I was similarly upset and also dropped Carbonite over 15 years ago over something along these lines. Backup services should be agnostic about the data they back up for their customers.
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
591–600 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the fine print, only to be used against bad actors (w/guarantee that filenames under x chars would never be charged), or that too problematic? building good faith into policy + "hiding" info... Reason - to not overcomplicate or give appearance of nickel-and-diming
No, just charge for the amount of storage they use on your server. Not the amount of data you think you’re storing. In non-special cases these will be the same number.
Makes sense.
Would there be any engineering/management pushback on the customer side? "we have to write a tiny script", "this is non-standard" / "why are you the only ones who charge us for filenames?"
(have limited knowledge here)
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even crazier is one drive has a limit on the total length of a file path, how is this even a thing that exists.
What do you expect to happen when your cloud storage file path is 5000 characters long and your local filesystem only supports a maximum of 4096?
Oh yeah... I remember Windows behaving weirdly when I tried to copy some files with long names into a deeper directory tree. And it was just weird behaviour - no useful error message.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying Backblaze should adapt to git; the issue isn't application related (besides git being badly configured by default; there's a solution with git gc, it's just that git gc basically never runs). It's that to back up a folder on a filesystem, you need to traverse that folder and check every file in that folder to see if it's changed. Most filesystem tools usually assume a fairly low file count for these op…
Actually once the initial backup is done there is no reason to scan for changes. They can just use a Windows service that tells them when any file is modified or created and add that file to their backup list.
To an extent. WinAPI's file watching has a race condition in it, and there's no simple workaround (just complex & error-prone ones).
Well, for backups the workaround is a bit easier (as they strictly only ever read files), but still.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.
What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup please?
I use restic as well. My script:
https://forge.taf.codes/taf/snippets/src/branch/main/backups...
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#596Weirdly, 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…
> I've been using Duplicati to sync a lot of data to S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier.
There are actually a lot of cheaper S3-compatible services out there, (like Backblaze B2, or Cloudflare R2). They pricing may work out to just backup to these directly. Certainly gives you far more control than Backblaze Backup.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#597I can understand in theory why they wouldn't want to back up .git folders as-is. Git has a serious object count bloat problem if you have any repository with a good amount of commit history, which causes a lot of unnecessary overhead in just scanning the folder for files alone. I don't quite understand why it's still like this; it's probably the biggest reason why git tends to play poorly with a lot of filesystem too…
FWIW some other people in this thread are saying the article is wrong about .git folders not being backed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765788 That's a really important fact that's getting buried so I'd like to highlight it here.
Well, I checked and it looks like none of my .git repos are backed up. All attempts to restore only restore the working copy. -_- I'm not sure why it was working for the person in the comment I linked.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#598AFAICT Backblaze does back up .git directories. I have many repos backed up. The .git directory is hidden by default in the web UI (along with all other hidden files), but there is an option to show them. You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.
I'd be really curious to know why that's working for you and not me. I just tried restoring and none of my .git directories were included; just the working copy. I tried with both the web and desktop restore tool.
There's no mention of .git being excluded in the Settings or on their support page (https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-bac...); they just silently decided to not back up a bunch of my files without telling me... wonderful.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#599AFAICT Backblaze does back up .git directories. I have many repos backed up. The .git directory is hidden by default in the web UI (along with all other hidden files), but there is an option to show them. You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.
Thanks. Silently ignoring .git folders would be much more egregious than not backing up cloud drives in my opinion. The latter is at least somewhat understandable, though they should have been more transparent about it.
Okay nevermind, I just checked and none of my git repos are being backed up; just the working copy. That's pretty awful.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#600The issue with a client app backing up dropbox and onedrive folders on your computer is the files on demand feature, you could sync a 1tb onedrive to your 250gb laptop but it's OK because of smart/selective sync aka files on demand. Then backblaze backup tries to back the folder up and requests a download of every single file and now you have zero bytes free, still no backup and a sick laptop. You could oauth the bac…
That would make sense for online-only files, but I have my Dropbox folder set to synchronize everything to my PC, and Backblaze still started skipping over it a few months ago. I reached out to support and they confirmed that they are just entirely skipping Dropbox/OneDrive/etc folders entirely, regardless of if the files are stored locally or not.
at least you can fix (bandaid) that by cloning your Dropbox folder to anotherfolder. Double taken space for the greater goodx