of security.
• andybak 5mo ago
  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
  • wafflebot 5mo ago
    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.)
  • kevincox 5mo ago
    That's ridiculous. I use Git for tons of personal projects.
    • gck1 5mo ago
      Forget personal, some of my git repos aren't even "developer", or have a single line of code in them.
  • Tor3 5mo ago
    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.
• nodesocket 5mo ago
  I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox does not affect me it’s worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores local files in OneDrive. You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back to an identical state of the snapshot. Yet, Microsoft can’t seem to figure this out.
• jtagen 5mo ago
  Well shit. If this is right, I'm dropping Backblaze and recommending all my friends/customers do the same. I pay for and rely on Backblaze as the "back up everything" they advertise.... to silently stop backing up the vast majority of my work is unacceptable!
• rietta 5mo ago
  Seems Backblaze does not even read their own blog with articles about 3-2-1 backups and sync not being the same as backup.
• devnulled 5mo ago
  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.
  • brandon272 5mo ago
    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.
  • ValentineC 5mo ago
    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.
• mlmonkey 5mo ago
  I would love to see a summary of all of the various options being bandied about. There are 2 components in my mind: the backup "agent" (what runs on your laptop/desktop/server) and the storage provider (which BB is in this context). What do people recommend for the agent? (I understand some storage providers have their own agents) For Linux/MacOS/Windows. What do people recommend for the storage provider? Let's assume there are 1TB of files to be backed up. 99.9% don't change frequently.
• vsl 5mo ago
  Dropped Backblaze over this when I learned about it in December (https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs-up-dropbox/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs...) and went to Arq. Not as polished, especially on Windows, but works and is actually cheaper.
• mig39 5mo ago
  I'm Backblaze user -- multiple machines, multiple accounts. I'm going to be dropping Backblaze over this change, that I'm only learning about from this thread. Any suggestions for alternatives?
• GrinningFool 5mo ago
  > 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. No problem I thought, I’ll just restore this from Backblaze. `git reflog` is your friend. You can recover from almost any mistake, including force-pushed branches.
• calmbonsai 5mo ago
  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.
• itintheory 5mo ago
  Anyone have suggestions for backing up Google Drive + local files? I keep reading the horror stories about people getting locked out of cloud services, and worry about my 20 years of history stored in Drive. Less worried about local files which are sync'd to an external disk, but it'd be nice to have something in place for everything.
  • crazygringo 5mo ago
    I have the same worry about being locked out. So I back it up to a NAS. I bought a Synology NAS (back before they turned into an evil company) which includes a Cloud Sync app which will connect to your Google Drive and sync changes every hour. It's technically sync not backup, but because all deleted files go into a "Trash bin" directory that you can set to never empty, it effectively works as backup for deleted files too (though you can't recover older versions of a file that still exists). The really great feature is that it has the option to sync all files that are in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides format as converted to Word/Excel/PPT. And the great thing about the backup running on your NAS is that it doesn't depend on your computer being on or anything. I know Synology's considered an evil company now because they seem to tie you to their own hard drives now, but I don't know if there's anything else as easy to set up for reliably syncing consumer cloud files to a NAS. Hopefully there is though, if anyone else knows? And of course, you can similarly run a backup program on your computer to back up your local files to it, as it's just a network mount.
• bede 5mo ago
  Thanks for publicising. I recently decided not to renew my Backblaze in favour of 'self hosting' encrypted backups outside the US. But I was horrified to learn that my git repos may not have been backed up, nor my Dropbox, whose subscription I also recently cancelled. Good riddance. My experience using restic has been excellent so far, snapshots take 5 mins rather than 30 mins with backblaze's Mac client. I just hope I can trust it…
• cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
  This is just wild. I mean, they do one thing. Looking forward to seeing if they respond.
• Ensorceled 5mo ago
  Windows is constantly pushing my wife and inlaws to move all their files to OneDrive while Backblaze is no longer backing up OneDrive. There are similar things going on with Apple and iCloud. What is the point of Backblaze at all at this point? If you are a consumer, all your files are probably IN OneDrive or iCloud or soon will be.
• KingMachiavelli 5mo ago
  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.
  • mzmzmzm 5mo ago
    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.
• morpheuskafka 5mo ago
  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.
  • axelthegerman 5mo ago
    Great explanation, very reasonable. Except that before they did and then they didn't without any proper notification (release notes don't count for significant changes like this). They should have just added a pop up or at least email or both, given a heads-up and then again when the change actually kicked in
  • PunchyHamster 5mo ago
    Well, you missed the point. The problem is not them not backing it up by default but: * changing existing setting to backup less by default * essentially hiding the change from the user as it is not shown on directory exclude list
• fluxusars 5mo ago
  I dropped them when they silently dropped support for veracrypt/truecrypt drives: https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1ol0pgf/backblaze_will_no_longer_support_veracrypt_volumes/ https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1ol0pgf/backblaz... They're really proving lately that they are a company that can't be trusted with your data.
• mikewarot 5mo ago
  I assume they do some form of de-duplication across all files in their system. Most windows system files, and binaries would be duplicates, and only need to be stored once. I'm relatively sure this is true for most other systems, like Linux, MacOS, etc. Why not just back everything up for everyone? It really shouldn't take up much more space or bandwidth. Personally: I had to go in and edit the undisclosed exclusions file, and restart the backup process. I've got quite a few gigabytes of upload going now.
  • defaultcompany 5mo ago
    They encrypt files on the client before transmission.
    • Tor3 5mo ago
      There was a Swizz cloud backup system existing until some years ago.. can't recall the name but it started with a 'V'. They also encrypted the files on the client side before transmission, but the files were encrypted with their own md5sum or some such as key, and therefore similar files from different systems, encrypted, could still be de-duplicated across their whole system.
      • defaultcompany 5mo ago
        Interesting! I can picture how the clients could calculate a hash prior to encryption and that would let the server know those files have the same contents once decrypted but how would that let them save on disk space? They still can’t see the contents of the file itself even if they know it’s the same so how could they deduplicate the storage? If they drop either one they are just left with a single encrypted version using only one clients key which they can’t serve up to anyone else.
        • Tor3 5mo ago
          I assume they had a kind of pool for files, and a system linking files (or should I say "blobs" to each client's directory layout. Kind of like if I have a disk with different subdirectories, I could run a tool (which do exist) to find duplicates, and delete all except one copy, and hardlink the rest to that one. As for the cloud storage system, the files were, as mentioned, stored in an encrypted form, using a hash of the original file as key (possibly md5, possibly something else, I can't recall that at the moment). Which the cloud provider didn't know, but the client's application would know it. The encrypted file is provided to (every) client, every client can decrypt it because the clients keep the encryption keys (the original hashes, one for every file). The details of that I don't have anymore, there used to be a document describing the whole thing. I probably got rid of all of that after they stopped the service (which I used for several years, with no issues).
• herf 5mo ago
  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.
• mk12 5mo ago
  Glad I switched from their personal computer backup to using restic + B2 a while ago. Every night my laptop and homelab both back up to each other and to B2. It takes less than a minute and I have complete control over the exclusions and retention. And I can easily switch off B2 to something else if I want.
  • thecapybara 5mo ago
    I was using Restic + B2 for a while, but recently switched to Restic + Hetzner Storage Box. Storage Box is a little more effort to setup since it doesn't provide an S3 interface and I instead had to use WebDAV, but it's more affordable and has automated snapshots that adds a layer of easy immutability.
• simon_bitwise 5mo ago
  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 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.
• seany 5mo ago
  FWIW You can put a rpi in gadget mode and use nbd kit to mount nfs/smb shares..
• PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  Having option to not do that is great, we did it for our backup system, because our cloud stores were backed up separately. Doing it silently is disaster. Making excludes doing it hidden from UI is outright malice, because it's far too easy to assume those would just be added as normal excludes and then go "huh, I probably just removed those from excludes when I set it up".
• tempaccount5050 5mo ago
  At least at the enterprise level, I've never seen anyone use Backblaze for this. You want to use a cloud level backup like Rubrik/Veeam/Cohesity. Trying to back up cloud based files locally is a fools errand. Granted it sucks that they dropped this without proper communication, but it's already a bad solution.
  • PunchyHamster 5mo ago
    We just use restic with B2 and some local S3 servers rather than relying on proprietary solutions. If it goes to shit we will just change the provider
• evanmoran 5mo ago
  Thank you. I will also immediately stop using backblaze. Its purpose is to independently back up my hard drive. Not to pick and choose.
• tencentshill 5mo ago
  They need to be reminded they are a utility. It's not up to them to have an opinion about my data. "Utilities" with an opinion carry a lot more liability.
• aklein 5mo ago
  Longtime backblaze user. Time to vibecode myself a replacement.
• chinathrow 5mo ago
  I discovered Backblaze through their disk reliabilty posts here on HN and became a customer for a family laptop many years ago. Now I discover again through HN, that it's time to find another solution.
• gadders 5mo ago
  I've been on Backblaze for a few years now, ever since Crashplan decided it didn't want individuals to use its service any more. It's always been just janky. A bad app that constantly throws low disk warnings and opens a webpage if you click anywhere on it. Being told the password change dialogue in the app doesn't work and having to use the website etc etc. Just all round not an experience that inspires confidence. In comparison, Crashplan just worked.
  • Anamon 5mo ago
    But Crashplan also had an absolute abomination of a bloated, sluggish, Java-based client.
    • gadders 5mo ago
      It was a bit, but I never found it as bad as Backblaze.
      • ValentineC 5mo ago
        CrashPlan required, if I recall correctly, 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up. It got a bit unwieldy after a while, because I have multiple terabytes of photos and videos over many years.
        • gadders 5mo ago
          These clients can't be that hard to write, surely?
• nippoo 5mo ago
  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-dropbox-and-onedrive-more-than-you-think/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-google-drive... That aged well...
• vondur 5mo ago
  Isn't it challenging to back up a directory that's being synced with a 3rd party service? Especially if more than one person may be working on one of those files in OneDrive or DropBox?
• tonymet 5mo ago
  > 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 git reflog is your "backup". it contains every commit and the resulting log (DAG) going back 90 days. If you do blow away a remote commit, don't fret, it's in your reflog # list all of the remote HEAD commits you've ever worked with git reflog origin/master # double check it's the right one git log -5 origin/master@{2} # reset the remote to the right one git push -f origin $(git rev-parse origin/master@{2}):master # (optional) reset your local branch git reset origin/master@{2} # at this point your local branch has time-traveled, but your working dir will be in the present state (e.g. all the relevant files will show as changed)
• mrwetsnow 5mo ago
  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. :(
• raincole 5mo ago
  Why tho? Doesn't Backblaze sell cloud storage, and more files you backup the more profit they make? Or I misunderstand what it is?
• sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
  Was about to sign up for backblaze and came across this. Thank you for sharing. Where I sync my files to should not be a concern of my back up provider. I need plain and simple back up that isn’t opinionated.
  • abcqwerty9876 5mo ago
    Borgbase is decent. rsync.net as well if you're comfy with a terminal
• aborsy 5mo ago
  Dropbox is literally the worst anmong all. For every little feature, like setting a password it requires upgrading your already paid plan. It’s slow and offers nothing. I put a Nextcloud snap on a VPS in the same city. Fast and no limitations.
• numpad0 5mo ago
  Nobody mentioning HDD prices? Disk prices had ~doubled over the last half a year.
• robertjpayne 5mo ago
  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.
• nerdile 5mo ago
  TIL that Backblaze has a desktop app. Seems this is specific to Windows and does not impact anyone using it as just a storage backend for backups through something like rclone.
  • subhobroto 5mo ago
    I just want you to ensure you're not confusing B2 with the product being mentioned here. This is a custom Backblaze product which only works via their apps and I don't believe is available as a storage backend for backups through something like rclone. I never tried this particular Backblaze product because I don't trust a opaque blob touching my most valuable data nor do I trust unlimited plans that dont mention what the limits are, atleast in fine print.
• h4kunamata 5mo ago
  Reading the comments and OP, DESERVED!!! You all skipped the most important part: 3, 2, 1 backup rule. Basically, you all were using Backblaze as a centered backup system, what do you think it was going to happen??? You do not backup data and call it a day, you must have a process in place to go there and check random files and folders for corruption. This process would have warned you that the sync was not 1:1
  • subhobroto 5mo ago
    To some it might feel nice the be vindicated. To know that people who didnt follow industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule have lost all the data they thought Backblaze would protect for them. The thing to empathize here is those who purchased these retail Backblaze plans fell into two buckets: 1. The technically savvy who were following the industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule, arbitraging the "unlimited" plan, waiting for the game to be over. 2. The technically unsavvy who believed in the "unlimited" plan My bet is that 2 is screwed and that's majority of the users of this specific Backblaze plan. This is likely to have rippling effects on Backblaze including their unrelated, object store plans. When there are choices available, people don't appreciate being ripped off and right now, there are a lot of choices in object stores.
  • dandano 5mo ago
    Deserved? If their product said, ensure that you have the 3,2,1 method then you could claim that. You pay for a backup, OP and everyone is rightly pretty mad about it.
• domador 5mo ago
  I was similarly upset and also dropped Carbonite over 15 years ago over something along these lines. Backup services should be agnostic about the data they back up for their customers.
• regalrubbish 5mo ago
  I use local repos, no GitHub, no remote. My .git directories are my backup. Backblaze was the safety net. Past tense. The data I'd lose isn't recoverable from anywhere else. That's the entire point of an offline backup provider. If I wanted selective cloud sync I'd use a selective cloud sync product. What makes this worse than a bad decision is that it was a silent one. No banner, no email, no opt-out prompt, just a release note buried so deep that the only way most people will find out is when they go to restore something that isn't there. That's not an oversight, that's a choice. I've been a paying customer for years. The product I bought backed up everything. That product no longer exists and I wasn't told.
• hitekker 5mo ago
  I didn't dig deep but I think Hindenburg Research saw this coming 1-2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827236
• gck1 5mo ago
  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?
  • dpark 5mo ago
    > 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.
  • foobiekr 5mo ago
    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.
  • kalleboo 5mo ago
    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.
• realaaa 5mo ago
  clear communication is very important as well as giving users the rightful choice about such things bad call
• qsi 5mo ago
  Just checked the Backblaze website where you can find the following page https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-backup-data https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-bac... which says: This article answers the question, "What does Backblaze back up?" Backblaze backs up all of your data across all of the user profiles that are on your computer as soon as you install the client. Backblaze believes that you do not need to worry whether you selected all of the files that you care about, put any files in a different location on your computer, or added new files that may not be included in your online backup. Therefore, Backblaze automatically selects all of your data. This is at best flat out wrong, at worst a blatant lie. But this was what I thought I was buying and paying for. Turns out you do have to worry! Don't lie about other stuff you don't back up. Very disappointed in Backblaze.
• ic4l 5mo ago
  The Backblaze Restore Application does not work reliably when restoring a large number of files. On an M4 Mac, it repeatedly crashed and ended up in a non-recoverable state, forcing me to recover the files another way. Some restore options also do not let you move data to their cloud for direct download, which makes it feel like they do not actually want users to fully download and recover all of their files.
• ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
  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.
• latentframe 5mo ago
  This looks like a systemic issue and not just Backblaze : because we’ve layered cloud on top of cloud and call it backup but it’s very linked. When a provider changes the rules then a big part of that safety just disapears and its the same pattern in finance: looks diversified but it isn’t
• Loranubi 5mo ago
  I would understand if they didn't backup anything with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS set (on Windows). Everything else makes their product worthless.
• Metacelsus 5mo ago
  TIL Backblaze doesn't back up the /Applications folder on Mac! Time to move everything to ~/Applications
• cxplay 5mo ago
  However, OneDrive users (yes, that includes me) are still complaining that there’s no way to set up exclusions.
• juancn 5mo ago
  Try recovery periodically, I lost ~90% of my files on Backblaze when I needed them. They had a corrupted backup and no way to know it or to do anything about it.
• NR-backblaze 5mo ago
  Hello everyone. Natasha from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders. You are correct 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: We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files. 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 feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.
  • tmault 5mo ago
    Hey Natasha, thanks for coming here. Out of interest I thought I'd see if the fact that cloud services are not backed up was highlighted on the product page so it was clear to new customers https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal ... it's not mentioned anywhere. So I think you're setting up new customers with the same expectations I had after 14 years of service. Support just told me 'Backblaze not backing up files stored by OneDrive is not a change in policy. It is the enforcement of policy that has existed since the inception of the Computer Backup service.' It may be right, but it makes me feel like I have been buying a different product from you than I thought over the last 14 years & disintegrated trust in milliseconds...
• kenkendk 5mo ago
  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 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.