So what are HN’s favorite alternatives? Preferably cheap and rclone compatible. Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?
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Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
161–170 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#162I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1] This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no rest…
Unlimited means without limits or restrictions. If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.
From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are affecting service reliability for other customers)
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways No they are not. This is explicitly addressed in the article itself.
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.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#164To the author: please use a darker font. Preferably black. I’m only in my 40’s, I don’t require glasses (yet) and I have to actively squint to read your site on mobile. Safari, iPhone. I’m pretty sure you’re under the permitted contrast levels under WCAG.
Reader mode?
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#165Use restic with resticprofile and you won't need anything else. Point it to a Hetzner storagebox, the best value you can get. Don't trust fisher price backup plans
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any more details? This is a pretty big deal. The differentiators between Backblaze and Hetzner mostly boil down to this kind of thing supposedly not being possible.
I’m on my phone so forgive the formatting, but here’s my entire support exchange: - - - Hey, I tried restoring a file from my backup — downloading it directly didn't work, and creating a restore with it also failed – I got an email telling me contract y'all about it. Can you explain to me what happened here, and what can I do to get my file(s?) back? - - - Hi Jan, Thanks for writing in! I've reached out to our engine…
Thank you for sharing this. A non-persistent backup service is on the same level as a zombie-insurance provider.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#167Ironically 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.
> drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways No they are not. This is explicitly addressed in the article itself.
normally this folder are synced to dropbox and/or onedrive
both services have internal backups to reduce the chance they lose data
both services allow some limited form of "going back to older version" (like the article states itself).
Just because the article says "sync is not backup" doesn't mean that is true, I mean it literally is backup by definition as it: makes a copy in another location and even has versioning.
It's just not _good enough_ backup for their standards. Maybe even standards of most people on HN, but out there many people are happy with way worse backups, especially wrt. versioning for a lot of (mostly static) media the only reason you need version rollback is in case of a corrupted version being backed up. And a lot of people mostly backup personal photos/videos and important documents, all static by nature.
Through
1. it doesn't really fulfill the 3-2-1 rules it's only 2-1-1 places (local, one backup on ms/drop box cloud, one offsite). Before when it was also backed up to backblaze it was 3-2-1 (kinda). So them silently stopping still is a huge issue.
2. newer versions of the 3-2-1 rule also say treat 2 not just as 2 backups, but also 2 "vendors/access accounts" with the one-drive folder pretty much being onedrive controlled this is 1 vendor across local and all backups. Which is risky.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#168I think this should not be attributed to malice, however unfortunate. I had also developed some sync app once and onedrive folders were indeed problematic, causing cyclic updates on access and random metadata changes for no explicit reason. Complete lack of communication (outside of release notes, which nobody really reads, as the article too states) is incompetence and indeed worrying. Just show a red status bar tha…
What’s worse, random metadata change or a completely missing data?
If the constant meta changes (or other peculiarities involving those folders) make the sync unusable, then it can be both. In that case, you stop syncing and communicate.
So my idea is that it's a competency problem (lack of communication), not malice. But it's just a theory, based on my own experience.
In any case, this is a bad situation, however you look at it.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#169I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1] This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no rest…
Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#170Exclusions 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 of these chunks, but it doesn't store the complete checksum of the file, so judging by how badly the client is written I can't be sure that restored files are not corrupted after the stitching.
Then I found out that it can't download some files even after dozens of retries because it seems they are corrupted on Backblaze side.
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.
I wonder if they fixed their client since then.