Glad I switched from their personal computer backup to using restic + B2 a while ago. Every night my laptop and homelab both back up to each other and to B2. It takes less than a minute and I have complete control over the exclusions and retention. And I can easily switch off B2 to something else if I want.
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
451–460 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use rsync.net. You can use basically any SSH tool or rclone interface. They have a cheaper plan for "experts" if you want to forgo zfs snapshots, https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=experts .
Just a note of caution: sync != backup. When I was younger and dumber, I had my own rsync cron script to do a nightly sync of my documents to a remote server. One day I noticed files were gone from my local drive; I think there were block corruptions on the disk itself, and the files were dropped from the filesystem, or something like that. The nightly rsync propagated the deletions to the remote "backup." D'argh.
Musing: There's a step further along the spectrum that echoes the relationship, where where "backup" != "backup that resists malware".
In other words, a backup can be degraded into a sync-to-nothing situation if the client logic is untrustworthy.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#454Yeah this is the core problem with how most backup tools handle Dropbox / iCloud / OneDrive now.
Those folders aren’t really “normal files” anymore — a lot of the time they’re just placeholders, and touching them can trigger downloads or other weird behavior depending on the client.
That said, just skipping the entire folder is kind of the worst possible outcome. Backup should be predictable. If something is on disk, it should get backed up. If it’s not, you should at least know that, not find out later when you need it.
I’ve been working on Duplicati (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati) and one thing we’ve tried to be careful about is not silently ignoring data. If something can’t be backed up, it should be visible to the user.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about setting up duplicati.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading your comments, it sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files. I know you haven’t technically said that, but that’s what it sounds like. I assume you don’t think that, so I’m curious, what would you propose positively?
> I know you haven’t technically said that, but that’s what it sounds like. Yes, I didn't technically said that. > It sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files. I don't argue neither, either. What I said is with "on demand file download", traditional backup software faces a hard problem. However, there are better…
My understanding of Backblaze Computer Backup is it is not a general purpose, network accessible filesystem.[0] If you want to use another tool to backup specific files, you'd use their B2 object storage platform.[1] It has an S3 compatible API you can interact with, Computer Backup does not.
But generally speaking, I'd agree with your sentiment.
[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-bac...
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-about-backblaze...
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#456Earlier 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…
I agree. I use syncthing for syncing phones and laptops. For data like photos, which aren't really updated. It works very nice. And for documents updated by one user, moving between devices is totally seamless.
That being said i understand how it works at a high level.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#457Earlier 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…
The choices are maybe eat shit, or spend your own time auditing and polishing shit into something edible before eating it?
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#458Glad I switched from their personal computer backup to using restic + B2 a while ago. Every night my laptop and homelab both back up to each other and to B2. It takes less than a minute and I have complete control over the exclusions and retention. And I can easily switch off B2 to something else if I want.
I was using Restic + B2 for a while, but recently switched to Restic + Hetzner Storage Box.
Storage Box is a little more effort to setup since it doesn't provide an S3 interface and I instead had to use WebDAV, but it's more affordable and has automated snapshots that adds a layer of easy immutability.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#459FWIW You can put a rpi in gadget mode and use nbd kit to mount nfs/smb shares..
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
Google forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a Workspace plan.
I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.