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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

#321

Post by embedding-shape »

kccqzy wrote: post #315
embedding-shape wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a s…

I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they…

> It’s a statistical game that they are prepared to play.

I understand this, many others do too, the only difference seems to be that we're not willing to play those games. Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.

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

#322

Post by [deleted] »

kccqzy wrote: post #315
embedding-shape wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a s…

I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of “unlimited” really means. It’s not a shenanigan. It’s just calculated risk. It’s clear to me that they simultaneously intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that they can easily predict and plan for. It’s a statistical game that they…

[deleted]

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

#323

Post by keitmo »

It seems to me that Backblaze does NOT exclude ".git". It's not shown by default in the restore UI -- you must enable "show hidden files" to see it -- but it's there. I just did a test restore of my top-level Project directory (container for all of my personal Git projects) and all .git directories are included in the produced .zip file.

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

#325

Post by nine_k »

bayindirh wrote: post #238
jtbayly wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This. You should not try to backup your local cache of cloud files as if those were your local files. Use a tool that talks to the cloud storage directly.

Use tools with straightforward, predictable semantics, like rclone, or synching, or restic/Borg. (Deduplication rules, too.)

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

#326

Post by deno »

salawat wrote: post #312
deno wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"

Building out for 100% of theoretical capacity makes no sense but you can still easily accommodate the small handful of power users with plenty to spare. Most ISPs will not drop or throttle users trying to get their money's worth if it’s fiber or similar. LTE of course that’s another thing.

That sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where some provider has strict monopoly, but that’s an aberration and with Starlink’s availability there’s an upper bound nowadays.

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

#327

Post by mcmcmc »

embedding-shape wrote: post #224
pixl97 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting. For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited…

> I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited somehow. Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).

What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your service contract multiplied by the length of the contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap

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

#329

Post by pkaeding »

pixl97 wrote: post #215
pkaeding wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, what are you saying shouldn't be done? Backing up untracked/modified files in a bit repo? Or compressing the .git folder and backing it up as a unit?

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

#330

Post by hedora »

ramses0 wrote: post #274
SCdF wrote: post #64

After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider. Basically it works like this: - I have syncthing moving files between all my devices. The larger the device, the more stuff I move there[2]. My phone only has my keepass file and a few other docs, my gaming PC has that plus all…

We need to talk about The Cone of Backups(tm), which you and I seem to have separately derived! Props for getting this implemented and seemingly trusted... I wish there was an easier way to handle some of this stuff (eg: tiny secure key material => hot syncthing => "live" git files => warm docs and photos => cold bulk movies, isos, etc)... along with selective "on demand pass through browse/fetch/cache" They all have…

Does syncthing work yet?

~ 5 years ago, I had a development flow that involved a large source tree (1-10K files, including build output) that was syncthing-ed over a residential network connection to some k8s stuff.

Desyncs/corruptions happened constantly, even though it was a one-way send.

I've never had similar issues with rsync or unison (well, I have in unison, but that's two-way sync, and it always prompted to ask for help by design).

Anyway, my decade-old synology is dying, so I'm setting up a replacement. For other reasons (mostly a decade of systemd / pulse audio finding novel ways to ruin my day, and not really understanding how to restore my synology backups), I've jumped ship over to FreeBSD. I've heard good things about using zfs to get:

saniod + syncoid -> zfs send -> zfs recv -> restic

In the absence of ZFS, I'd do:

rsync -> restic

Or:

unison unison -> restic.

So, similar to what you've landed on, but with one size tier. I have docker containers that the phone talks to for stuff like calendars, and just have the source of the backup flow host my git repos.

One thing to do no matter what:

Write at least 100,000 files to the source then restore from backup (/ on a linux VM is great for this). Run rsync in dry run / checksum mode on the two trees. Confirm the metadata + contents match on both sides. I haven't gotten around to this yet with the flow I just proposed. Almost all consumer backup tools fail this test. Comments here suggest backblaze's consumer offering fails it badly. I'm using B2, but I haven't scrubbed my backup sets in a while. I get the impression it has much higher consistency / durability.

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