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

There was a Swizz cloud backup system existing until some years ago.. can't recall the name but it started with a 'V'. They also encrypted the files on the client side before transmission, but the files were encrypted with their own md5sum or some such as key, and therefore similar files from different systems, encrypted, could still be de-duplicated across their whole system.

Yep. "Unlimited" doesn't just mean they're not telling you what the limit is, it means they can decide, at any time, what the limit actually is and when you've gone over it.

I just want you to ensure you're not confusing B2 with the product being mentioned here. This is a custom Backblaze product which only works via their apps and I don't believe is available as a storage backend for backups through something like rclone.

I never tried this particular Backblaze product because I don't trust a opaque blob touching my most valuable data nor do I trust unlimited plans that dont mention what the limits are, atleast in fine print.

One time around 2012, a friend of mine was upgrading his Windows/PC hardware, and he was a non-technical musician, and he called on me for a lot of help with the migration.

His daughter-in-law had gifted him a really nice new system. His old system wasn't too bad, either. He'd mostly been relying on an external USB HDD for data. He used Thunderbird for e-mail, which I am quite unfamiliar with.

As we worked on the migration, I collected all the apps and software he had been using, which he would need on the new system, and it wasn't much. I also complimented him on his "online hygiene" insofar as never clicking on suspicious links, or downloading suspicious software; his system had no malware and no shovelware, no unwanted browser bars or spyware was found.

We were completing the migration when I noticed a large discrepancy between the "new data" HDD space and the old data, but I needed to delete the old partition to complete the upgrade, and I flagged this with him: I said, "look this makes me uneasy: do you still want to move forward?" and he nodded approval, so I deleted the partition. Then we discovered that we had just lost many gigabytes of important data, such as was in his Firefox profile and his Thunderbird data, like all his email which had been downloaded locally. I turned white as a sheet and I was ready for him to sue me or something.

He was surprisingly sanguine about this, and he says, "What about Backblaze?" and I gaped at him, "You had an online backup of all this???" and he goes "Sure, here's how to install it..." and we installed his little Backblaze systray widget, and all his data began streaming back in. Nothing at all was lost, because he'd also been meticulous about using this app!

So that was the day I learned about Backblaze and their services, and I was intensely grateful to them for saving my bacon for sure, and we remained friends, and we finished the migration in one day, and he was grateful to me and my expertise, and not at all worried about the crippling data loss which I had incurred with my cavalier ignorance.

Remember, when you are running backups, you do not have any backups until you have tested your restore procedures.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/BackupTest...

You should naturally test your ordinary restore procedures (single-file, one directory, spot-checks) on the regular, and you should also form a viable disaster recovery plan, based on your projected risks. What if your house burns down? What if you're burglarized? What if your password manager loses all passwords? etc.

If you've never successfully run a disaster-recovery drill, then you don't have a plan.

"Those who fail to plan, plan to fail!"