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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

#431

Post by peteforde »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #297
peteforde wrote: post #203

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…

If you don’t really want backups you can save a lot more money by not signing up for Backblaze.

Are they known for accidentally erasing your backups?

I get that this is not a restorable image, but for $100 a year I'm not expecting that.

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

#432

Post by cortesoft »

mrighele wrote: post #308
mrighele wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I have been using borg backup [1] against Hetzner Storage Box [2] Borg backup is a good tool in my opinion and has everything that I need (deduplication, compression, mountable snapshot. Hetzner Storage Box is nothing fancy but good enough for a backup and is sensibly cheaper for the alternatives (I pay about 10 eur/month for 5TB of storage) Before that I was using s3cmd [3] to backup on a S3 bucket. [1]…

I cannot edit any longer, the second link was supposed to be [2] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/

Thanks, I was quite confused for a second

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

#433

Post by senkora »

babypuncher wrote: post #416
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 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”.

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

#434

Post by embedding-shape »

pixl97 wrote: post #412
embedding-shape wrote: post #224

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).

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.

No ISP I've had in my adult life had such conditions, it truly is "Whatever you manage to do with the bandwidth we give you". I've done hundreds of TBs for months without any impact to my bandwidth (transferring ML datasets among other things), and I'm pretty sure a ISP in my country would break some law if they'd limit a typical broadband home connection based on data transfer quotas.

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

#435

Post by j1elo »

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.

Wait a moment, you just gave me an idea for a product

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

#436

Post by cortesoft »

mrighele wrote: post #128
jgrizou wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using now? Asking for a friend

Not OP, but I have been using borg backup [1] against Hetzner Storage Box [2] Borg backup is a good tool in my opinion and has everything that I need (deduplication, compression, mountable snapshot. Hetzner Storage Box is nothing fancy but good enough for a backup and is sensibly cheaper for the alternatives (I pay about 10 eur/month for 5TB of storage) Before that I was using s3cmd [3] to backup on a S3 bucket. [1]…

This is quite a bit more expensive than Backblaze if you have more than 5 TBs or so

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

#437

Post by KingMachiavelli »

They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.

However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.

Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?

IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.

But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.

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

#438

Post by morpheuskafka »

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 personal Sharepoint site under the hood). Trying to back them up would result in downloading potentially hundreds of gigabytes of files to the desktop only to them reupload them to OneDrive. That would also likely trigger data exfiltration flags at your corporate IT.

A Dropbox/OneDrive/Drive/etc folder is a network mount point by another name. (Many of them are not implemented as FUSE mounts or equivalent OS API, not folders on disk.) It's fundamentally reasonable for software that promises backing up the local disk not to backup whatever network drives you happen to have signed in/mounted.

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

#440

Post by wtallis »

realo wrote: post #383
wtallis wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shouldn't be seen as Backblaze's problem. It's Dropbox's problem that they made their product too complicated for users to reason about. The original Dropbox concept was "a folder that syncs" and there would be nothing problematic about Backblaze or anything else trying to back it up like any other folder. Today's Dropbox is a network file system with inscrutable cache behavior that seeks to hide from the users…

If I backup a file, I need to read that file. The rest is in the management layer underneath that file. Seems simple enough to do for Backblaze, no?

Do you really want Backblaze to ignore all the side effects of scanning through the entire contents a badly-designed network filesystem?
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