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

rareese.com

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

#131
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.

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

#132
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.

Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?

You can only do it during growth phases or if there’s complimentary products with margin. The story I was told about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google has a similar story, although neither are really unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large customers.

Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.

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

#133
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also pretty sure 14 points font is a bit outdated at this point, 16 should probably be a minimum with current screens. It's not as if screens aren't wide enough to fit bigger text.

That's good guidelines and all, but meanwhile you are posting it on a site with.. .default { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#828282; } .admin { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:8.5pt; color:#000000; } .title { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#828282; overflow:hidden; } .subtext { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt;…

There’s a reason I have HN set to 200%

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.

Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to times .

I’ve used Spectrum and their predecessors since the 90s. Never ran into this, although the upstream speeds are ridiculously slow, and they used to force Netflix traffic to an undersized peer circuit.

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

#136
post #17

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.

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.

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.

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

#137

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.

> 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.

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.

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

#138

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 giv…

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.

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

#140
post #24

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…

What are you using now? Asking for a friend

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