Live data from Hacker News

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

rareese.com

411–420 of 716 posts

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

#411
post #365
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Anecdotally, I've been managing a Syncthing network with a file count in the ~200k range, everything synced bidirectionally across a few dozen (Windows) computers, for 9 years now; I've never seen data loss where Syncthing was at fault.

Good to know. I wonder what the difference is. We were doing things like running go build inside the source directory. Maybe it can't handle write races well on Linux/MacOS?

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

#412
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).

In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that says "unless your usage interferes with other users" which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're the first to get booted off the service.

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

#413
Anyone have suggestions for backing up Google Drive + local files? I keep reading the horror stories about people getting locked out of cloud services, and worry about my 20 years of history stored in Drive. Less worried about local files which are sync'd to an external disk, but it'd be nice to have something in place for everything.

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

#414
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s connection, and your access to that connection is unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some point, and your access isn't cut off - there are no limits on your access.

Of course there are practical limits as you can't make your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc).

Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a endlessly consumable resource, like storage.

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

#415
Thanks for publicising. I recently decided not to renew my Backblaze in favour of 'self hosting' encrypted backups outside the US. But I was horrified to learn that my git repos may not have been backed up, nor my Dropbox, whose subscription I also recently cancelled. Good riddance.

My experience using restic has been excellent so far, snapshots take 5 mins rather than 30 mins with backblaze's Mac client. I just hope I can trust it…

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to drop Backblaze for my entire company over this. I need it to capture local data, even though that local data is getting synced to Google Drive. Where we sync our data really has nothing to do with Backblaze backing up the endpoint. We don't wholly trust sync, that's why we have backup. On my personal Mac I have iCloud Drive syncing my desktop, and a while back iCloud ate a file I was working on. Backblaz…

Bidirectional auto file sync is a fundamentally broken pattern and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's just complete chaos with wrong files constantly getting overridden on both ends. I have no clue why people still use it and I'd cut my losses if I were you, either backup to the cloud or pull from it, not both at the same time like an absolute tictac.

I think this is a case of people using bidirectional file sync wrong. The point is to make the most up to date version of a file available across multiple devices, not to act as a backup or for collaboration between multiple users.

It works perfectly fine as long as you keep how it works in mind, and probably most importantly don't have multiple users working directly on the same file at once.

I've been using these systems for over a decade at this point and never had a problem. And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.

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

#417

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.

I have multiple drives that started out as their own os. Each of them has a Dropbox folder in the standard location. Each of them has a different set of files in them (I deduped at one point), with some overlap of different versions. I no longer use Dropbox, so none of these are synced anywhere.

They don't need to be in my case, I'm only using them now because of existing shortcuts and VM shares and programs configured to source information from them. That doesn't mean I don't want them backed up.

Same for OneDrive: Microsoft configured my account for OneDrive when I set it up. Then I immediately uninstalled it (I don't want it). But I didn't notice that my desktop and documents folders live there. I hate it. But by the time I noticed it, it was already being used as a location for multiple programs that would need to be reconfigured, and it was easier to get used to it than to fix it. Several things I've forgotten about would likely break in ways I wouldn't notice for weeks/months. Multiple self-hosted servers for connecting to my android devices would need to reindex (Plex, voidtools everything, several remote systems that mount via sftp and connected programs would decide all my files were brand new and had never been seen before)

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve lost data not realizing I was backing up placeholder files (iCloud). Hiding the network always ends in pain. But never goes out of style.

Same. I lost a lot of photos this way. I've recently moved over to Immich + Borg backup with a 3-2-1 backup between a local synology NAS and BorgBase. Painful lesson, but at least now I feel much more confident. I've even built some end-to-end monitoring with Grafana.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern... My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him. A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap

> Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards... > A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap I think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that…

Data caps are just documenting the reality that ISPs oversubscribe - if they sell a hundred 1Gb/s connections to a neighborhood, it's highly unlikely they're peering that neighborhood onto the Internet at large at 100Gb/s. I don't know what the current standard is, but in the past it's been 10/100 to 1 - so a hundred 1Gb/s connections might be sharing 1-10Gb/s of uplink; and if usage starts to saturate that they need a way of backing off that is "fair" - data caps are one of the ways they inform the customer of such.

I've seen it with my new fiber rollout - every single customer no matter their purchased speed had 1Gb up and down - as more customers came online and usage became higher, they're not limiting anyone, but you get closer to your advertised rate - but my upload is still faster than my download because most of my neighborhood is downloading, few are uploading.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to drop Backblaze for my entire company over this. I need it to capture local data, even though that local data is getting synced to Google Drive. Where we sync our data really has nothing to do with Backblaze backing up the endpoint. We don't wholly trust sync, that's why we have backup. On my personal Mac I have iCloud Drive syncing my desktop, and a while back iCloud ate a file I was working on. Backblaz…

Bidirectional auto file sync is a fundamentally broken pattern and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's just complete chaos with wrong files constantly getting overridden on both ends. I have no clue why people still use it and I'd cut my losses if I were you, either backup to the cloud or pull from it, not both at the same time like an absolute tictac.

I also have no clue why people use it.

You can build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Post reply on HN