I would understand if they didn't backup anything with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS set (on Windows). Everything else makes their product worthless.
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
651–660 of 716 posts
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#652Some 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.
Nobody who’s actually considered Microsoft trusts Microsoft. It’s just the devil you know and it’s not like there’s reasonable or trustworthy alternatives in most cases.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#653Earlier 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…
> Linux file locking is to put it mildly, deficient.
Since the introduction of flock on Linux, how bad is it really though? I don't see why one would need kludges like filename.lock. Though of course flock is still an "honor system" as you put it.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
In university we had computer labs, I worked in the office that handled all of engineering computing. You paid the fee for engineering school and you got to use the labs. They had printers. We wanted printing to be free. This didn't mean "you get to take reams of blank paper home with you", it meant "you get as much printing as you reasonably need for academic purposes". Nobody cared if you printed your resume, flier…
You meant “reasonable,” but you did not apply reason. Situations such as this can be handled with a quota set at something like 150% of median use, but then extended upon a justified request. It can work in a lab where there’s a human touch, but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
> but it fails at million-user scale where even that level of human support is too expensive.
In general this is a myth promoted by platforms with millions of users. The vast majority of such large platforms could easily afford that level of human support, they just actively choose mot to give it. Blackblaxe - if they even have millions of users - belongs to the minority of such companies.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#655Weirdly, 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…
The comments are full of people saying the restore didn't work. If that's not important to you, you could save the extra $99 and just not bother backing it up. Given your use case and space, I'd just get a storage box from hetzner and enable nightly zfs snapshots
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#656I noticed this (thankfully before it was critical) and I’ve decided to move on from BB. Easily over 10 year customer. Totally bogus. Not only did it stop backing it up the old history is totally gone as well. The one thing they have to do is backup everything and when you see it in their console you can rest assured they are going to continue to back it up. They’ve let the desktop client linger, it’s difficult to add…
What are you using now? Asking for a friend
Restic to almost any cloud storage provider. It works perfectly, it is client-side encrypted with easily-configurable retention policies. I have been using it happily for many years (and also restored some files from the backups).
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#657TIL Backblaze doesn't back up the /Applications folder on Mac! Time to move everything to ~/Applications
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
definition of the term backup by most sources is one the line of: > a copy of information held on a computer that is stored separately from the computer there is nothing about _any_ versioning, or duration requirements or similar To use your own words, I fear its you who doesn't know what a backup is and assume a lot other additional (often preferable(1)) things are part of that term. Which is a common problem, not j…
> To use your own words, I fear its you who doesn't know what a backup is Feel free to use my reputation, instead: when I say a system is backed up, data cannot be lost by that system being destroyed, because an independent copy always exists. This satisfies those whom it concerns, who put their money where their mouth is, whereas your more generous but insufficient definition would absolutely not be good enough. Whe…
> When you assure a client that a system is backed up, which definition do they expect from you?
the one in the contract (and the various EU laws)
that is not a satisfying answer, I know
e.g. in some past projects the customers explicitly did _not_ want year long backups and outright forbid them, redundant storage systems + daily backups kept for ~1-2 weeks (I don't remember) had been pretty close to the legal limit of what we are allowed to have for that project (1)
the point I'm making was never that a good general purpose backup solutions shouldn't have versioning and years of backups
it's that
1. the word backup just doesn't mean much, so you have to be very explicit about what is needed, and sometimes that is the opposite of the "generic best solution"
2. If data is explicitly handled by another backup solution, even if it's a very bad one, it's understandable that the default is not to handle it yourself. (Through only the default, you should always have an overwrite option, be warned if defaults change, etc.).
Insisting a word means something it doesn't in a way where most non-tech people tend to use it in the definition you say isn't right just isn't helpful at all. Telling them that this is a very bad form of backup which they probably shouldn't use is much more likely to be taken serious.
---
(1): Side note: It's because all data we had is backed up else where, by a different solution, and sometimes can be a bit sensitive. So the customers preferred data loss (on our side, not on theirs) over any data being kept longer then needed (and as such there being more data at any point of time if there is some hacker succeeding or similar). And from what I have heard that project is still around working the same way.
But ironically that is similar to the case here, the data is owned/handled by a different system and as such we should not handle the backup.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#659However, OneDrive users (yes, that includes me) are still complaining that there’s no way to set up exclusions.
Re: Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
#660Weirdly, 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…
The comments are full of people saying the restore didn't work. If that's not important to you, you could save the extra $99 and just not bother backing it up. Given your use case and space, I'd just get a storage box from hetzner and enable nightly zfs snapshots
I've read through the comments, and the vast majority of them are folks who are justifiably angry about Git, cloud storage and VeraCrypt exclusions that were quietly introduced. All fully legit points that don't represent blockers for me personally, though I would have to eat my hat if they arbitrarily decided to stop backing up something like MP3s and didn't tell me.
I checked out what it would cost to store my data on rsync.net and it's ~1500/year.
There are a few folks who lost data to corrupted files on the BackBlaze side. That is much more worrisome, but still, the point is to go in eyes open. It's clear that it should not be used as an "only" backup! I already backup locally and rsync critical data offsite. I'm all about adding several "third option" lifelines that I hope will keep me covered in extreme situations.