Earlier quoted context omitted.
if I can't read TFA because of its formatting it isn't tangential
Worst case scenario you copy the text out. It's worth complaining sometimes, but yes it's tangential.
flying really close to the dropbox comment, sir
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
261–270 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would it use either of those on all the files at once? It should only be opening enough files to fill the upload buffer.
I think you might be confusing Backblaze reading files and how Dropbox/OneDrive/Nextcloud/etc. work. NC doesn't enable this by default (I don't think), but Windows calls it virtual file support. There is no avoiding filling the upload buffer, because Backblaze has zero control over how Dropbox downloads files. When Backblaze requests that a file be opened and read, Windows will ask Dropbox or whatever to open the fil…
No, I'm not confusing anything.
Dropbox and onedrive can handle backblaze zipping through and opening many files. The risk is getting too many gigabytes at once, but that shouldn't happen because backblaze should only open enough for immediate upload. If it does happen it's very easily fixed.
If it overloads nextcloud by hitting too many files too fast, that's a legitimate issue but it's not what OP was worried about.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#263The 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)
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#264The 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…
That doesn't really make a lot of sense, though. Reading a file that's not actually on disk doesn't download it permanently. If I have zero of 10TB worth of files stored locally on my 1TB device, read them all serially, and measure my disk usage, there's no reason the disk should be full, or at least it should be cache that can be easily freed. The only time this is potentially a problem is if one of the files exceed…
It's generally now handled decently well, but with three or four of these things it can make backups take annoying long as without "smarts" (which are not always present) it may force a download of the entire OneDrive/Box each time - even if it never crashes out.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#265The 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…
That would make sense for online-only files, but I have my Dropbox folder set to synchronize everything to my PC, and Backblaze still started skipping over it a few months ago. I reached out to support and they confirmed that they are just entirely skipping Dropbox/OneDrive/etc folders entirely, regardless of if the files are stored locally or not.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
rsync.net and rclone are great, my brain understood restic easier than borg for local backups over usb (ymmv), and plain old `rsync --archive` is most excellent wrt preserving file mod times and the like.
There is 100% a difference between "dead data" (eg: movie.mp4) and "live data" (eg: a git directory with `chmod` attributes)- S3 and similar often don't preserve "attributes and metadata" without a special secondary pass, even though the `md5` might be the same.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#267The 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…
The whole "just sync everything, and if you can't seek everything, pretend to sync everything with fake files and then download the real ones ad-hoc" model of storage feels a bit ill-conceived to me. It tries to present a simple facade but I'm not sure it actually simplifies things. It always results in nasty user surprises and sometimes data loss. I've seen Microsoft OneDrive do the same thing to people at work.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#268I 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…
I don’t think this is the right way to see this. Why should a file backup solution adapt to work with git? Or any application? It should not try to understand what a git object is. I’m paying to copy files from a folder to their servers just do that. No matter what the file is. Stay at the filesystem level not the application level.
Backblaze offers 'unlimited' backup space, so they have to do this kind of thing as a result of that poor marketing choice.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7. Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use. But you could…
Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#270Why should Backblaze back up their competitors’ data? And what use is it to you for it to do so?