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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

#471

Post by baal80spam »

mcherm wrote: post #18

Some companies are in the business of trust. These companies NEED to understand that trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain. After reading this article I will almost certainly never use or recommend Backblaze. (And while I don't use them currently, they WERE on the list of companies I would have recommended due to the length of their history.)

> trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain

Eh, I don't agree. Case in point: Microsoft.

Or in other words: a sucker is born every minute.

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

#472

Post by mzmzmzm »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #437

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…

Dropbox and GDrive desktop clients can be configured to sync files to a local directory. Backing them up with an additional platform would probably need some sort of logic like you described for VCS.

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

#473

Post by PunchyHamster »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #438

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 person…

Well, you missed the point.

The problem is not them not backing it up by default but:

* changing existing setting to backup less by default * essentially hiding the change from the user as it is not shown on directory exclude list

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

#474

Post by realo »

wtallis wrote: post #440
realo wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What I actually want is not a backup. That is just an artefact of the process.

What i want is restores. The ability to restore anything from ideally any point back in time.

How that is achieved is not my concern.

Obviously Backblaze does not achieve that, today.

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

#475

Post by gambiting »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #282
gambiting wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK with Virgin Media on their 1Gbps package, going through multiple TB a month and I'm yet to be throttled in any way.

Well, multiple TB isn't close to your bandwidth rating. It only takes 2% of your connection in a single direction to hit 6TB a month.

Ha, yes I suppose that's correct.

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

#476

Post by PunchyHamster »

Hendrikto wrote: post #77
dathinab wrote: post #11

Ironically 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.

The author of article explicitly ignored both of them come with versioning so it is not just sync, you have old version of files too

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

#478

Post by Aurornis »

moffkalast wrote: post #370
wafflebot wrote: post #348

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.

> I have no clue why people still use it

This is an instance of someone familiar with complex file access patterns not understanding the normal use case for these services.

The people using these bidirectional sync services want last writer wins behavior. The mild and moderately technical people I work with all get it and work with it. They know how to use the UI to look for old versions if someone accidentally overwrites their file.

Your characterization as complete chaos with constant problems does not mesh with the reality of the countless low-tech teams I've seen use Dropbox type services since they were launched.

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

#479

Post by SCdF »

hedora wrote: post #330
ramses0 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to talk about The Cone of Backups(tm), which you and I seem to have separately derived! Props for getting this implemented and seemingly trusted... I wish there was an easier way to handle some of this stuff (eg: tiny secure key material => hot syncthing => "live" git files => warm docs and photos => cold bulk movies, isos, etc)... along with selective "on demand pass through browse/fetch/cache" They all have…

Does syncthing work yet? ~ 5 years ago, I had a development flow that involved a large source tree (1-10K files, including build output) that was syncthing-ed over a residential network connection to some k8s stuff. Desyncs/corruptions happened constantly, even though it was a one-way send. I've never had similar issues with rsync or unison (well, I have in unison, but that's two-way sync, and it always prompted to a…

I will say I specifically don't sync git repos (they are just local and pushed to github, which I consider good enough for now), and I am aware that syncthing is one more of those tools that does not work well with git.

syncthing is not perfect, and can get into weird states if you add and remove devices from it for example, but for my case it is I think the best option.

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

#480

Post by SCdF »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #470
SCdF wrote: 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

That's a really good idea, imma steal it.
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