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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

#631

Post by mvdtnz »

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…

You should consider Backblaze B2. It's not unlimited, but it's S3 compatible storage at a competitive price, without the limitations of Personal Backup.

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

#632

Post by Dylan16807 »

dpark wrote: post #626
Dylan16807 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not confusing anything. Dropbox and onedrive can handle backblaze zipping through and opening many files. The risk is getting too many gigabytes at once, but that shouldn't happen because backblaze should only open enough for immediate upload. If it does happen it's very easily fixed. If it overloads nextcloud by hitting too many files too fast, that's a legitimate issue but it's not what OP was worried about…

The issue you’re missing is that the abstraction Dropbox/OneDrive/etc provide is not that of an NFS. When an application triggers the download of a file, it hydrates the file to the local file system and keeps it there . So if Backblaze triggers the download of a TB of files, it will consume a TB of local file system space (which may not even exist).

It won't keep it permanently. That would break under normal use.

Keeping recent files will work fine with a program that goes through them as fast as it can upload (which is not super fast).

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

#633

Post by fuckinpuppers »

embedding-shape wrote: post #73
azalemeth wrote: post #54

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…

Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse. Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a s…

They still claim “unlimited” they just don’t support types of files it detects in onedrive, Dropbox, etc

so it’s an even more frustrating misleading statement.

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

#634

Post by Tor3 »

andybak wrote: post #362

I had a back and forth with them about .git folders a couple of years back and their defence was something like "we are a consumer product - not a professional developer product. Pay for our business offering" But if that's truly their stance, then they are being deceptive about their non-business offering at the point of sale. EDIT - see my other comment where I found the actual email

Professional? We indeed use git at the company where I work, but there we have a dedicated backup system used by professionals. No BB involved.

I, on the other hand, as a private consumer, use git for all my hobby projects and note-taking. And my language learning. Of course I do, or I couldn't keep track of what I'm doing over the years, and I wouldn't be able to sort things out. There's nothing professional there, are BB saying that if you try to do something in an orderly and controlled manner, then it's "professional" and shouldn't be backed up? If that's their stance then no wonder people are leaving BB. I for sure won't ever recommend them again.

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

#635

Post by Tor3 »

andybak wrote: post #367
Vegenoid wrote: post #275

AFAICT 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 commented on this topic elsewhere on this page. This is an email from 2021. Maybe they changed policy but here: > Bob (Backblaze Help) > Aug 5, 2021, 11:33 PDT > Hello there, > Thank you for taking the time to write in, > Unfortunately .git directories are excluded by Backblaze by default. File > changes within .git directories occur far too often and over so many files > that the Backblaze software simply would no…

>File changes within .git directories occur far too often[..]

That's a crazy statement. The cloud backup system I use can be configured to how often it should bother even looking for new files, and for the section where I have my .git repos (they're actually "bare" git repos and I push to them, locally) I've set it to every two hours. Which is actually overkill because they absolutely do not change that quickly.

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

#636

Post by ahhhhnoooo »

garaetjjte wrote: post #545
ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited strings are a problem. People will use it as storage. No, I'm not joking. We used to allow arbitrary paths in a cloud API I owned. Within about a month someone had figured out that the cost to store a single byte file was effectively zero, and they could encode arbitrary files into the paths of those things. It wasn't too long before there was a library to do it on Github. We had to put limits on it because…

Just include filename size in file size for billing purposes?

Not sufficient, unfortunately. The strings for file paths are stored in wholly different infrastructure with wholly different optimizations. It probably lives in your database. You really don't want people just stuffing gigabytes into that, payment or no payment. Odds are you didn't plan your control plane around, "what if someone uses our strings as encoded data?"

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

#637

Post by kalleboo »

gck1 wrote: post #608

Backblaze is such a weird case. On one hand, it became the most trusted personal backup provider on reddit and HN, on another - their software is absolute junk, and as some comments in this thread are highlighting - even their restore can't be trusted. I've never needed to restore anything, so can't say anything about this, but once, one of my devices deleted a file in Syncthing, and I went into Backblaze to see if t…

When I first started using Backblaze, I also tested several of the competitors at the time (Carbonite, CrashPlan etc) and as bad as Backblazes software was, it was still by far the best out of the options.

And from comments here I don't see any other user-friendly options being proposed, it's all just suggestions to glue together some open source software with object storage and be your own sysadmin.

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

#638

Post by koyote »

gck1 wrote: post #608

Backblaze is such a weird case. On one hand, it became the most trusted personal backup provider on reddit and HN, on another - their software is absolute junk, and as some comments in this thread are highlighting - even their restore can't be trusted. I've never needed to restore anything, so can't say anything about this, but once, one of my devices deleted a file in Syncthing, and I went into Backblaze to see if t…

I was very surprised when I gave them a go after hearing good stuff about them here and on other techy parts of the internet:

After using their website and their app for a few hours I pretty much immediately decided to not proceed with them as the software was clearly not built by a team that has great competency in software development. This was a year ago so they've had plenty of time to polish it.

You sort of let that kind of stuff pass for a hardware company, but backblaze is not a hardware company. There's more to backup than just ensuring the disks at the data centre are replaced in a timely manner.

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

#639

Post by dpark »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #632
dpark wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue you’re missing is that the abstraction Dropbox/OneDrive/etc provide is not that of an NFS. When an application triggers the download of a file, it hydrates the file to the local file system and keeps it there . So if Backblaze triggers the download of a TB of files, it will consume a TB of local file system space (which may not even exist).

It won't keep it permanently. That would break under normal use. Keeping recent files will work fine with a program that goes through them as fast as it can upload (which is not super fast).

It does keep them permanently. Dropbox is not a NAS and does not pretend to be one.

> When you open an online-only file from the Dropbox folder on your computer, it will automatically download and become available offline. This means you’ll need to have enough hard drive space for the file to download before you can open it. You can change it back to online-only by following the instructions below.

https://help.dropbox.com/sync/make-files-online-only

Same exact behavior for OneDrive, though it apparently does have a Windows integration to eventually migrate unused files back to online-only if enabled.

> When you open an online-only file, it downloads to your device and becomes a locally available file. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without Internet access. If you need more space, you can change the file back to online only. Just right-click the file and select "Free up space."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-disk-space-w...

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

#640

Post by buzer »

noirscape wrote: post #535
toast0 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, you can't do blazingly fast iteration over folders with small files in Windows, because every open is hooked by the anti-virus, and there goes your performance.

Not just antivirus, there's also file locking. Windows has a much harsher approach to file locking than Linux and backup software like BackBlaze absolutely should be making use of it (lest they back up files that are being modified while they back them up), but that also means that the software effectively has to ask the OS each time to lock the file, then release the lock when the software is done with it. With a la…

I have never personally used it, but aren't Windows' Shadow Copies supposed to be the answer to file locking/modification issues?
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