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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

#231

Post by nekusar »

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 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".

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

#232

Post by dathinab »

gilrain wrote: post #163
Tempest1981 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

definition of the term backup by most sources is one the line of:

> a copy of information held on a computer that is stored separately from the computer

there is nothing about _any_ versioning, or duration requirements or similar

To use your own words, I fear its you who doesn't know what a backup is and assume a lot other additional (often preferable(1)) things are part of that term.

Which is a common problem, not just for the term backup.

There is a reason lawyers define technical terms in a for this contract specific precise way when making contracts.

Or just requirements engineering. Failing there and you might end up having a backup of all your companies important data in a way susceptible to encrypting your files ransomware or similar.

---

(1): What often is preferable is also sometimes the think you really don't want. Like sometimes keeping data around too long is outright illegal. Sometimes that also applies to older versions only. And sometimes just some short term backups are more then enough for you use case. The point here is the term backup can't mean what you are imply it does because a lot of existing use cases are incompatible with it.

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

#233

Post by Dylan16807 »

bayindirh wrote: post #217
Dylan16807 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

4 writes out of what, 3000? For something you'll need to do once or twice ever? It's fine. You might not even eat your whole Drive Write Per Day quota for the upload duration, let alone the entire month.

> the technical limits of the technology that I had at home (PON for the time being)

Isn't that usually symmetrical? Is yours not?

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

#235

Post by rogerrogerr »

doubled112 wrote: post #202
myself248 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so intuitive, how could I have missed that?

Good old iOS and hidden features. Great discoverability. Long press those, swipe that, gesture this. I have a gesture for whoever decided "find in page" should go under share.

> I have a gesture for whoever decided "find in page" should go under share.

You can also just type your search term into the normal address bar and there's an item at the bottom of the list for "on this page - find ". I'd never even seen the find-in-page button under share.

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

#236

Post by gkanai »

avazhi wrote: post #127
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.

Your iPhone has this cool feature called reader mode if you didn’t know. As for mentioning WCAG - so what if it doesn’t adhere to those guidelines? It’s his personal website, he can do what he wants with it. Telling him you found it difficult to read properly is one thing but referencing WCAG as if this guy is bound somehow to modify his own aesthetic preference for generic accessibility reasons is laughable. Part of…

Many here at HN find that site hard to read, not just the original commenter.

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

#237

Post by Confiks »

Jolter wrote: post #62
dwayne_dibley wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LONG PRESS????!?! you legend. How does one find these things out.

Like this, by word of mouth. That’s how Apple has done UI design since they stopped printing paper manuals. - ctrl-shift-. to show hidden files on macOS - pull down to see search box (iOS 18) - swipe from top right corner for flashlight button - swipe up from lower middle for home screen Etc, etc

Not restricted to Apple, but TIL: Double-clicking on a word an keeping the second click pressed, then dragging, allows you to select per word instead of per character.

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

#238

Post by bayindirh »

jtbayly wrote: post #225
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…

Reading your comments, it sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files. I know you haven’t technically said that, but that’s what it sounds like. I assume you don’t think that, so I’m curious, what would you propose positively?

> I know you haven’t technically said that, but that’s what it sounds like.

Yes, I didn't technically said that.

> It sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files.

I don't argue neither, either.

What I said is with "on demand file download", traditional backup software faces a hard problem. However, there are better ways to do that, primary candidate being rclone.

You can register a new application ID for your rclone installation for your Google Drive and Dropbox accounts, and use rclone as a very efficient, rsync-like tool to backup your cloud storage. That's what I do.

I'm currently backing up my cloud storages to a local TrueNAS installation. rclone automatically hash-checks everything and downloads the changed ones. If you can mount Backblaze via FUSE or something similar, you can use rclone as an intelligent MITM agent to smartly pull from cloud and push to Backblaze.

Also, using RESTIC or Borg as a backup container is a good idea since they can deduplicate and/or only store the differences between the snapshots, saving tons of space in the process, plus encrypting things for good measure.

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

#239

Post by appreciatorBus »

Neil44 wrote: post #179

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 bac…

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

- report an error

- ignore

- materialize

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

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

#240

Post by renata »

cowboylowrez wrote: post #228
ape4 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte

I use them for the b2 bucket style storage where this happens. Its expensive per gig compared to the cost of a working personal unlimited desktop account. I like to visit their reddit page occasionally and its a constant stream of desktop client woes and stories of restoring problems and any time b2 is mentioned its like "but muh 50 terabytes" lol

It's cheaper if you have multiple computers with normal amounts of data though. My whole family is on my B2 account (Duplicati backing up eight computers each to a separate bucket), and it's $10/month.
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