Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rareese.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 716 posts

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

#441

Post by BizarroLand »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #398
cobertos wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups software written by Claude? No thanks. I've used enough Claude coded applications that I wouldn't trust that with a backup, unless it had extensive tests along with it.

And I've used enough "gold standard" commercial applications, like the one being discussed in this very article , that I don't trust those either. If you recoil in horror at code written by LLMs, I'm afraid that the vendors you're already working with have some really bad news for you. You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it. I can audit and verify Claude's output. Code running at BackBlaze…

>You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it

You're forgetting the third option:

You can remain blissfully unaware of it.

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

#442

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

senkora wrote: post #433
babypuncher wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

+1. It works perfectly if your mental model is: “Every file is only ever written to from a single client, and will be asynchronously made available to all other clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you can safely switch to always writing to the file from a different client”.

Bidirectional file sync is also in hot demand from people who don't know the words, "file", "client", "write", "async", "available", or "time"

:P

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

#443

Post by CamperBob2 »

BizarroLand wrote: post #441
CamperBob2 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've used enough "gold standard" commercial applications, like the one being discussed in this very article , that I don't trust those either. If you recoil in horror at code written by LLMs, I'm afraid that the vendors you're already working with have some really bad news for you. You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it. I can audit and verify Claude's output. Code running at BackBlaze…

>You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it You're forgetting the third option: You can remain blissfully unaware of it.

You can remain blissfully unaware of it.

And you can read many accounts of the outcome of that strategy in this very thread.

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

#444

Post by bananamogul »

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.

But isn't that exactly what Dropbox does? If I delete a file on my PC, I can go to Dropbox.com and restore it, to some period in the past (I think it depends on what you pay for). In fact, I can see every version that's changed during the retention period and choose which version to restore.

Maintaining version history out to a set retention period is a backup...no?

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

#445

Post by burnte »

omnimus wrote: post #420
moffkalast wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1 out of a thousand people might do that, the others will buy the product. That's why people use it, most people don't want to build everything themselves.

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

#446

Post by mikewarot »

I assume they do some form of de-duplication across all files in their system. Most windows system files, and binaries would be duplicates, and only need to be stored once. I'm relatively sure this is true for most other systems, like Linux, MacOS, etc. Why not just back everything up for everyone?

It really shouldn't take up much more space or bandwidth.

Personally: I had to go in and edit the undisclosed exclusions file, and restart the backup process. I've got quite a few gigabytes of upload going now.

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

#447

Post by axelthegerman »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #438

Everyone is acting like this is obviously wrong, and they clearly should have communicated the change and made it visible in the exclusion settings. However, there is a very good reason for not backing up what is in effect network attached storage. Particularly for OneDrive, as it often adds company SharePoint sites you open files from as mountpoints under your OneDrive folder (business OneDrive is basically a person…

Great explanation, very reasonable.

Except that before they did and then they didn't without any proper notification (release notes don't count for significant changes like this).

They should have just added a pop up or at least email or both, given a heads-up and then again when the change actually kicked in

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

#448

Post by toast0 »

masfuerte wrote: post #200
noirscape wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying Backblaze should adapt to git; the issue isn't application related (besides git being badly configured by default; there's a solution with git gc, it's just that git gc basically never runs). It's that to back up a folder on a filesystem, you need to traverse that folder and check every file in that folder to see if it's changed. Most filesystem tools usually assume a fairly low file count for these op…

7za (the compression app) does blazingly fast iteration over any kind of folder. This doesn't require special code for git. Backblaze's backup app could do the same but rather than fix their code they excluded .git folders. When I backup my computer the .git folders are among the most important things on there. Most of my personal projects aren't pushed to github or anywhere else. Fortunately I don't use Backblaze. I…

IMHO, you can't do blazingly fast iteration over folders with small files in Windows, because every open is hooked by the anti-virus, and there goes your performance.

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

#449

Post by jsw97 »

ibizaman wrote: post #343
julianozen wrote: post #335

We are going to drop blackblaze over this We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze” We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so I can install you on…

Why not just use backblaze as cold storage and use restic or another tool with a GUI to backup to it?

When an org quietly degrades one of their products, you should expect this behavior to occur again.

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

#450

Post by herf »

Both Dropbox and OneDrive default to "online first" for most users (including Dropbox on macOS which has moved itself into File Provider). It is a technically sound and sane default for Backblaze to ignore these mounts, especially given their policy not to backup network drives. They really should have informed legacy users about it.

Technically speaking, imagine you're iterating over a million files, and some of them are 1000x slower than the others, it's not Backblaze's fault that things have gone this way. Avoiding files that are well-known network mount points is likely necessary for them to be reliable at what they do for local files.

It's important to recognize that these new OS-level filesystem hooks are slow and inefficient - the use case is opening one file and not 10,000 - and this means that things you might want to do (like recursive grep) are now unworkably slow if they don't fit in some warmed-up cache on your device.

To fix it, Backblaze would need a "cloud to cloud" backup that is optimized for that access pattern, or a checkbox (or detection system) for people who manage to keep a full local mirror in a place where regular files are fast. This is rapidly becoming a less common situation. I do, however, think that they should have informed people about the change.

Post reply on HN