Nobody mentioning HDD prices? Disk prices had ~doubled over the last half a year.
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
541–550 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#542I highly recommend switching to something more like Arq and then using whatever backend storage that you want. There are probably some other open source ways to do it, etc, but Arq scratches the itch of having control over your backups and putting them where you want with a GUI to easily configure/keep track of what is going on. Maybe there's something newer/better now (and I bought lifetime licenses of it long ago),…
Arq saved me a few hours of work recently when VS Code's GitHub Copilot looped out on a Playwright screenshot (>8k pixel height) and I had to manually edit the JSONL chat history, but accidentally restored to the previous checkpoint. That was one time I really appreciated that I set Arq to back up hourly. (I only restore from Arq maybe 2-3 times a year.)
I wish lifetime licences were still sold.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Crashplan also had an absolute abomination of a bloated, sluggish, Java-based client.
It was a bit, but I never found it as bad as Backblaze.
CrashPlan required, if I recall correctly, 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up. It got a bit unwieldy after a while, because I have multiple terabytes of photos and videos over many years.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#544We 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…
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…
Same. Specifically I was considering Backblaze for our company’s backups (both products, computers and their bucket for server backups. That is no longer the case as of the news.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even crazier is one drive has a limit on the total length of a file path, how is this even a thing that exists.
Unlimited strings are a problem. People will use it as storage. No, I'm not joking. We used to allow arbitrary paths in a cloud API I owned. Within about a month someone had figured out that the cost to store a single byte file was effectively zero, and they could encode arbitrary files into the paths of those things. It wasn't too long before there was a library to do it on Github. We had to put limits on it because…
Just include filename size in file size for billing purposes?
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#546I 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…
They encrypt files on the client before transmission.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're pulling 2TB of data you should be ordering it on a drive from them and saving yourself the hassle.
I restored a 2 TB drive via the net no problem from them some years back, although I didn't use the client, but downloaded one massive ZIP file from the web interface. Well, "no problem" is an overstatement. Once you need a restore, you learn that their promise of end-to-end encryption is actually a lie. (As in, you have to break the end-to-end encryption to restore since everything has to be decrypted on their serve…
I've backed up and restored ~14-15TB[0] with their B2 product. IIRC sync each way took three or four days, not really that bad. I used rclone, though, not any official client. And that's B2, not their "unlimited" backup service.
[0] My home file server, migrating a four-disk mirrored-pairs ZFS array to RAID5 including replacing the smaller pair of disks with ones matching the larger pair, so the old ZFS filesystem had to be totally destroyed in the process and I needed somewhere to put the data for the like 15 minutes the logical disk wouldn't exist in any form. The alternative would have been to build an entire new four-disk array, doubling the disk cost of the project and requiring some kind of second host-machine. This approach saved me $400 or more, probably wouldn't have attempted it otherwise, cost would have been too high. Ended up costing somewhere in the tens of dollars as I recall.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#548Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history. I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of credits. I do not trust my Backblaze backups anymore.
I have the same experience with Backblaze. 3 years ago I tried to restore my files from Backblaze, using their desktop client. First thing I noticed is that if it can't download a file due to network or some other problem then it just skips it. But you can force it to retry by modifying its job file which is just an SQLite DB. Also it stores and downloads files by splitting them into small chunks. It stores checksums…
> But the most jarring issue for me is that it mangled all non-ascii filenames. They are stored as UTF-8 in the DB, but the client saves them as Windows-1252 or something. So I ended up with hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like фикац, and I can't just re-encode these names back, because some characters were dropped during the process.
> I wanted to write a script that forces Backblaze Client to redownload files, logs all files that can't be restored, fixes the broken names and splits restored files back into chunks to validate their checksums against the SQLite DB, but it was too big of a task for me, so I just procrastinated for 3 years, while keeping paying monthly Backblaze fees because it's sad to let go of my data.
Filenames are probably the most valuable of metadata for them to mangle. I value them as much as I do file creation/modification times. A backup program is dead to me if they mess up either of these.
I think it should be trivial for you to pipe your request into Claude now, and get them to write a quick script. Hope that'll free you from Backblaze for good!
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#549Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#550We 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…
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