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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

#371
post #337

I 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…

"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"." The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months. Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.

Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now.

Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.

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

#372

I had a back and forth with them about .git folders a couple of years back and their defence was something like "we are a consumer product - not a professional developer product. Pay for our business offering" But if that's truly their stance, then they are being deceptive about their non-business offering at the point of sale. EDIT - see my other comment where I found the actual email

Well I do pay for their business product, I have a "Business Groups" package with a few dozen endpoints all backing up for $99/year per machine.

According to support's reply just now, my backups are crippled just like every other customer. No git, no cloud synced folders, even if those folders are fully downloaded locally.

(This is also my personal backup strategy for iCloud Drive: one Mac is set to fully download complete iCloud contents, and that Mac backs up to Backblaze.)

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

#373

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…

I'm going to join the exodus, though for a different reason. Switched to Orbstack and ever since Backblaze refuses to back up saying "disk full" as Orbstack uses a 8TB sparse disk image. You can exclude it, but if they won't (very easily) fix a known issue by measuring file sizes properly I don't feel confident about the product.

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

#374

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.

Throw some clock skew into the mix and it’s even more hilarious!

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well this wasn’t the promise backblaze made a decade ago when we started using their products. Now I need a new solution that will work for my parents

Of course, I wouldn’t use their client anymore. Actually, I would have never used it from the start as it’s not open source. I think for backups there’s no better guarantee than that. I don’t mean because you could look at the source code, I mean because in my experience open source products tend to care more about their users than not. At least for such foundational tools.

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

#376
Well shit. If this is right, I'm dropping Backblaze and recommending all my friends/customers do the same. I pay for and rely on Backblaze as the "back up everything" they advertise.... to silently stop backing up the vast majority of my work is unacceptable!

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoutout to Arq backup which simply gives you an option in backup plans for what to do with cloud only files: - report an error - ignore - materialize Regardless, if you make it back up software that doesn’t give this level of control to users, and you make a change about which files you’re going to back up, you should probably be a lot more vocal with your users about the change. Vanishingly few people read release…

Why no linux support?

If it's open-source, Linux support is only a few hours with Claude away.

If it's not open-source, but the protocol is documented, see above.

If it's not open-source, and the protocol isn't documented, well... that makes the decision easy, doesn't it?

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

#378

Weirdly, reading this had the net impact of me signing up to Backblaze. I had no idea that it was such a good bargain. I used to be a Crashplan user back in the day, and I always thought Backblaze had tiered limits. I've been using Duplicati to sync a lot of data to S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier. It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file. It's a heavy enou…

"Maybe they're only incompetent in the ways that have been enumerated in this blog post" does not seem like much of a sales pitch. Baffling.

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

#379
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete. And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.

>and "unlimited" is required to compete. And there speaks marketing.

Or they're selling their product to a market where the purchaser doesn't understand how much they would need to pay if they were paying by the gigabyte (or even how to check how much they would need). Telling those people they don't need to worry about that "detail" is a key selling point. Backblaze has a product for people who understand the limitations of their consumer product and don't find them acceptable: B2, which is priced by the gigabyte.
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