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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

#461
Having option to not do that is great, we did it for our backup system, because our cloud stores were backed up separately.

Doing it silently is disaster.

Making excludes doing it hidden from UI is outright malice, because it's far too easy to assume those would just be added as normal excludes and then go "huh, I probably just removed those from excludes when I set it up".

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

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the general conclusion you will draw after reading the comments on this story, yes.

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

#463

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.

Slow as fuck compared to 2 synced dirs

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

#464
At least at the enterprise level, I've never seen anyone use Backblaze for this. You want to use a cloud level backup like Rubrik/Veeam/Cohesity. Trying to back up cloud based files locally is a fools errand. Granted it sucks that they dropped this without proper communication, but it's already a bad solution.

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

#465

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.

It works perfectly fine if you're user that know how it works. I use it with Syncthing and it works coz I know to not edit same file at the same time on 2 devices (my third and fourth device is always on internet so chances propagate reasonably fast even if the 2 devices aren't on on the same time)

But the moment that hits normal users, yeah, mess

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

#466

At least at the enterprise level, I've never seen anyone use Backblaze for this. You want to use a cloud level backup like Rubrik/Veeam/Cohesity. Trying to back up cloud based files locally is a fools errand. Granted it sucks that they dropped this without proper communication, but it's already a bad solution.

We just use restic with B2 and some local S3 servers rather than relying on proprietary solutions. If it goes to shit we will just change the provider

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

#467
post #17

Exclusions 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…

And they talked so much about how great redundancy they have on backend. I guess they don't count 404's

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

#468

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…

When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually given consideration to the cost of doing business and have priced that in already.

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

#469

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…

Also taking recommendations for a simple services I can install on my dads windows machine and my moms Mac that will just automatically backup the main drive to the cloud just in case

I've been extremely happy with Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/ for several years as a quiet backup solution, bring your own storage. I've done a few small restores and it's been just fine, and it automatically thins your backups to constrain storage costs.

Managing exclusions is something to keep vaguely on top of (I've accidentally had a few VM disk images get backed up when I don't need/want them) but the default exclusions are all very reasonable.

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

#470
post #64

After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider. Basically it works like this: - I have syncthing moving files between all my devices. The larger the device, the more stuff I move there[2]. My phone only has my keepass file and a few other docs, my gaming PC has that plus all…

I also have a lil script that rolls dice on restic snapshot, then lists files and picks a random set to restore to /dev/null.

I still trust restic checksums will actually check whether restore is correct, but that way random part of storage gets tested every so often in case some old pack file gets damaged

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