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 muc…
It isn't user error if it was working perfectly fine until the provider made a silent change.
Unless the user error you are referring to is not managing their own backups, like I do. Though this isn't free from trouble, I once had silent failures backing up a small section of my stuff for a while because of an ownership/perms snafu and my script not sending the reports to stderr to anywhere I'd generally see them. Luckily an automated test (every now & then it scans for differences in the whole backup and current data) because it could see the source and noticed a copy wasn't in the latest snapshot on the far-away copy. Reliable backups is a harder problem then most imagine.