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

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

#211

Post by skydhash »

contravariant wrote: post #59
Jolter wrote: post #20

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.

I'm also pretty sure 14 points font is a bit outdated at this point, 16 should probably be a minimum with current screens.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.

10 point at 96 dpi or with correctly applied scaling is very readable. But some toolkits like GTK have huge paddings for their widgets, so the text will be readable, but you’ll lose density.

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

#212

Post by ahofmann »

ape4 wrote: post #169
azalemeth wrote: post #54

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 rest…

Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte

They do, it's called B2 and is another product of them.

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

#213

Post by motrm »

ncheek wrote: post #74

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: 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 fi…

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!

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

#214

Post by vladvasiliu »

bayindirh wrote: post #196
danpalmer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

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.

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

#215

Post by pixl97 »

pkaeding wrote: post #94
maalhamdan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a good point, but you might expect them to back up untracked and modified files in the backup, along with everything else on your filesystem.

Eh, you really shouldn't do that for any kind of file that acts like a (an impromptu) database. This is how you get corruption. Especially when change information can be split across more than one file.

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

#216

Post by lukewarm707 »

mijoharas wrote: post #53
palata wrote: post #33

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.

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)

cloudflare

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

#217

Post by bayindirh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #210
bayindirh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it'll, maybe it won't, but it'll cycle all files in the drive and will stress everything from your cloud provider to Backblaze, incl. everything in between; software and hardware-wise.

That sounds very acceptable to get those files backed up. It shouldn't stress things to spend a couple weeks relaying a terabyte in small chunks. The most likely strain is on my upload bandwidth and yeah that's the cost of cloud backup, more ISPs need to improve upload.

I mean, cycling a couple of terabytes of data over a 512GB drive is at least full 4 writes, which is too much for that kind of thing.

> more ISPs need to improve upload.

I was yelling the same things to the void for the longest time, then I had a brilliant idea of reading the technical specs of the technology coming to my home.

Lo and behold, the numbers I got were the technical limits of the technology that I had at home (PON for the time being), and going higher would need a very large and expensive rewiring with new hardware and technology.

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

noirscape wrote: post #19

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 too…

[deleted]

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

#219

Post by sreitshamer »

massysett wrote: post #76
microtonal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour just to scan my files for changes.

(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.

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

#220

Post by bayindirh »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #214
bayindirh wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

You can't trust size and modification time all the time, though mdate is a better indicator, it's not foolprooof. The only reliable way will be checksumming.

Interestingly, rclone supports that on many providers, but to be able to backblaze support that, it needs to integrate rclone, connect to the providers via that channel and request checks, which is messy, complicated, and computationally expensive. Even if we consider that you won't be hitting API rate limits on the cloud provider.

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