[HN Gopher] Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbo...
___________________________________________________________________
Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and
maybe others
Author : rrreese
Score : 894 points
Date : 2026-04-14 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rareese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rareese.com)
| Terr_ wrote:
| I feel that's a systemic problem with all consumer online-backup
| software: They often use the barest excuse to _not_ back things
| up. At best, it 's to show a fast progress bar to the average
| user, and at worst it's to quietly renege on the "unlimited"
| capacity they promised when they took your money. [1]
|
| Trying to audit--let alone change--the finer details is a pain
| even for power users, and there's a non-zero risk the GUI is
| simply lying to everybody while undocumented rules override what
| you specified.
|
| When I finally switched my default boot to Linux, I found many of
| those offerings didn't support it, so I wrote some systemd
| services around Restic + Backblaze B2. It's been a real breath of
| fresh air: I can tell what's going on, I can set my own snapshot
| retention rules, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper. [2]
|
| ____
|
| [1] Along the lines of "We have your My Documents. Oh, you didn't
| manually add My Videos or My Music for every user? Too bad." Or
| in some cases, certain big-file extensions are on the ignore list
| by default for no discernible reason.
|
| [2] Currently a dollar or two a month for ~200gb. It doesn't
| change very much, and data verification jobs redownload the total
| amount once a month. I don't backn up anything I could get from
| elsewhere, like Steam games. Family videos are in the care of
| different relatives, but I'm looking into changing that.
| rrreese wrote:
| Yes, you're exactly right. Once they decide not to exclude
| certain filetypes it puts the burden on the endusers who are
| unequipped to monitor these changes.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Umm, why didnt you find a GUI manager like Vorta (this one is
| Borg exclusive IIRC)?
| Terr_ wrote:
| With restic I don't need some kind of special server daemon
| on the other end, I can point my backup destination to any
| mountable filesystem, or relatively dumb "bucket" stores like
| S3 or B2. I like having the sense of options and avoiding
| lock-in. [1]
|
| As for GUIs in general... Well, like I said, I just finished
| several years of bad experiences with some proprietary ones,
| and I wanted to see and choose what was really going on.
|
| At this point, I don't think I'd ever want a GUI beyond a
| basic status-reporting widget. It's not like I need to
| regularly micromanage the folder-set, especially when nobody
| else is going to tweak it by surprise.
|
| _____
|
| [1] The downside to the dumb-store is a ransomware scenario,
| where the malware is smart enough to go delete my old
| snapshots using the same connection/credentials. Enforcing
| retention policies on the server side necessarily needs a
| smarter server. B2 _might_ actually have something useful
| there, but I haven 't dug into it.
| o10449366 wrote:
| I've recently been looking for online backup providers and
| Backblaze came highly recommended to me - but I think after
| reading this article I'll look elsewhere because this kind of
| behavior seems like the first step on the path of
| enshittification.
| benguild wrote:
| The fact that they'd exclude ".git" and other things without
| being transparent about it is scandalous
| patates wrote:
| I think this should not be attributed to malice, however
| unfortunate. I had also developed some sync app once and onedrive
| folders were indeed problematic, causing cyclic updates on access
| and random metadata changes for no explicit reason.
|
| Complete lack of communication (outside of release notes, which
| nobody really reads, as the article too states) is incompetence
| and indeed worrying.
|
| Just show a red status bar that says "these folders will not be
| backed up anymore", why not?
| eviks wrote:
| What's worse, random metadata change or a completely missing
| data?
| patates wrote:
| If the constant meta changes (or other peculiarities
| involving those folders) make the sync unusable, then it can
| be both. In that case, you stop syncing and communicate.
|
| So my idea is that it's a competency problem (lack of
| communication), not malice. But it's just a theory, based on
| my own experience.
|
| In any case, this is a bad situation, however you look at it.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| I only use Backblaze as a cold storage service so this doesn't
| affect me but it's worth knowing about changes in the delivery of
| their other services as it might become widespread
| trvz wrote:
| Meanwhile, Backblaze still happily backups up the 100TB+ I have
| on various hard drives with my Mac Pro.
| mcherm wrote:
| Does it? How do you know?
|
| If they start excluding random content (eg: .git) without
| effective notice, maybe they AREN'T backing up everything you
| think they are.
| trvz wrote:
| You don't do quarterly restore tests?
| Semaphor wrote:
| How do you do that?
|
| My naive idea: Download 100 TB every 3 month to a 2nd
| device, create a list of files restored, validate checksums
| with the original machine, make a list of files differing
| and missing, check which ones are supposed to be missing?
| That sounds like a full time job.
| dathinab wrote:
| 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.
| nikanj wrote:
| Microsoft makes no guarantees on onedrive, you are responsible
| for backing up that data. Of course they try hard to keep it
| safe, but contractually they give no promises
| Timwi wrote:
| Oftentimes the important data that needs restoring is in the
| checkout: uncommitted and unstaged changes that represent hours
| of work.
| dnnddidiej wrote:
| I use backblaze and have repos I dont push for this reason so I
| am a bit stunned lol
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Parent is using "backuped" to mean "likely in some cloud
| (latest version)". And that may explain why BB excludes .git
| folders.
|
| You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history",
| I believe? Another important consideration.
| gilrain wrote:
| > You are using it to mean "maintaining full version
| history", I believe?
|
| No, they are using it to mean "backed up". Like, "if this
| data gets deleted or is in any way lost locally, it's still
| backed remotely (even years later, when finally needed)".
|
| I'm astonished so many people here don't know what a backup
| is! No wonder it's easy for Backblaze to play them for
| fools.
| dathinab wrote:
| 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 just for the term backup.
|
| There is a reason lawyers define technical terms in a for
| this contract specific precise way when making contracts.
|
| Or just requirements engineering. Failing there and you
| might end up having a backup of all your companies
| important data in a way susceptible to encrypting your
| files ransomware or similar.
|
| ---
|
| (1): What often is preferable is also sometimes the think
| you really don't want. Like sometimes keeping data around
| too long is outright illegal. Sometimes that also applies
| to older versions only. And sometimes just some short
| term backups are more then enough for you use case. The
| point here is the term backup can't mean what you are
| imply it does because a lot of existing use cases are
| incompatible with it.
| bananamogul wrote:
| But isn't that exactly what Dropbox does? If I delete a
| file on my PC, I can go to Dropbox.com and restore it, to
| some period in the past (I think it depends on what you
| pay for). In fact, I can see every version that's changed
| during the retention period and choose which version to
| restore.
|
| Maintaining version history out to a set retention period
| is a backup...no?
| dathinab wrote:
| normally this folder are synced to dropbox and/or onedrive
|
| both services have internal backups to reduce the chance they
| lose data
|
| both services allow some limited form of "going back to older
| version" (like the article states itself).
|
| Just because the article says "sync is not backup" doesn't
| mean that is true, I mean it literally is backup by
| definition as it: makes a copy in another location and even
| has versioning.
|
| It's just not _good enough_ backup for their standards. Maybe
| even standards of most people on HN, but out there many
| people are happy with way worse backups, especially wrt.
| versioning for a lot of (mostly static) media the only reason
| you need version rollback is in case of a corrupted version
| being backed up. And a lot of people mostly backup personal
| photos/videos and important documents, all static by nature.
|
| Through
|
| 1. it doesn't really fulfill the 3-2-1 rules it's only 2-1-1
| places (local, one backup on ms/drop box cloud, one offsite).
| Before when it was also backed up to backblaze it was 3-2-1
| (kinda). So them silently stopping still is a huge issue.
|
| 2. newer versions of the 3-2-1 rule also say treat 2 not just
| as 2 backups, but also 2 "vendors/access accounts" with the
| one-drive folder pretty much being onedrive controlled this
| is 1 vendor across local and all backups. Which is risky.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| efreak wrote:
| I have multiple drives that started out as their own os. Each
| of them has a Dropbox folder in the standard location. Each of
| them has a different set of files in them (I deduped at one
| point), with some overlap of different versions. I no longer
| use Dropbox, so _none_ of these are synced anywhere.
|
| They don't need to be in my case, I'm only using them now
| because of existing shortcuts and VM shares and programs
| configured to source information from them. That doesn't mean I
| don't want them backed up.
|
| Same for OneDrive: Microsoft configured my account for OneDrive
| when I set it up. Then I immediately uninstalled it (I don't
| want it). But I didn't notice that my desktop and documents
| folders live there. I hate it. But by the time I noticed it, it
| was already being used as a location for multiple programs that
| would need to be reconfigured, and it was easier to get used to
| it than to fix it. Several things I've forgotten about would
| likely break in ways I wouldn't notice for weeks/months.
| Multiple self-hosted servers for connecting to my android
| devices would need to reindex (Plex, voidtools everything,
| several remote systems that mount via sftp and connected
| programs would decide all my files were brand new and had never
| been seen before)
| fuckinpuppers wrote:
| I 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
| meaningful exceptions. It's obvious they want everyone to use B2
| now.
| jgrizou wrote:
| What are you using now? Asking for a friend
| microtonal wrote:
| I have used Arq for way over a decade. It does incremental
| encrypted backups and supports a lot of storage providers.
| Also supports S3 object lock (to protect against ransomware).
| It's awesome!
| massysett wrote:
| How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour
| just to scan my files for changes.
| sreitshamer wrote:
| (Arq developer here) By default Arq tries to be
| unobtrusive. Edit your backup plan and slide the "CPU
| usage" slider all the way to the right to make it go
| faster.
| e40 wrote:
| Wasabi + rclone works well for me. Previous BB customer.
| mrighele wrote:
| Not OP, but I have been using borg backup [1] against Hetzner
| Storage Box [2]
|
| Borg backup is a good tool in my opinion and has everything
| that I need (deduplication, compression, mountable snapshot.
|
| Hetzner Storage Box is nothing fancy but good enough for a
| backup and is sensibly cheaper for the alternatives (I pay
| about 10 eur/month for 5TB of storage)
|
| Before that I was using s3cmd [3] to backup on a S3 bucket.
|
| [1] https://www.borgbackup.org/
|
| [2] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd
|
| [3] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd
| mrighele wrote:
| I cannot edit any longer, the second link was supposed to
| be
|
| [2] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
| cortesoft wrote:
| Thanks, I was quite confused for a second
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is quite a bit more expensive than Backblaze if you
| have more than 5 TBs or so
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| I use rsync.net. You can use basically any SSH tool or rclone
| interface. They have a cheaper plan for "experts" if you want
| to forgo zfs snapshots,https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.htm
| l?code=experts.
| ramses0 wrote:
| rsync.net and rclone are great, my brain understood restic
| easier than borg for local backups over usb (ymmv), and
| plain old `rsync --archive` is most excellent wrt
| preserving file mod times and the like.
|
| There is 100% a difference between "dead data" (eg:
| movie.mp4) and "live data" (eg: a git directory with
| `chmod` attributes)- S3 and similar often don't preserve
| "attributes and metadata" without a special secondary pass,
| even though the `md5` might be the same.
| 6ak74rfy wrote:
| Rsync.net is really really good.
|
| Just this weekend, my backup tool went rogue and exhausted
| quota on rsync.net (Some bad config by me on Borg.) Emailed
| them, they promptly added 100 GB storage for a day so that
| I could recover the situation. Plus, their product has been
| rock solid since a few years I've been using them.
| rsync wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words.
|
| Just to clarify - there are discounted plans that don't
| have _free_ ZFS snapshots but you can still have them ...
| they just count towards your quota.
|
| If your files don't change much - you don't have much
| "churn" - they might not take up any real space anyway.
| tbagman wrote:
| Just a note of caution: sync != backup. When I was younger
| and dumber, I had my own rsync cron script to do a nightly
| sync of my documents to a remote server. One day I noticed
| files were gone from my local drive; I think there were
| block corruptions on the disk itself, and the files were
| dropped from the filesystem, or something like that. The
| nightly rsync propagated the deletions to the remote
| "backup."
|
| D'argh.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Musing: There's a step further along the spectrum that
| echoes the relationship, where where "backup" != "backup
| that resists malware".
|
| In other words, a backup can be degraded into a sync-to-
| nothing situation if the client logic is untrustworthy.
| 100ms wrote:
| Managing backup exclusions strikes again. It's impossible. Either
| commit to backing up the full disk, including the 80% of easily
| regenerated/redownloaded etc. data, or risk the 0.001% critical
| 16 byte file that turns out to contain your Bitcoin wallet key or
| god knows what else. I've been bitten by this more times than I'd
| like to admit managing my own backups, it's hard to expect a
| shrink-wrapped provider to do much better. It only takes one dumb
| simplification like "my Downloads folder is junk, no need to back
| that up" combined with (no doubt, years later) downloading say a
| 1Password recovery PDF that you lazily decide will live in that
| folder, and the stage is set.
|
| Pinning this squarely on user error. Backblaze could clearly have
| done better, but it's such a well known failure mode that it's
| not much far off refusing to test restores of a bunch of tapes
| left in the sun for a decade.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| If there is a footgun I haven't considered yet in backup
| exclusions, I'd like to know more. Shouldn't it be safe to
| exclude $XDG_CACHE_HOME? Unfortunately, since many applications
| don't bother with the XDG standard, I have to exclude a few
| more directories, so if you have any stories about unexpected
| exclusions, would you mind sharing?
| 100ms wrote:
| I don't remember why I started doing it, but I don't bulk
| exclude .cache for some reason or other. I have a script that
| strips down larger known caches as part of the backup. But
| the logic, whatever it was, is easy to understand: you're
| relying on apps to correctly categorise what is vs. isn't
| cache.
|
| Also consider e.g. ~/.cache/thumbnails. It's easy to
| understand as a cache, but if the thumbnails were of photos
| on an SD card that gets lost or immediately dies, is it still
| a cache? It might be the only copy of some once-in-a-lifetime
| event or holiday where the card didn't make it back with you.
| Something like this actually happened to me, but in that
| case, the "cache" was a tarball of an old photo gallery
| generated from the originals that ought to have been deleted.
|
| It's just really hard to know upfront whether something is
| actually important or not. Same for the Downloads folder.
| Vendor goes bankrupt, removes old software versions, etc. The
| only safe thing you can really do is hold your nose and save
| the whole lot.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Pinning this squarely on user error._
|
| It isn't user error if it was working perfectly fine until the
| provider made a silent change.
|
| Unless the user error you are referring to is not managing
| their own backups, like I do. Though this isn't free from
| trouble, I once had silent failures backing up a small section
| of my stuff for a while because of an ownership/perms snafu and
| my script not sending the reports to stderr to anywhere I'd
| generally see them. Luckily an automated test (every now & then
| it scans for differences in the whole backup and current data)
| because it could see the source and noticed a copy wasn't in
| the latest snapshot on the far-away copy. Reliable backups is a
| harder problem then most imagine.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| I backup my data to s3 and r2 using local scripts, never had any
| issues
|
| Don't even know why people rely on these guis which can show
| their magic anytime
| bjord wrote:
| you don't understand why pre-rolled critical backup solutions
| might be appealing to (especially non-technical) people?
|
| also, you pay per-GB. the author is on backblaze's unlimited
| plan.
| palata wrote:
| This. I use Restic, the cloud service doesn't know about what I
| send, it's just encrypted blobs as far as it is concerned.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > encrypted blobs
|
| I like how you can set multiple keys (much like LUKS) so that
| the key used by scheduled backups can be changed without
| messing with the key that I have memorized to restore with
| when disaster strikes.
|
| It also means you can have multiple computers backing up
| (sequentially, not simultaneously) to the same repository,
| each with their own key.
| ralfd wrote:
| > Don't even know why people
|
| Most people (my mom) don't know what s3 and r2 is or how to use
| it.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| * S3 is super expensive, unless you use Glacier, but that has a
| high overhead per file, so you should bundle them before
| uploading.
|
| * If your value your privacy, you need to encrypt the files on
| the client before uploading.
|
| * You need to keep multiple revisions of each file, and manage
| their lifecycle. Unless you're fine with losing any data that
| was overwritten at the time of the most recent backup.
|
| * You need to de-duplicate files, unless you want bloat
| whenever you rename a file or folder.
|
| * Plus you need to pay for Amazon's extortionate egress prices
| if you actually need to restore your data.
|
| I certainly wouldn't want to handle all that on my own in a
| script. What can make sense is using open source backup
| software with S3/R2/B2 as backing storage.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| which service you recommend?
| gpm wrote:
| In terms of software I've been impressed by restic, and as
| a developer who wants to be able to not back-up gitignored
| files the rustic clone of restic.
|
| In terms of cloud storage... well I was using backblaze's
| b2 but the issues here are definitely making me
| reconsidering doing business with the company even if my
| use of it is definitely not impacted by any of them.
| Anamon wrote:
| Even with Glacier, S3 is ridiculously expensive compared to
| almost anything else.
| klausa wrote:
| Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore
| a file_. I pay for unlimited history.
|
| I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at
| some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of
| credits.
|
| I do not trust my Backblaze backups anymore.
| christoff12 wrote:
| wut
| willis936 wrote:
| Do you have any more details? This is a pretty big deal. The
| differentiators between Backblaze and Hetzner mostly boil down
| to this kind of thing supposedly not being possible.
| klausa wrote:
| I'm on my phone so forgive the formatting, but here's my
| entire support exchange:
|
| - - -
|
| Hey, I tried restoring a file from my backup -- downloading
| it directly didn't work, and creating a restore with it also
| failed - I got an email telling me contract y'all about it.
|
| Can you explain to me what happened here, and what can I do
| to get my file(s?) back?
|
| - - -
|
| Hi Jan,
|
| Thanks for writing in!
|
| I've reached out to our engineers regarding your restore, and
| I will get back to you as soon as I have an update. For now,
| I will keep the ticket open.
|
| - - -
|
| Hi Jan,
|
| Regarding the file itself - it was deleted back in 2022, but
| unfortunately, the deletion never got recorded properly,
| which made it seem like the file still existed.
|
| Thus, when you tried to restore it, the restoration failed,
| as the file doesn't actually exist anymore. In this case, it
| shouldn't have been shown in the first place.
|
| For that, I do apologize. As compensation, we've granted you
| 3 monthly backup credits which will apply on your next
| renewal. Please let me know if you have any further
| questions.
|
| - - -
|
| That makes me even more confused to be honest - I've been
| paying for forever history since January 2022 according to my
| invoices?
|
| Do you know how/when exactly it got deleted?
|
| - - -
|
| Hi Jan,
|
| Unfortunately, we don't have that information available to
| us. Again, I do apologize.
|
| - - -
|
| I really don't want to be rude, but that seems like a very
| serious issue to me and I'm not satisfied with that response.
|
| If I'm paying for a forever backup, I expect it to be forever
| - and if some file got deleted even despite me paying for the
| "keep my file history forever" option, "oh whoops sorry our
| bad but we don't have any more info" is really not a
| satisfactory answer.
|
| I don't hold it against _you_ personally, but I really need
| to know more about what happened here - if this file got
| randomly disappeared, how am I supposed to trust the
| reliability of anything else that's supposed to be safely
| backed up?
|
| - - -
|
| Hi Jan,
|
| I'll inquire with our engineers tomorrow when they're back
| in, and I'll update you as soon as I can. For now, I will
| keep the ticket open.
|
| - - -
|
| Appreciate that, thank you! It's fine if the investigation
| takes longer, but I just want to get to the bottom of what
| happened here :)
|
| - - -
|
| Hi Jan,
|
| Thanks for your patience.
|
| According to our engineers and my management team:
|
| With the way our program logs information, we don't have the
| specific information that explains exactly why the file was
| removed from the backup. Our more recent versions of the
| client, however, have vastly improved our consistency checks
| and introduced additional protections and audits to ensure
| complete reliability from an active backup.
|
| Looking at your account, I do see that your backup is
| currently not active, so I recommend running the Backblaze
| installer over your current installation to repair it, and
| inherit your original backup state so that our updates can
| check your backup.
|
| I do apologize, and I know it's not an ideal answer, but
| unfortunately, that is the extent of what we can tell you
| about what has happened.
|
| - - -
|
| I gave up escalating at this point and just decided these
| aren't trusted anymore.
|
| The files in question are four year old at this point so it's
| hard for me conclusively state, so I guess there might be a
| perfect storm of that specific file being deleted because it
| was due to expire before upgraded to "keep history forever",
| but I don't think it's super likely, and I absolutely would
| expect them to have telemetry about that in any case.
|
| If anyone from Backblaze stumbles upon it and wants to
| escalate/reinvestigate, the support ID is #1181161.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. A non-persistent backup service
| is on the same level as a zombie-insurance provider.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| This reminds me of the Seinfeld riff on car rental
| reservations. Anyone can make a backup. The important part
| is holding the backup. If Backblaze doesn't always do that
| then it is practically worthless to everyone.
| rincebrain wrote:
| This seems absurd from a company offering backups as a
| service.
|
| Especially if they allow them restoring all your data onto
| a drive and shipping it to you, they pretty clearly should
| have enough information available to them to test
| restorations of data, and the number of times I've heard
| that failure mode ("oh, we didn't track deletions well
| enough, so we only found out we deleted it when you tried
| restoring"), plus them saying they have made improvements
| to avoid this exact failure mode in newer client versions,
| makes me think they should have enough reports to
| investigate it.
|
| ...which makes me wonder if they did, and decided they
| would go bankrupt if they told people how much data they
| lost, so they decided to bet on people not trying restores
| on a lot of the lost data.
| nayhel89 wrote:
| I have the same experience with Backblaze. 3 years ago I tried
| to restore my files from Backblaze, using their desktop client.
|
| First thing I noticed is that if it can't download a file due
| to network or some other problem then it just skips it. But you
| can force it to retry by modifying its job file which is just
| an SQLite DB. Also it stores and downloads files by splitting
| them into small chunks. It stores checksums of these chunks,
| but it doesn't store the complete checksum of the file, so
| judging by how badly the client is written I can't be sure that
| restored files are not corrupted after the stitching.
|
| Then I found out that it can't download some files even after
| dozens of retries because it seems they are corrupted on
| Backblaze side.
|
| But the most jarring issue for me is that it mangled all non-
| ascii filenames. They are stored as UTF-8 in the DB, but the
| client saves them as Windows-1252 or something. So I ended up
| with hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like
| N,,D,DoDdegN+, and I can't just re-encode these names back,
| because some characters were dropped during the process.
|
| I wanted to write a script that forces Backblaze Client to
| redownload files, logs all files that can't be restored, fixes
| the broken names and splits restored files back into chunks to
| validate their checksums against the SQLite DB, but it was too
| big of a task for me, so I just procrastinated for 3 years,
| while keeping paying monthly Backblaze fees because it's sad to
| let go of my data.
|
| I wonder if they fixed their client since then.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| And they talked so much about how great redundancy they have
| on backend. I guess they don't count 404's
| toraway wrote:
| > I wonder if they fixed their client since then.
|
| They have not. I spent more than a week trying to restore a
| little less than 2 TB backup because the client would just
| freeze at the last few % every time. I ended up having to
| break the restore into 200GB chunks on the web client and
| download and restore manually which was extremely frustrating
| and made me despise their (required) Windows client.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _But the most jarring issue for me is that it mangled all
| non-ascii filenames. They are stored as UTF-8 in the DB, but
| the client saves them as Windows-1252 or something. So I
| ended up with hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like
| N,,D,DoDdegN+, and I can 't just re-encode these names back,
| because some characters were dropped during the process._
|
| > _I wanted to write a script that forces Backblaze Client to
| redownload files, logs all files that can 't be restored,
| fixes the broken names and splits restored files back into
| chunks to validate their checksums against the SQLite DB, but
| it was too big of a task for me, so I just procrastinated for
| 3 years, while keeping paying monthly Backblaze fees because
| it's sad to let go of my data._
|
| Filenames are probably the most valuable of metadata for them
| to mangle. I value them as much as I do file
| creation/modification times. A backup program is dead to me
| if they mess up either of these.
|
| I think it should be trivial for you to pipe your request
| into Claude now, and get them to write a quick script. Hope
| that'll free you from Backblaze for good!
| orr721 wrote:
| I had similar experience as well. They upgraded their client
| and server software something like 5 years ago which put
| forward different restrictions on character set used for
| password. I have used a special character which was no longer
| allowed. When I needed to restore files after disk failure I
| could not log in either in the app or on the website. The
| customer service was useless -- we are sorry, your fault. I
| have lost 1 TB of personal photos due to this as a paying
| customer. Never trust Backblaze.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Exclusions are one thing, but I 've had Backblaze _fail to
| restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history._
|
| > _I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted
| at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of
| credits._
|
| This happened to me with CrashPlan for Windows many years ago,
| because of some Volume Shadow Copy Service thing. I noped out
| of there right after.
| mcherm wrote:
| 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.)
| baal80spam wrote:
| > 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.
| noirscape wrote:
| I 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 tools (not just backups). If it'd been something like
| an SQLite database instead (just an example really), you wouldn't
| get so much unnecessary inode bloat.
|
| At the same time Backblaze is a _backup_ solution. The need to
| back up everything is sort of baked in there. They promise to be
| the third backup solution in a three layer strategy (backup
| directly connected, backup in home, backup external), and that
| third one is probably the single most important one of them all
| since it 's the one you're going to be touching the least in an
| ideal scenario. They really can't be excluding any files
| whatsoever.
|
| The cloud service exclusion is similarly bad, although much
| worse. Imagine getting hit by a cryptoworm. Your cloud storage
| tool is dutifully going to sync everything encrypted, junking up
| your entire storage _across devices_ and because restoring old
| versions is both ass and near impossible at scale, you need an
| actual backup solution for that situation. Backblaze excluding
| files in those folders feels like a complete misunderstanding of
| what their purpose should be.
| ciupicri wrote:
| > If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just
| an example really)
|
| See _Fossil_ (https://fossil-scm.org/)
|
| P.S. There's also (https://www.sourcegear.com/vault/)
|
| > _SourceGear Vault Pro_ is a version control and bug tracking
| solution for professional development teams. Vault Standard is
| for those who only want version control. Vault is based on a
| client / server architecture using technologies such as
| Microsoft SQL Server and IIS Web Services for increased
| performance, scalability, and security.
| maalhamdan wrote:
| I think they shouldn't back up git objects individually because
| git handles the versioning information. Just compress the .git
| folder itself and back it up as a single unit.
| pkaeding wrote:
| This is a good point, but you might expect them to back up
| untracked and modified files in the backup, along with
| everything else on your filesystem.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, you really shouldn't do that for any kind of file that
| acts like a (an impromptu) database. This is how you get
| corruption. Especially when change information can be split
| across more than one file.
| pkaeding wrote:
| Sorry, what are you saying shouldn't be done? Backing up
| untracked/modified files in a bit repo? Or compressing
| the .git folder and backing it up as a unit?
| pixl97 wrote:
| > Backing up untracked/modified files in a bit repo?
|
| This. It's best to do this in an atomic operation, such
| as a VSS style snapshot that then is consistent and done
| with no or paused operations on the files. Something like
| a zip is generally better because it takes less time on
| the file system than the upload process typically takes.
| willis936 wrote:
| Better yet, include dedpulication, incremental versioning,
| verification, and encryption. Wait, that's borg / restic.
|
| This is a joke, but honestly anyone here shouldn't be
| directly backing up their filesystems and should instead be
| using the right tool for the job. You'll make the world a
| more efficient place, have more robust and quicker to recover
| backups, and save some money along the way.
| rmccue wrote:
| I think it's understandable for both Backblaze and most users,
| but surely the solution is to add `.git` to their default
| exclusion list _which the user can manage_.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's probably primarily because Linus is a kernel and
| filesystem nerd, not a database nerd, so he preferred to just
| use the filesystem which he understood the performance
| characteristics of well (at least on linux).
| grumbelbart2 wrote:
| Git packs objects into pack-files on a regular basis. If it
| doesn't, check your configuration, or do it manually with 'git
| repack'.
| noirscape wrote:
| I decided to look into this (git gc should also be doing
| this), and I think I figured out why it's such a consistent
| issue with git in particular. Running git gc does properly
| pack objects together and reduce inode count to something
| much more manageable.
|
| It's the same reason why the postgres autovacuum daemon tends
| to be borderline useless unless you retune it[0]: the
| defaults are barmy. git gc only runs if there's _6700_ loose
| unpacked objects[1]. Most typical filesystem tools tend to
| start balking at traversing ~1000 files in a structure
| (depends a bit on the filesystem /OS as well, Windows tends
| to get slower a good bit earlier than Linux).
|
| To fix it, running
|
| > git config --global gc.auto 1000
|
| should retune it and any subsequent commit to your repo's
| will trigger garbage collection properly when there's around
| 1000 loose files. Pack file management seems to be properly
| tuned by default; at more than 50 packs, gc will repack into
| a larger pack.
|
| [0]: For anyone curious, the default postgres autovacuum
| setting runs only when 10% of the table consists of dead
| tuples (roughly: deleted+every revision of an updated row).
| If you're working with a beefy table, you're never hitting
| 10%. Either tune it down or create an external cronjob to run
| vacuum analyze more frequently on the tables you need to keep
| speedy. I'm pretty sure the defaults are tuned solely to
| ensure that Postgres' internal tables are fast, since those
| seem to only have active rows to a point where it'd warrant
| autovacuum.
|
| [1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc
| LetTheSmokeOut wrote:
| I needed to use
|
| > git config --global gc.auto 1000
|
| with the long option name, and no `=`.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A few thousand files shouldn't be a problem to a program
| designed to scan entire drives of files. Even in a single
| folder and considering sloppy programs I wouldn't worry
| just yet, and git's not putting them in a single folder.
| bombcar wrote:
| I love nothing more than running strange _git_ commands
| found in HN comments.
|
| Let's ride the lightning and see if it does anything.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| I don't think this is the right way to see this.
|
| Why should a file backup solution adapt to work with git? Or
| any application? It should not try to understand what a git
| object is.
|
| I'm paying to copy files from a folder to their servers just do
| that. No matter what the file is. Stay at the filesystem level
| not the application level.
| noirscape wrote:
| 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 operations.
|
| Git, rather unusually, tends to produce a lot of files in
| regular use; before packing, every commit/object/branch is
| simply stored as a file on the filesystem (branches only as
| pointers). Packing fixes that by compressing commit and
| object files together, but it's not done by default (only
| after an initial clone or when the garbage collector runs).
| Iterating over a .git folder can take a _lot_ of time in a
| place that 's typically not very well optimized (since most
| "normal" people don't have thousands of tiny files in their
| folders that contain sprawled out application state.)
|
| The correct solution here is either for git to change, or for
| Backblaze to implement better iteration logic (which will
| probably require special handling for git..., so it'd be more
| "correct" to fix up git, since Backblaze's tools aren't the
| only ones with this problem.)
| masfuerte wrote:
| 7za (the compression app) does blazingly fast iteration
| over any kind of folder. This doesn't require special code
| for git. Backblaze's backup app could do the same but
| rather than fix their code they excluded .git folders.
|
| When I backup my computer the .git folders are among the
| most important things on there. Most of my personal
| projects aren't pushed to github or anywhere else.
|
| Fortunately I don't use Backblaze. I guess the moral is
| don't use a backup solution where the vendor has an
| incentive to exclude things.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| noirscape wrote:
| 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 large amount of
| files, that does stack up.
|
| Linux file locking is to put it mildly, deficient. Most
| software doesn't even bother acquiring locks in the first
| place. Piling further onto that, basically nobody
| actually uses POSIX locks because the API has some very
| heavy footguns (most notably, every lock on a file is
| released whenever _any_ close() for that file is called,
| even if another component of the same process is also
| having a second lock open). Most Linux file locks instead
| work on the honor system; you create a file called
| filename.lock in the same directory as the file you 're
| working on, and then any software that detects the
| filename.lock file exists should stop reading the file.
|
| Nobody using file locks is probably the bigger reason why
| Linux chokes less on fast iteration than Windows, given
| that Windows is slow with loads of files even when you
| aren't running a virus scanner.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| 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.
| Saris wrote:
| Backblaze offers 'unlimited' backup space, so they have to do
| this kind of thing as a result of that poor marketing choice.
| conductr wrote:
| No they don't. They just have to price the product to
| reflect changing user patterns. When backblaze started, it
| was simply "we back up all the files on your drive" they
| didn't even have a restore feature that was your job when
| you needed it. Over time they realized some user behavior
| changed, these Cloud drives where a huge data source they
| hadn't priced in, git gave them some problems that they
| didn't factor in, etc. The issue is there solution to
| dealing with it is to exclude it and that means they're now
| a half baked solution to many of their users, they should
| have just changed the pricing and supported the backup
| solution people need today.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| If they must scam, shouldn't they be deduplicating on the
| server rather than the client?
| yangm97 wrote:
| You don't see ZFS/BTRFS block based snapshot replication
| choking on git or any sort of dataset. Use the right job for
| the tool or something.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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.
| stebalien wrote:
| I've actually spent some time debugging why git causes so many
| issues with the backup software I use (restic).
|
| Ironically, I believe you have it backwards: pack files, git's
| solution to the "too many tiny files" problem, are the issue
| here; not the tiny files themselves.
|
| In my experience, incremental backup software works best with
| many small files that never change. Scanning is usually just a
| matter of checking modification times and moving on. This isn't
| fast, but it's fast enough for backups and can be optimized by
| monitoring for file changes in a long-running daemon.
|
| However, lots of mostly identical files ARE an issue for
| filesystems as they tend to waste a lot of space. Git solves
| this issue by packing these small objects into larger pack
| files, then compressing them.
|
| Unfortunately, it's those pack files that cause issues for
| backup software: any time git "garbage collects" and creates
| new pack files, it ends up deleting and creating a bunch of
| large files filled with what looks like random data (due to
| compression). Constantly creating/deleting large files filled
| with random data wreaks havoc on incremental/deduplicating
| backup systems.
| Jolter wrote:
| To the author: please use a darker font. Preferably black.
|
| I'm only in my 40's, I don't require glasses (yet) and I have to
| actively squint to read your site on mobile. Safari, iPhone.
|
| I'm pretty sure you're under the permitted contrast levels under
| WCAG.
| readingnews wrote:
| Completely agree with this comment. Had to cut / paste it into
| vim and q! when done, was getting a headache.
| maalhamdan wrote:
| document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(p => p.style.color =
| 'black');
|
| Use this command in the developer tools console to change the
| color.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Even as a Vim user I find this completely overkill when you
| can just press the reader mode button on the browser.
| vovavili wrote:
| I instinctively use Dark Reader on any page with a white
| background so I was genuinely surprised by your comment at
| first.
| argsnd wrote:
| Safari's reader mode is good for this. All you have to do is
| long press the icon on the left edge of the address bar.
| Jolter wrote:
| Yes, it's a great workaround but website owners should not
| make me do that.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| LONG PRESS????!?! you legend. How does one find these things
| out.
| Jolter wrote:
| Like this, by word of mouth. That's how Apple has done UI
| design since they stopped printing paper manuals.
|
| - ctrl-shift-. to show hidden files on macOS - pull down to
| see search box (iOS 18) - swipe from top right corner for
| flashlight button - swipe up from lower middle for home
| screen
|
| Etc, etc
| galad87 wrote:
| Long press is a shortcut, the longer way is to click on
| the icon beside the url and tap/click the enormous
| "reader mode" button.
| the-grump wrote:
| That's what I've done for years.
|
| Long pressing is much more pleasant.
|
| I wish Apple would give us a hint rather than requiring
| us to chance upon this recommendation on HN.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That's a nice use for AI - pop up hints when it sees you
| using the long way a few times.
|
| The problem is Apple's hints keep popping up even after
| you say no thanks or it's fine.
| myself248 wrote:
| It's so intuitive, how could I have missed that?
| doubled112 wrote:
| Good old iOS and hidden features. Great discoverability.
| Long press those, swipe that, gesture this.
|
| I have a gesture for whoever decided "find in page"
| should go under share.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| > I have a gesture for whoever decided "find in page"
| should go under share.
|
| You can also just type your search term into the normal
| address bar and there's an item at the bottom of the list
| for "on this page - find <search>". I'd never even seen
| the find-in-page button under share.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That would be so much better if Find in page was the
| first item not the last.
| Confiks wrote:
| Not restricted to Apple, but TIL: Double-clicking on a
| word an keeping the second click pressed, then dragging,
| allows you to select per word instead of per character.
| asimovDev wrote:
| cmd+shift+R for reader mode if you prefer a keyboard
| shortcut
| finger wrote:
| So that's why Reader mode sometimes shows up directly when
| I click on the icon, I must be long clicking it by
| accident.
| kaszanka wrote:
| Surprisingly only the headings (2.05) and links (3.72) fail the
| Firefox accessibility check, the body text is 5.74. But
| subjectively it seems worse and I definitely agree with you
| that the contrast is too low.
| KwanEsq wrote:
| I wonder if it's because of the font-weight being decreased.
| If I disable the `font-weight` rule in Firefox's Inspector
| the text gets noticeably darker, but the contrast score
| doesn't change. Could be a bad interaction with anti-aliasing
| thin text that the contrast checker isn't able to pick up.
| captainbland wrote:
| I'd say it looks pretty readable on android although I
| still wouldn't describe it as good. I wouldn't say I feel
| encouraged to squint. But possibly different antialiasing
| explains it.
| mhitza wrote:
| Contrast looks good for the text, but the font used has very
| thin lines. A thicker font would have been readable by
| itself. At 250% page zoom it's good enough, if you don't
| enable the browser built-in reader mode.
| zachrip wrote:
| I think the accessibility checks only take into account the
| text color, not the actual real world readability of given
| text which in this case is impossible to read because of the
| font weight.
| baq wrote:
| +1
|
| Firefox users: press F9 or C-A-R
| soblemprolver wrote:
| F9 doesn't seem to do anything for me on Linux... Neither on
| the posted page nor on HN.
|
| What is it supposed to do?
|
| There is no mention of F9 on this support page either:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-
| perf...
|
| Am I missing something?
| moebrowne wrote:
| I assume they are trying to enable Reader mode which is
| Ctrl+Alt+R
| nbernard wrote:
| Probably. When available, reader mode can also be
| activated by clicking the little "page with text" icon on
| the right of the address bar.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| According to http://web.archive.org/web/20260317212538/ht
| tps://support.mo... its
|
| F9 on Windows
|
| Ctrl + Alt + R on Linux
|
| Command + Option + R on macOS
|
| (It uses JS to only show the one for your platform but
| with view source you can see it mentions all three of
| these different OSes.)
|
| So I guess the first guy is a Windows user and you other
| two use Linux.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| > (It uses JS to only show the one for your platform but
| with view source you can see it mentions all three of
| these different OSes.)
|
| There is a dropdown at the top-right to select the
| platform - no need to view source.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| On mobile they've hidden that under "customize this
| article", which I never would have even noticed if I
| hadn't specifically known that there is some sort of
| dropdown somewhere, heh. But now we know :)
| baq wrote:
| yeah reader mode it is, didn't know it's different on Linux
| than on Windows and the support article listing it is here:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-
| perf...
| contravariant wrote:
| I'm also pretty sure 14 points font is a bit outdated at this
| point, 16 should probably be a minimum with current screens.
| It's not as if screens aren't wide enough to fit bigger text.
| ncts wrote:
| That's good guidelines and all, but meanwhile you are posting
| it on a site with.. .default { font-
| family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;
| color:#828282; } .admin { font-family:Verdana,
| Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:8.5pt; color:#000000; }
| .title { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-
| size: 10pt; color:#828282; overflow:hidden; } .subtext
| { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt;
| color:#828282; } .yclinks { font-family:Verdana,
| Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; color:#828282; }
| .pagetop { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-
| size: 10pt; color:#222222; line-height:12px; } .comhead
| { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt;
| color:#828282; } .comment { font-family:Verdana,
| Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; }
| Semaphor wrote:
| There's a reason I have HN set to 200%
| dsr_ wrote:
| Which is why Firefox has memorized that this site needs
| 170% zoom.
| nottorp wrote:
| Haha I keep forgetting that. Fortunately the browser
| remembers my zoom settings per page. I'm pretty sure the
| font is now at 16 or something via repeated Cmd +.
| skydhash wrote:
| 10 point at 96 dpi or with correctly applied scaling is very
| readable. But some toolkits like GTK have huge paddings for
| their widgets, so the text will be readable, but you'll lose
| density.
| raptor99 wrote:
| Why don't you just go tell the WCAG on him yourself?
| Jolter wrote:
| The who?
| JLCarveth wrote:
| > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| This is not merely annoyance. This is usability failure.
| baq wrote:
| if I can't read TFA because of its formatting it isn't
| tangential
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Worst case scenario you copy the text out. It's worth
| complaining sometimes, but yes it's tangential.
| baq wrote:
| flying really close to the dropbox comment, sir
| rrreese wrote:
| As the author I certainly apreciate this feedback
| capital_guy wrote:
| This is the most broken rule in the history of time. Every
| thread
| jasode wrote:
| macOS/iOS Safari and Brave browsers have "Reader mode" . Chrome
| has a "Reading mode" but it's more cumbersome to use because
| it's buried in a side menu.
|
| For desktop browsers, I also have a bookmarklet on the
| bookmarks bar with the following Javascript:
| javascript: document.querySelectorAll('p, td, tr, ul,
| ol').forEach(elem => {elem.style.color = '#000'})
|
| It doesn't darken the text on every webpage but it does work on
| this thread's article. (The Javascript code can probably be
| enhanced with more HTML heuristics to work on more webpages.)
| silvestrov wrote:
| Some css files abuse !important so you might have to add that
| too: {elem.style.color = '#000 !important'}
| rrreese wrote:
| Your feedback is noted! I'll darken it down a few nootches and
| test it on mobile. Thanks for the feedback
| billev2k wrote:
| Please: Not "a few notches". All the way. Black. That is if
| you actually care if people read your posts.
| specialp wrote:
| >I don't require glasses (yet)
|
| One day try throwing a pair on you'll be surprised. The small
| thin font is causing this not the text contrast. This and low
| light scenarios are the first things to go.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The small thin font is causing this not the text contrast.
|
| Whatever causes it, I do wear glasses (and on a recent
| prescription too) and the text is still very hard to read.
| bencevans wrote:
| I found this to be a common theme in web design a while back,
| and in part led to an experiment developing a newspaper/Pocket-
| like interface to reading HN. It's not perfect, but is easier
| on the eyes for reading...
| https://times.hntrends.net/story/47762864
| avazhi wrote:
| Your iPhone has this cool feature called reader mode if you
| didn't know.
|
| As for mentioning WCAG - so what if it doesn't adhere to those
| guidelines? It's his personal website, he can do what he wants
| with it. Telling him you found it difficult to read properly is
| one thing but referencing WCAG as if this guy is bound somehow
| to modify his own aesthetic preference for generic
| accessibility reasons is laughable. Part of what continues to
| make the web good is differing personal tastes and unique
| website designs - it is stifling and monotonous to see the same
| looking shit on every site and it isn't like there aren't tools
| (like reader mode) for people who dislike another's personal
| taste.
| gkanai wrote:
| Many here at HN find that site hard to read, not just the
| original commenter.
| Jolter wrote:
| I don't know, I got 140 upvotes on a nitpick so I think
| others agree with me it's hard to read.
| avazhi wrote:
| Didn't say it wasn't. I said invoking an accessibility
| standard when it comes to a guy's personal website is
| laughable because the way it was said implied he was
| compelled to change his site because some bureaucratic
| busybodies somewhere said he should. Unless you are a
| business or a government, most people aren't overly
| concerned about accessibility, nor should they be -
| especially if it comes about only through guilt tripping or
| insinuated threats.
| Jolter wrote:
| I don't think I've insinuated any threats. WCAG are
| guidelines. It's a great idea to follow them if you want
| your content to be consumed, but as you say most
| jurisdictions would only mandate accessibility for
| certain actors, not for everyone. Me, I have no idea what
| jurisdiction the OP is in, or who he/she is, or whether
| WCAG would be a compliance issue to them. I just used
| that term as a clue/hint that there are frameworks that
| can help guide web authors towards good practices. Like
| how WCAG 2.2 specifies a minimum contrast level. Nobody
| knows all of this stuff by default, we all have to learn
| it. Gotta assume good intentions and just point them
| towards the tools available.
| shortformblog wrote:
| The problem is less the color than the weight. If it was 500
| rather than 300 it would be perfectly fine.
| dgellow wrote:
| Reader mode?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The font is dark enough, yet the weight is too light. Hairline
| or ultrathin or something. It's eye straining.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm on my laptop and that font is too thin and too small. I'm
| in my mid 30's ;)
| Aerroon wrote:
| On my android phone it's perfectly legible. Moving my phone
| away it's only a tiny bit worse than HN.
|
| Is this maybe a pixel density of iphone issue?
|
| I wouldn't mind a darker and higher weight font though.
| venzaspa wrote:
| On the topic of backing up data from cloud platforms such as
| Onedrive, I suspect this is stop the client machine from actively
| downloading 'files on demand' which are just pointers in explorer
| until you go to open them.
|
| If you've got huge amounts of files in Onedrive and the backup
| client starts downloading everyone of them (before it can
| reupload them again) you're going to run into problems.
|
| But ideally, they'd give you a choice.
| einr wrote:
| This is a pain, to be sure, but surely there is some sort of
| logic you could implement to detect whether a file is a Real
| File that actually exists on the device (if so, back it up) or
| a pointer to the cloud (ignore it by default, probably, but
| maybe provide a user setting to force it to back up even these)
| yangm97 wrote:
| It used to be the case that placeholder files were very
| obvious but now OneDrive and iCloud (possibly others) work
| more like an attached network storage with some local cache,
| and that was a good move for most programs because back then
| a file being evicted from storage looked like a file
| deletion.
| simplyinfinity wrote:
| Came here to say this. Files in OneDrive get removed from your
| local storage and are downloaded ON DEMAND. given that you can
| have 1TB+ onedrive folder, backblaze downloading all of that is
| gonna throttle your connection and fill up your disk real fast.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| No reason for that to be true.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Hetzner storagebox. 1TB for under 5 bucks/month, 5TB for under
| 15. Sftp access. Point your restic there. Backup game done, no
| surprises, no MBAs involved.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Until there is. Backblaze was also trusted years ago. Selfhost,
| it became easy enough.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| Selfhosting Offsite is hard. Accessing services via standard
| protocols like ssh/webdav and just pushing your encrypted
| blobs there is a good middle ground. They can't control what
| you upload, and you can easily point your end-point somewhere
| else if you need to move.
| creatonez wrote:
| Hetzner Storage Box is not even remotely a similar product to
| B2, considering the only reliability offered is the disks being
| in RAID. There is no geo-redundancy at all. The number of
| simultaneous connections is also quite limited, though this
| might not matter for many use cases.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| B2 has no geo-redundacy by default. It's RAID across a bunch
| of neighboring servers.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I feel what you need to chose between $5/m and 99.999% SLA
| stratts wrote:
| I think this is a risk with anything that promotes itself as
| "unlimited", or otherwise doesn't specify concrete limits. I'm
| always sceptical of services like this as it feels like the terms
| could arbitrarily change at any point, as we've found out here.
|
| (as a side note, it's funny to see see them promoting their
| native C app instead of using Java as a "shortcut". What I
| wouldn't give for more Java apps nowadays)
| palata wrote:
| My takeaway is that for data that matters, don't trust the
| service. I back up with Restic, so that the service only sees
| encrypted blobs.
| mijoharas wrote:
| What cloud backend are people using for restic? B2/S3/something
| else? I'm still just backing up to other machines using it
| (though I'd also heavily recommend restic)
| palata wrote:
| I run restic with rclone, which is not only compatible with
| S3-like storage (which include many, like Hetzner, OVH,
| Exoscale) but many others, from mega to pcloud through Google
| Drive.
|
| For stuff I care about (mostly photos), I back them up on two
| different services. I don't have TBs of those, so it's not
| very expensive. My personal code I store on git repositories
| anyway (like SourceHut or Codeberg or sometimes GitHub).
| mijoharas wrote:
| Yep, I was wondering which services people would recommend.
| I had been thinking about B2, I just haven't prioritised
| it.
| lukewarm707 wrote:
| cloudflare
| alfanick wrote:
| Same, I use Restic + Backrest (plus monitoring on Healthchecks,
| self-hosted + Prometheus/AlertManager/Pushover), with some
| decent structure - local backups every half-an-hour to raid1,
| every hour a backup to my old NAS, every day a backup to FTP in
| Helsinki, and once a week some backups to Backblaze (via
| Restic). Gives me local backups, observability, remote backups
| spread across different providers - seems quite safe :) I
| highly recommend to everyone figuring out a good backup
| strategy, takes a day or two.
|
| Edit: on top of that I've built a custom one-page monitoring
| dashboard, so I see everything in one place
| (https://imgur.com/B3hppIW) - I'll opensource, it's decent
| architecture, I just need to cleanup some secrets from Git
| history...
| throwaway81998 wrote:
| This is terrifying. Aren't Backblaze users paying per-GB of
| storage/transfer? Why should it matter what's being stored, as
| long as the user is paying the costs? This will absolutely result
| in permanent data loss for some subset of their users.
|
| I hope Backblaze responds to this with a "we're sorry and we've
| fixed this."
| mrighele wrote:
| I think the author is referring to the personal backup plan [1]
| which has a fixed monthly amount
|
| [1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
| knorker wrote:
| Is this grey-on-black just meant for LLMs to see for training, or
| is the intention that humans should be able to read it too?
| breakingcups wrote:
| Holy Hannah, this is such bullshit from Backblaze. Both the .git
| directory (why would I not SPECIFICALLY want this backed up for
| my projects?) and the cloud directories.
|
| I get that changing economics make it more difficult to honor the
| original "Backup Everything" promise but this feels very
| underhanded. I'll be cancelling.
| eviks wrote:
| > There was the time they leaked all your filenames to Facebook,
| but they probably fixed that.
|
| That's a good warning
|
| > Backblaze had let me down. Secondly within the Backblaze
| preferences I could find no way to re-enable this.
|
| This - the nail in the coffin
| AegirLeet wrote:
| At some point, Backblaze just silently stopped backing up my
| encrypted (VeraCrypt) drives. Just stopped working without any
| announcement, warning or notification. After lots of
| troubleshooting and googling I found out that this was
| intentional from some random reddit thread. I stopped using their
| backup service after that.
| solarkraft wrote:
| So what are HN's favorite alternatives?
|
| Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.
|
| Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like
| options?
| freedomben wrote:
| > _So what are HN's favorite alternatives?_
|
| I assume when asking such a question, you expect an honest
| answer like mine:
|
| rclone _is_ my favorite alternative. Supports encryption
| seamlessly, and loaded with features. Plus I can control
| exactly what gets synced /backed up, when it happens, and I pay
| for what I use (no unsustainable "unlimited" storage that
| always comes with annoying restrictions). There's never any
| surprises (which I experienced with nearly every backup
| solution). I use Backblaze B2 as the backend. I pay like $50 a
| month (which I know sounds high), but I have many terabytes of
| data up there that matters to me (it's a decade or more of my
| life and work, including long videos of holidays like Christmas
| with my kids throughout the years).
|
| For super-important stuff I keep a tertiary backup on Glacier.
| I also have a full copy on an external harddrive, though those
| drives are not very reliable so I don't consider it part of the
| backup strategy, more a convenience for restoring large files
| quickly.
| solarkraft wrote:
| That's why I like rclone, but I'm concerned with where to
| actually put the stuff.
|
| Those $50 indeed sound high to me. I think I'd be fine
| depending on the Glacier backup, is that rclone compatible?
| What do you pay for it?
| lizknope wrote:
| The cheapest is a computer at a relative or friend's house. I
| have my backup server at my parents house. We both have gigabit
| fiber so it works well.
| brycewray wrote:
| Backblaze's B2 storage is fine if used with a separate app over
| which you have more control. Others here have mentioned Arq. I
| have used it, as well as Kopia[0] and Blinkdisk[1] (Blinkdisk
| is essentially Kopia but with a nicer UI). Can recommend all
| three highly; the latter two are FOSS.
|
| [0]: https://kopia.io/
|
| [1]: https://blinkdisk.com/
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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 restrictions on file type or size" [2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_...
| [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 sustainable way.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network
| traffic.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, in this universe we live in everything is limited
| somehow.
|
| I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped
| from marketing/adverting.
|
| For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the
| visible universe has a storage limit. There is not
| unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you
| start using more space they started exponentially slowing
| the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU
| time in processing your request? Unlimited execution
| slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when
| processing your requests.
|
| Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I mean, in this universe we live in everything is
| limited somehow.
|
| Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time"
| and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the
| line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all
| intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or
| more precise; there is no data cap).
| mcmcmc wrote:
| What? You are capped by bandwidth and time is its own
| limit. You are capped at the max bandwidth in your
| service contract multiplied by the length of the
| contract. A bandwidth cap has an implied data cap
| organsnyder wrote:
| Of course. You're always capped by rate. But you're not
| capped by the cumulative amount (other than as a function
| of rate and time).
| bombcar wrote:
| The point is that you have access to a 100Mb/s
| connection, and your access to that connection is
| unlimited. It doesn't become a 10Mb/s connection at some
| point, and your access isn't cut off - there are _no
| limits_ on your access.
|
| Of course there are practical limits as you can't make
| your 100Mb/s connection into a gigabit one (ignoring that
| you can buy burstable in a datacenter, etc, etc).
|
| Where unlimited falls down is when it refers to a
| endlessly consumable resource, like storage.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In almost all services this tends to get an asterisk that
| says "unless your usage interferes with other users"
| which in itself is poorly defined. But typically means
| once their system gets closer to its usage limit, you're
| the first to get booted off the service.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| No ISP I've had in my adult life had such conditions, it
| truly is "Whatever you manage to do with the bandwidth we
| give you". I've done hundreds of TBs for months without
| any impact to my bandwidth (transferring ML datasets
| among other things), and I'm pretty sure a ISP in my
| country would break some law if they'd limit a typical
| broadband home connection based on data transfer quotas.
| willis936 wrote:
| And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they
| sell you 24/7.
|
| Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate
| they sell you 24/7
|
| I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their
| customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually
| make use of that.
|
| Second question would be, how long they would allow you
| to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without
| canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the
| point the person I replied to was making: If you truly
| make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it
| is not a faithful offer in the first place.
| deno wrote:
| Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll
| let you in on the very obvious secret: there's zero
| chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone
| using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and
| probably much less than that.
|
| Residential network access is oversold as everything
| else.
|
| The only difference with storage is there's a theoretical
| maximum on how much a single person can use.
|
| But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for
| similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is
| really not that different.
| cestith wrote:
| Residential ISPs don't work financially unless you
| oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things
| right, you oversell at a level that your customers don't
| actually slow down. Even today, you won't have 100% of
| customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the
| time.
|
| Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k
| lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to
| the same extent today, but there's still a ratio that
| works fine.
| salawat wrote:
| Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be
| arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building
| out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides
| behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants
| shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're
| sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
| deno wrote:
| Building out for 100% of theoretical capacity makes no
| sense but you can still easily accommodate the small
| handful of power users with plenty to spare. Most ISPs
| will not drop or throttle users trying to get their
| money's worth if it's fiber or similar. LTE of course
| that's another thing.
|
| That sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where
| some provider has strict monopoly, but that's an
| aberration and with Starlink's availability there's an
| upper bound nowadays.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
|
| Not important here because backblaze only has to match
| the storage of your single device. Plus some extra
| versions but one year multiplied by upload speed is also
| a tractable amount.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited
| which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these
| things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like
| Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but
| dang.
| dboreham wrote:
| In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the
| word "unlimited" means "limited".
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| They mean that they're not going to limit the total
| amount of data that you send/receive beyond the natural
| limit implied by the maximum rate.
|
| When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know
| they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of
| time, just that they won't turn you away from a
| screening. It's pretty normal language, used to
| communicate no _additional_ limit, which is relevant when
| compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in
| my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier
| after a certain amount of usage.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and
| "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth
| rating> times <seconds in a month>.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've
| used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this
| is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not
| sure many people would even subscribe to something like
| that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home
| broadband connection works.
|
| Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so
| developed as in other parts of the world, this might make
| sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at
| least in my experience.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-
| intern...
|
| My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading
| huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP
| silently throttled him.
|
| A common term is "data cap":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US
|
| Wow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was
| true for internet access in the US too, how backwards...
|
| > A common term is "data cap":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
|
| I think most are familiar with throttling because most
| (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I
| don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here
| with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Our ISPs conspire to avoid competition (AKA
| "overbuilding") and so stuff like this just festers. It's
| truly a shame.
| cestith wrote:
| I have 5 Gbps symmetric at home. I and my fiancee both
| work from home, so our backup fiber connection from
| another provider is 2 Gbps. We can also both tether to
| cell phones if necessary. We can get 5G home wireless
| Internet here, too, and we might ditch our 2 Gbps line in
| favor of that as a backup. We moved from Texas back home
| to Illinois last year, and one of the biggest
| considerations was who had service at what tiers due to
| remote work. Some of the houses we looked at in the same
| three-county area in the Chicago suburbs didn't even have
| 5G home available (not from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile
| anyway).
|
| My parents have 5G wireless home as their primary
| connection, and that was only introduced in their area a
| couple of years ago. Before that, they could get dial-up,
| 512 kbps wireless with about a $1000 startup cost, ISDN
| (although the phone company really didn't want to sell it
| to them), Starlink, or HughesNet. The folks across the
| asphalt road from them had 20 Mbps Ethernet over power
| lines years ago, and that's now I think 250 Mbps. It's a
| different power company, though, so they aren't eligible.
|
| Around 80% of the US population lives in large urban
| areas. The other 20% of the population range from smaller
| towns to living many kilometers from any town at all.
| There's a lot of land in the US.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Here in dense NYC, most apartments I've lived in have but
| a single ISP available. It's common to hunt for
| apartments by searching the address on service maps.
|
| I'm pretty sure one landlord was cut in by his ISP, as he
| skipped town when I tried to ask about getting fiber, and
| his office locked their door and drew their shades when I
| went there with a technician on two occasions. The final
| time, we got there before they opened and the woman ran
| into the office and slammed the door on us.
| bombcar wrote:
| Data caps are just documenting the reality that ISPs
| oversubscribe - if they sell a hundred 1Gb/s connections
| to a neighborhood, it's highly unlikely they're peering
| that neighborhood onto the Internet at large at 100Gb/s.
| I don't know what the current standard is, but in the
| past it's been 10/100 to 1 - so a hundred 1Gb/s
| connections might be sharing 1-10Gb/s of uplink; and if
| usage starts to saturate that they need a way of backing
| off that is "fair" - data caps are one of the ways they
| inform the customer of such.
|
| I've seen it with my new fiber rollout - every single
| customer no matter their purchased speed had 1Gb up and
| down - as more customers came online and usage became
| higher, they're not limiting anyone, but you get closer
| to your advertised rate - but my upload is _still_ faster
| than my download because most of my neighborhood is
| downloading, few are uploading.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I've used Spectrum and their predecessors since the 90s.
| Never ran into this, although the upstream speeds are
| ridiculously slow, and they used to force Netflix traffic
| to an undersized peer circuit.
| dmantis wrote:
| I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in
| several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few
| TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent
| amount. I guess it really depends on the country.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| Ha, yes I suppose that's correct.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Doesn't help when you still need a VPN to get rid of
| Telekom/Vodafones abysmal peering
| LaGrange wrote:
| It's not unlimited. The limit might be very high these
| days, but it's at most bandwidth times duration. And while
| that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren't selling you
| an infinity of a resource.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _It 's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams
| have taken over the businesses_
|
| Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where
| people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required
| to compete.
|
| And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company
| keeps its users to a normal distribution.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been
| able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider
| positive?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You can only do it during growth phases or if there's
| complimentary products with margin. The story I was told
| about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning
| disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high
| volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google
| has a similar story, although neither are really
| unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large
| customers.
|
| Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth
| and you need to spend money on marketing.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at
| the expense of older content looking like mud, so
| arguably even they're having their struggles.
| UltraSane wrote:
| YouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
| bombcar wrote:
| We all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten
| years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is
| coming, someday.
| computably wrote:
| YT would have to start declining in growth pretty
| substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video
| from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the
| storage new videos added in 2025.
| bombcar wrote:
| True, it's more likely to be aimed at stemming the tide
| of 4k video that nobody watches - but luckily they're
| worth more than Disney right now so we don't have to
| confront that ... yet.
| tedivm wrote:
| Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase
| my storage.
| samfriedman wrote:
| Google Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education
| accounts once they realized that universities also
| contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of
| data.
| Barbing wrote:
| Massive fraud from abroad didn't help there either. A
| favorite backup spot for terabytes of pirated media,
| complete with guides on which schools had good @edu
| addresses for it.
|
| Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Not only did they cut unlimited, they went to insultingly
| low limits with not much warning after all their nice
| promises. Moderately large universities ended up with
| less space per student than the 15GB they give out to
| anyone for free. It was a pretty bad rug pull.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Google forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for
| Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a
| Workspace plan.
|
| I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of
| this. That data was important to me, but not important
| enough to pay their ransom.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Telegram?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| US cellular data plans? Where it's throttled after soft
| cap?
|
| Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more
| transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's an example of where unlimited can work (because
| the limit is a number of hours of degraded service which
| is quantifiable).
|
| Storage was already a hairy beast with the original
| setup, and it would be much better if they had defined
| limits you could at least know about (and pay for).
| malvim wrote:
| > Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where
| people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is
| required to compete.
|
| So... Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment
| said. Got it.
| imiric wrote:
| > And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a
| company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
|
| Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying
| customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be
| "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for
| those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| On the other hand, subsidizing high-usage customers with
| low-usage customers is pretty generous to the high-usage
| customers, and there's no pricing model that doesn't suck
| a little.
|
| Pricing tiers suck if your usage needs are at the bottom
| of a tier, or you need exactly one premium feature but
| not more. A la carte pricing is always at least a bit
| steep, since there's no minimum charge/bulk discount
| (consider a gym or museum's "day pass") so they have to
| charge you the full one-time costs every time in case
| that's your only time.
|
| Base cost + extra per usage might be the best overall,
| but because nobody has solved micro transactions, the
| usage fees have to be pretty steep too. And frankly,
| everyone hates being metered - it means you have to think
| about pricing every time you go to use something.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| >and "unlimited" is required to compete.
|
| And there speaks marketing.
| MrRadar wrote:
| Or they're selling their product to a market where the
| purchaser doesn't understand how much they would need to
| pay if they were paying by the gigabyte (or even how to
| check how much they would need). Telling those people
| they don't need to worry about that "detail" is a key
| selling point. Backblaze has a product for people who
| understand the limitations of their consumer product and
| don't find them acceptable: B2, which _is_ priced by the
| gigabyte.
| Barbing wrote:
| >doesn't understand how much they would need to pay...how
| to check how much they would need...
|
| ...even nearly any frame of reference for anything
| storage related, much less gigabytes
| kccqzy wrote:
| I just read the Reddit post by their developer and my
| takeaway is that they have a very good understanding of
| "unlimited" really means. It's not a shenanigan. It's just
| calculated risk. It's clear to me that they simultaneously
| intend to offer truly unlimited backups while hoping that
| what the average user backs up is within a certain limit that
| they can easily predict and plan for. It's a statistical game
| that they are prepared to play.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > It's a statistical game that they are prepared to play.
|
| I understand this, many others do too, the only difference
| seems to be that we're not willing to play those games.
| Others are, and that's OK, just giving my point of view
| which I know is shared by many others who are bit stricter
| about where we host our backups. Instead of "statistical
| games" we prefer "upfront limitations", as one example.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is you have to play with them - and sure, maybe
| they're willing to be the Costco to the unlimited backup's
| $1.50 hotdog - but for how long? Will their dedication to
| unlimited and particular price points mean you have to take
| Pepsi for awhile instead of Coke, or that your polish
| sausage dog disappears? Wait, where did the analogy go? I'm
| hungry.
|
| It's a bit safer when you know your playbook - if there was
| unlimited (as it is now) and unlimited plus (where they
| backup "cloud storage cached files") and unlimited pro max
| premier (where they backup entire cloud storages) you'd at
| least know where you stand, and you'd change "holy shit my
| important file I though was backed up isn't and now it's
| gone forever" to "I have to pay $10 a more a month or take
| on this risk".
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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,
| fliers for your book club, or whatever, we weren't sticklers.
| Honestly we wanted to think about printers as little as
| possible.
|
| But we'd always have a few people at the end of the semester
| print 493 blank pages using up all of their print quota
| they'd "paid for". No sir, you didn't pay for 500 pages of
| printing a semester, we'd let you print as much as you
| needed, we just had to put a quota in place to prevent some
| joker from wallpapering the lecture hall.
|
| It was hard to express what we meant and "unlimited" didn't
| cut it.
| Majromax wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Completely agree. This reminds me of the shady companies
| offering their employees "unlimited vacation" which
| translates to "you had better _never_ take vacation because
| if you do it will be a major black mark against you. "
| monooso wrote:
| Unlimited means without limits or restrictions.
|
| If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service,
| but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that
| doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word
| unlimited. It just means the company is lying.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of
| service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always
| been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you
| for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are
| affecting service reliability for other customers)
| conductr wrote:
| Sorry but unlimited has never meant unrestricted. TOCs always
| have restrictions. If it were unrestricted it would be used
| for all kinds of illegal stuff they don't want on their
| servers, child pr0n and whatnot. They can't legally offer a
| service like this without restrictions as they operate within
| an existing set of laws.
|
| Unlimited however, they can offer. I don't see how people get
| into mental block of thinking something is nefarious when a
| company offers you unlimited hosting or data. Yes, they know
| it's impossible if everyone took full advantage of that. They
| also know most people won't and so they don't have to spend
| time worrying about it. It's a simple actuarial exercise to
| work out the pricing that covers the use of your users.
|
| Back in the early 2000s I ran a web hosting service that was
| predominantly a LAMP stack shared hosting environment. It had
| several unlimited plans and they were easy to estimate/price.
| The only times I had an issue of supporting a heavy user, it
| would turn out they were doing something unrestricted. Back
| then, it was usually something pron or mp3 related. So the
| user would get kicked off for that. I didn't have any issues
| with supporting the usage load if it was within TOS. The
| margins were so high it was almost impossible to find a user
| that could give me any trouble from an economic standpoint.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup
| please?
| Zetaphor wrote:
| rclone on a cron job
| its-summertime wrote:
| Restic + rclone personally, with a wrapper script to glue
| things together nicely
| dicytea wrote:
| What's the advantage of additionally using rclone vs.
| just restic?
| ape4 wrote:
| Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte
| danpalmer wrote:
| Because approximately no one wants that. Anyone who does
| already uses S3 etc.
| ahofmann wrote:
| They do, it's called B2 and is another product of them.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| I use them for the b2 bucket style storage where this
| happens. Its expensive per gig compared to the cost of a
| working personal unlimited desktop account. I like to visit
| their reddit page occasionally and its a constant stream of
| desktop client woes and stories of restoring problems and any
| time b2 is mentioned its like "but muh 50 terabytes" lol
| renata wrote:
| It's cheaper if you have multiple computers with normal
| amounts of data though. My whole family is on my B2 account
| (Duplicati backing up eight computers each to a separate
| bucket), and it's $10/month.
| lousken wrote:
| Yea, that's pretty shady. Either don't call your service
| unlimited or bump up the prices so you can survive occasional
| datahoarder, called them out on it many years ago.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I actually emailed them years ago about it. Asked them point
| blank what'd happen if I dumped 20+ TB of encrypted,
| undeduplicable backups onto their storage servers. They
| actually replied that there'd be no problem, but I didn't buy
| it. Not at all surprised to see this now.
| rsync wrote:
| "I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with
| respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"."
|
| The new and very interesting problem with their business model
| is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more
| than doubled - in the last 12 months.
|
| Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't
| make sense anymore.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new
| 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought
| the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To
| replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about
| $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now.
|
| Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is it that bad? When I look at the prices of new drives on
| amazon I mostly see increases just under 50%. I think used
| went up more but that's not affecting backblaze as much.
| bitfilped wrote:
| When it comes to storage "unlimited" to me means a promise to
| be broken at some random point in the future. I'll never use a
| service that claims unlimited anything over having an actual
| cost model. Companies that charge by what you use have actually
| given consideration to the cost of doing business and have
| priced that in already.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite"
| and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the
| very least their use should be heavenly regulated.
|
| _Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits.
|
| "But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of
| users"
|
| Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite
| means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that -
| and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when I made several
| errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git history
| for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of
| changes was.
|
| I know this is besides the point somewhat, but: Learn your tools
| people. The commit history could probably have been easily
| restored without involving any backup. The commits are not just
| instantly gone.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The commits are not just instantly gone.
|
| Indeed, the commits and blobs might even have still been
| available on the GitHub remote, I'm not sure they clean them on
| some interval or something, but bunch of stuff you "delete"
| from git still stays in the remote regardless of what you push.
| XCSme wrote:
| Initially I thought this was about their B2 file
| versions/backups, where they keep older versions of your files.
| Hamuko wrote:
| B2 is not a backup service. It's an object storage service.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| Weird, because in the Reddit thread linked above they call
| themselves a backup service.
| SCdF wrote:
| 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 of my photos and music, etc.
|
| - All of this ends up on a raspberry pi with a connected USB
| harddrive, which has everything on it. Why yes, that is very
| shoddy and short term! The pi is mirrored on my gaming PC though,
| which is awake once every day or two, so if it completely breaks
| I still have everything locally.
|
| - Nightly a restic job runs, which backs up everything on the pi
| to an s3 compatible cloud[3], and cleans out old snapshots (30
| days, 52 weeks, 60 months, then yearly)
|
| - Yearly I test restoring a random backup, both on the pi, and on
| another device, to make sure there is no required knowledge stuck
| on there.
|
| This is was somewhat of a pain to setup, but since the pi is
| never off it just ticks along, and I check it periodically to
| make sure nothing has broken.
|
| [1] there is always weirdness with these tools. They don't sync
| how you think, or when you actually want to restore it takes
| forever, or they are stuck in perpetual sync cycles
|
| [2] I sync multiple directories, broadly "very small", "small",
| "dumping ground", and "media", from smallest to largest.
|
| [3] Currently Wasabi, but it really doens't matter. Restic
| encrypts client side, you just need to trust the provider enough
| that they don't completely collapse at the same time that you
| need backups.
| ramses0 wrote:
| 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 different policy, size, cost, technical details,
| and overall SLA/quality tradeoffs.
| hedora wrote:
| 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 ask for help by design).
|
| Anyway, my decade-old synology is dying, so I'm setting up a
| replacement. For other reasons (mostly a decade of systemd /
| pulse audio finding novel ways to ruin my day, and not really
| understanding how to restore my synology backups), I've
| jumped ship over to FreeBSD. I've heard good things about
| using zfs to get:
|
| saniod + syncoid -> zfs send -> zfs recv -> restic
|
| In the absence of ZFS, I'd do:
|
| rsync -> restic
|
| Or:
|
| unison <-> unison -> restic.
|
| So, similar to what you've landed on, but with one size tier.
| I have docker containers that the phone talks to for stuff
| like calendars, and just have the source of the backup flow
| host my git repos.
|
| One thing to do no matter what:
|
| Write at least 100,000 files to the source then restore from
| backup (/ on a linux VM is great for this). Run rsync in dry
| run / checksum mode on the two trees. Confirm the metadata +
| contents match on both sides. I haven't gotten around to this
| yet with the flow I just proposed. Almost all consumer backup
| tools fail this test. Comments here suggest backblaze's
| consumer offering fails it badly. I'm using B2, but I haven't
| scrubbed my backup sets in a while. I get the impression it
| has much higher consistency / durability.
| Nnnes wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've been managing a Syncthing network with a
| file count in the ~200k range, everything synced
| bidirectionally across a few dozen (Windows) computers, for
| 9 years now; I've never seen data loss where Syncthing was
| at fault.
| hedora wrote:
| Good to know. I wonder what the difference is. We were
| doing things like running go build inside the source
| directory. Maybe it can't handle write races well on
| Linux/MacOS?
| hiddendoom45 wrote:
| I've personally had no major issues with syncthing, it just
| works in the background, the largest folder I have synced
| is ~6TB and 200k files which is mirroring a backup I have
| on a large external.
|
| One particular issue I've encountered is that syncthing 2.x
| does not work well for systems w/o an SSD due to the
| storage backend switching to sqlite which doesn't perform
| as well as leveldb on HDDs, the scans of the 6TB folder was
| taking an excessively long time to complete compared to 1.x
| using leveldb. I haven't encountered any issues with mixing
| the use of 1.x and 2.x in my setup. The only other issues
| I've encountered are usually related to filename
| incompatibilites between filesystems.
| SCdF wrote:
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| SCdF wrote:
| That's a really good idea, imma steal it.
| avidphantasm wrote:
| I recently stopped using Backblaze after a decade because it was
| using over 20GB of RAM on my machine. I also realized that I
| mostly wanted it for backing up old archival data that doesn't
| change ever really. So I created a B2 bucket and uploaded a
| .tar.xz file.
| pastage wrote:
| Not backing up cloud is a good default. I have had people
| complain about performance when they connected to our multiple TB
| shared drive because their backup software fetched everything.
| There are of course reasons to back that up I am not belittling
| that, but not for people who want temporary access to some 100GB
| files i.e. most people in my situation.
| basilgohar wrote:
| This is really disturbing to hear as I've incorporated B2 into a
| lot of my flow for backups as well as a storage backend for
| Nextcloud and planned as the object store for some upcoming
| archival storage products I'm working on.
|
| I know the post is talking about their personal backup product
| but it's the same company and so if they sneak in a reduction of
| service like this, as others have already commented, it erodes
| difficult-to-earn trust.
| e40 wrote:
| I had issues with the personal backup product and was told the
| solution was to create a new account. I moved to Wasabi
| immediately using rclone.
|
| On macOS.
| ncheek wrote:
| It looks like the following line has been added to _/
| Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml_
| which excludes my Dropbox folder from getting backed up:
|
| _< /bzexclusions><excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="*"
| ruleIsOptional="f" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*"
| contains_1="/users/username/dropbox/" contains_2="*"
| doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />_
|
| That is the exact path to my Dropbox folder, and I presume if I
| move my Dropbox folder this xml file will be updated to point to
| the new location. The top of the xml file states " _Mandatory
| Exclusions: editing this file DOES NOT DO ANYTHING_ ".
|
| .git files seem to still be backing up on my machine, although
| they are hidden by default in the web restore (you must open
| _Filters_ and enable _Show Hidden Files_ ). I don't see an option
| to show hidden files/folders in the Backblaze Restore app.
| motrm wrote:
| I wonder if OP didn't realise there was this _Show Hidden
| Files_ option and their .git was indeed backed up.
|
| That would be nice, they'd be able to get their history back!
| Nnnes wrote:
| > .git files seem to still be backing up on my machine
|
| Try checking bzexcluderules_editable.xml. A few years ago,
| Backblaze would back up .git folders for Mac but not Windows.
| Not sure if this is still the case.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| rhey alao stopped taking my cc and email me on a no+reply email
| about it like they dont want to get paid
| mdevere wrote:
| If this is true, I'll need to stop using Backblaze. I have been
| relying on them for years. If I had discovered this mid-restore,
| I think I would have lost my mind.
| bakugo wrote:
| Blackblaze's personal backup solution is a mess in general. The
| client is clearly a giant pile of spaghetti code and I've had
| numerous issues with it, trying to figure out and change which
| files it does and doesn't backup is just one of them.
|
| The configuration and logging formats they use are absolutely
| nonsensical.
| Vingdoloras wrote:
| Unrelated to the main point, and probably too late to matter, but
| you can access repo activity logs via Github's API. I had to
| clean up a bad push before and was able to find the old commit
| hash in the logs, then reset the branch to that commit, similarly
| to how you'd fix local messes using reflog.
| kameit00 wrote:
| I once had to restore around 2 TB of RAW photos. The app was a
| mess. It crashed every few hours. I ended up manually downloading
| single folders over a timespan of 2 weeks to restore my data. The
| support only apologized and could not help with my restore
| problem. After this I cancelled my subscription immediately and
| use local drives for my backups now, drives which I rotate (in
| use and locations).
|
| I never trust them again with my data.
| 51Cards wrote:
| If you're pulling 2TB of data you should be ordering it on a
| drive from them and saving yourself the hassle.
| Anamon wrote:
| I restored a 2 TB drive via the net no problem from them some
| years back, although I didn't use the client, but downloaded
| one massive ZIP file from the web interface.
|
| Well, "no problem" is an overstatement. Once you need a
| restore, you learn that their promise of end-to-end
| encryption is actually a lie. (As in, you have to break the
| end-to-end encryption to restore since everything has to be
| decrypted on their servers.)
| lamasery wrote:
| I've backed up and restored ~14-15TB[0] with their B2
| product. IIRC sync each way took three or four days, not
| really that bad. I used rclone, though, not any official
| client. And that's B2, not their "unlimited" backup
| service.
|
| [0] My home file server, migrating a four-disk mirrored-
| pairs ZFS array to RAID5 including replacing the smaller
| pair of disks with ones matching the larger pair, so the
| old ZFS filesystem had to be totally destroyed in the
| process and I needed somewhere to put the data for the like
| 15 minutes the logical disk wouldn't exist in any form. The
| alternative would have been to build an entire new four-
| disk array, doubling the disk cost of the project and
| requiring some kind of second host-machine. This approach
| saved me $400 or more, probably wouldn't have attempted it
| otherwise, cost would have been too high. Ended up costing
| somewhere in the tens of dollars as I recall.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| The article links to a statement made by Backblaze:
|
| "The Backup Client now excludes popular cloud storage providers
| [...] this change aligns with Backblaze's policy to back up only
| local and directly connected storage."
|
| I guess windows 10 and 11 users aren't backing up much to
| Backblaze, since microsoft is tricking so many into moving all of
| their data to onedrive.
| tomkaos wrote:
| I've been using it for years, and the one time I needed to
| restore a file, I realized that VMware VMs files were excluded
| from the backup. They are so many exclusion that I start doing
| physical backup again.
| Havoc wrote:
| Ouch. The only reason their "well figured out what to include and
| exclude" policy made sense was an implicit assumption that they'd
| play it safe
| minebreaker wrote:
| I just checked the Backblaze app and found that .iso was on the
| exclusion list. Just in case anyone here is as dumb as I...
| corndoge wrote:
| I like backblaze for backups, but I use restic and b2. You get
| what you pay for. Really lame behavior from backblaze as I always
| recommended their native backup solution to others and now need
| to reconsider.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Just switched from Backblaze to Cloudflare R2 (using restic). Now
| it makes me think if I should check for such issues with R2 as
| well.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Use restic with resticprofile and you won't need anything else.
| Point it to a Hetzner storagebox, the best value you can get.
| Don't trust fisher price backup plans
| donatj wrote:
| I can _almost_ almost understand the logic behind not backing up
| OneDrive /Dropbox. I think it's bad logic but I can understand
| where it's coming from.
|
| Not backing up .git folders however is completely unacceptable.
|
| I have hundreds of small projects where I use git track of
| history locally with no remote at all. The intention is never to
| push it _anywhere_. I don 't like to say these sorts of things,
| and I don't say it lightly when I say someone should be fired
| over this decision.
| politelemon wrote:
| I'd like to apologise to everyone for this situation. It's very
| likely because I've just started using it recently.
| hiisukun wrote:
| I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in
| part): OneDrive.
|
| My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will
| push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not
| do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in
| your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do
| not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it
| typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.
|
| If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do?
| Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been
| modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just
| sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option
| certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files
| they can 'see' just get magically backed up.
|
| It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it
| well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation
| thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the
| same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see),
| that's the same ugly situation.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Most have pointed out that the OneDrive exclusion makes sense
| due to its complexity. But I see no one here defending the
| undocumented .git exclusion. That's pretty egregious - if I'm
| backing up that directory it's always 100% intentional and it
| definitely feels like a sacrifice to the product functionality
| for stability and performance. Not documenting it just twists
| the knife.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If you want to access your file, it gets downloaded. If
| Backblaze wants to check if your file has been changed, it
| doesn't need to have the file downloaded - that's what
| modification time is for. And file size.
| Neil44 wrote:
| The 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 backblaze
| app to access onedrive directly, but if you want to back your
| onedrive up you need a different product IMO.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This is a complexity that makes it harder, but not
| insurmountable.
|
| It would be reasonable to say that if you run the file sync in
| a mode that keeps everything locally, then Backblaze should be
| backing it up. Arguably they should even when not in that mode,
| but it'll churn files repeatedly as you stream files in and out
| of local storage with the cloud provider.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Arguably they should even when not in that mode, but it'll
| churn files repeatedly as you stream files in and out of
| local storage with the cloud provider.
|
| When you have a couple terabytes of data in that drive, is it
| acceptable to cycle all that data and use all that bandwidth
| and wear down your SSD at the same time?
|
| Also, high number of small files is a problem for these
| services. I have a large font collection in my cloud account
| and oh boy, if I want to sync that thing, the whole thing
| proverbially overheats from all the queries it's sending.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| But if the files are only on the remote storage and not
| local, chances are they haven't been modified recently, so
| it shouldn't download them fully, just check the metadata
| cache for size / modification time and let them be if they
| didn't change.
|
| So, in practice, you shouldn't have to download the whole
| remote drive when you do an incremental backup.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You can't trust size and modification time all the time,
| though mdate is a better indicator, it's not foolprooof.
| The only reliable way will be checksumming.
|
| Interestingly, rclone supports that on many providers,
| but to be able to backblaze support that, it needs to
| integrate rclone, connect to the providers via that
| channel and request checks, which is messy, complicated,
| and computationally expensive. Even if we consider that
| you won't be hitting API rate limits on the cloud
| provider.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If you can't trust modification time you are doing
| something so unusual that you probably need to be
| handling your backups privately anyway.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| Sometimes modification time of a file which is not
| downloaded on computer A, but modified by computer B is
| not reflected immediately to computer A.
|
| Henceforth, backup software running on computer A will
| think that the file has not been modified. This is a
| known problem in file synchronization. Also, some
| applications modifying the files revert or protect the
| mtime of the file for reasons. They are rare, but they're
| there.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Reading your comments, it sounds like you are arguing it is
| impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable
| way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files.
| I know you haven't technically said that, but that's what
| it sounds like.
|
| I assume you don't think that, so I'm curious, what would
| you propose positively?
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I know you haven't technically said that, but that's
| what it sounds like.
|
| Yes, I didn't technically said that.
|
| > It sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to
| backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and
| therefore nobody should backup their cloud files.
|
| I don't argue neither, either.
|
| What I said is with "on demand file download",
| traditional backup software faces a hard problem.
| However, there are better ways to do that, primary
| candidate being rclone.
|
| You can register a new application ID for your rclone
| installation for your Google Drive and Dropbox accounts,
| and use rclone as a very efficient, rsync-like tool to
| backup your cloud storage. That's what I do.
|
| I'm currently backing up my cloud storages to a local
| TrueNAS installation. rclone automatically hash-checks
| everything and downloads the changed ones. If you can
| mount Backblaze via FUSE or something similar, you can
| use rclone as an intelligent MITM agent to smartly pull
| from cloud and push to Backblaze.
|
| Also, using RESTIC or Borg as a backup container is a
| good idea since they can deduplicate and/or only store
| the differences between the snapshots, saving tons of
| space in the process, plus encrypting things for good
| measure.
| nine_k wrote:
| This. You should not try to backup your _local cache_ of
| cloud files as if those were your local files. Use a tool
| that talks to the cloud storage directly.
|
| Use tools with straightforward, predictable semantics,
| like rclone, or synching, or restic/Borg. (Deduplication
| rules, too.)
| mroche wrote:
| My understanding of Backblaze Computer Backup is it is
| _not_ a general purpose, network accessible
| filesystem.[0] If you want to use another tool to backup
| specific files, you 'd use their B2 object storage
| platform.[1] It has an S3 compatible API you can interact
| with, Computer Backup does not.
|
| But generally speaking, I'd agree with your sentiment.
|
| [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/computer-
| backup/docs/supported-bac...
|
| [1]: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-about-
| backblaze...
| Chaosvex wrote:
| Then do it in memory, assuming those services allow you to
| read the files like that. It sounds like they do based on
| your other comments.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The problem is, downloading files and disk management is
| not in your control, that part is managed by the cloud
| client (dropbox, google drive, et. al) transparently. The
| application accessing the file is just waiting akin to
| waiting for a disk spin up.
|
| The filesystem is a black box for these software since
| they don't know where a file resides. If you want
| control, you need to talk with every party, incl. the
| cloud provider, a-la rclone style.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why would they do new backups of old files all the time? They
| would just skip those.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Unless it does something very weird it won't trigger all those
| files to download at the same time. That shouldn't be a worry.
|
| And, as a separate note, they shouldn't be balking at the
| amount of data in a virtualized onedrive or dropbox either
| considering the user could get a many-terabyte hard drive for
| significantly less money.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Unless it does something very weird it won't trigger all
| those files to download at the same time. That shouldn't be a
| worry.
|
| The moment you call read() (or fopen() or your favorite
| function), the download will be triggered. It's a hook
| sitting between you and the file. You can't ignore it.
|
| The only way to bypass it is to remount it over rclone or
| something and use "ls" and "lsd" functions to query
| filenames. Otherwise it'll download, and it's how it's
| expected to work.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Why would it use either of those on all the files at once?
| It should only be opening enough files to fill the upload
| buffer.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Maybe it'll, maybe it won't, but it'll cycle _all_ files
| in the drive and will stress everything from your cloud
| provider to Backblaze, incl. everything in between;
| software and hardware-wise.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That sounds very acceptable to get those files backed up.
|
| It shouldn't _stress_ things to spend a couple weeks
| relaying a terabyte in small chunks. The most likely
| strain is on my upload bandwidth and yeah that 's the
| cost of cloud backup, more ISPs need to improve upload.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I mean, cycling a couple of terabytes of data over a
| 512GB drive is _at least_ full 4 writes, which is too
| much for that kind of thing.
|
| > more ISPs need to improve upload.
|
| I was yelling the same things to the void for the longest
| time, then I had a brilliant idea of reading the
| technical specs of the technology coming to my home.
|
| Lo and behold, the numbers I got were the technical
| limits of the technology that I had at home (PON for the
| time being), and going higher would need a very large and
| expensive rewiring with new hardware and technology.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 4 writes out of what, 3000? For something you'll need to
| do once or twice ever? It's fine. You might not even eat
| your whole Drive Write Per Day quota for the upload
| duration, let alone the entire month.
|
| > the technical limits of the technology that I had at
| home (PON for the time being)
|
| Isn't that usually symmetrical? Is yours not?
| bayindirh wrote:
| > 4 writes out of what, 3000?
|
| Depends on your device capacity and how much is in actual
| use. Wear leveling things also wear things while it moves
| things around.
|
| > For something you'll need to do once or twice ever?
|
| I don't know you, but my cloud storage is living, and
| even if it's not living, if the software can't smartly
| ignore files, it'll pull everything in, compare and pass
| without uploading, causing churns in _every backup
| cycle_.
|
| > Isn't that usually symmetrical? Is yours not?
|
| GPON (Gigabit PON) is asymmetric. Theoretical limits is
| 2.4Gbps down, 1.2Gbps up. I have 1000Mbit/75Mbit at home.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I don't know you, but my cloud storage is living
|
| But you're probably changing less than 1% each day. And
| new changes are likely already in the cache, no need to
| download them.
|
| > if the software can't smartly ignore files, it'll
|
| Backblaze checks the modification date.
|
| > GPON (Gigabit PON) is asymmetric. Theoretical limits is
| 2.4Gbps down, 1.2Gbps up. I have 1000Mbit/75Mbit at home.
|
| 2:1 is fine. If you're getting worse than 10:1 then that
| _does_ sound like your ISP failed you?
| jonhohle wrote:
| How do you know how often those files need to be backed
| up without reading them? Timestamps and sizes are not
| reliable, only content hashes. How do you get a content
| hash? You read the file.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Backblaze already trusts the modification date.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If timestamps aren't reliable, you fall way outside the
| user that can trust a third party backup provider. Name a
| time when modification timestamp fails but a cloud
| provider will catch the need to download the file.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why would it do that more than once unless you are
| modifying 4TB of data every day, in which case you are
| causing the problem.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't know how your client works, but reading metadata
| (e.g. requesting size) off any file causes some cloud
| clients to download it completely.
|
| Of course I'm not modifying 4TB on a cloud drive, every
| day.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Can you name such a client? That sounds like a terrible
| experience.
| ethin wrote:
| I think you might be confusing Backblaze reading files
| and how Dropbox/OneDrive/Nextcloud/etc. work. NC doesn't
| enable this by default (I don't think), but Windows calls
| it virtual file support. There is no avoiding filling the
| upload buffer, because Backblaze has zero control over
| how Dropbox downloads files. When Backblaze requests that
| a file be opened and read, Windows will ask Dropbox or
| whatever to open the file for it, and to read it. How
| that is done is up to whatever handles the virtual files.
| To Backblaze, your Dropbox folder is a normal directory
| with all that that entails, so Backblaze thinks that it
| can just zip through the directory and it'll read data
| from disk, even though that isn't really what's
| happening. I had to exclude my Nextcloud directory from
| my Duplicati backups for precisely this reason -- my
| Nextcloud is hosted on my server, and Duplicati was
| sending it so many requests it would cause my server to
| start sending back error 500s.
|
| And no, my server isn't behind cloudflare, primarily
| because I don't have $200 to throw at them to allow me to
| proxy arbitrary TCP/UDP ports through their network, and
| I don't know how to tell CF "Hey, only proxy this
| traffick but let me handle everything else" (assuming
| that's even possible given that the usual flow is to put
| your entire domain behind them).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Shoutout to Arq backup which simply gives you an option in
| backup plans for what to do with cloud only files:
|
| - report an error
|
| - ignore
|
| - materialize
|
| Regardless, if you make it back up software that doesn't give
| this level of control to users, and you make a change about
| which files you're going to back up, you should probably be a
| lot more vocal with your users about the change. Vanishingly
| few people read release notes.
| decadefade wrote:
| Love Arq!
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Why no linux support?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If it's open-source, Linux support is only a few hours with
| Claude away.
|
| If it's not open-source, but the protocol is documented,
| see above.
|
| If it's not open-source, and the protocol isn't documented,
| well... that makes the decision easy, doesn't it?
| cobertos wrote:
| Backups software written by Claude? No thanks.
|
| I've used enough Claude coded applications that I
| wouldn't trust that with a backup, unless it had
| extensive tests along with it.
| kid64 wrote:
| "Dear Claude, please create an eztensive testing suite
| for this app. Love, cobertos"
| lolc wrote:
| "Great idea wise customer, I will certainly mock one out
| just for you!"
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| My favorite Peanuts comic was always the one where Linus
| is standing at an intersection next to a 'Push Button To
| Cross Street' sign. He is sucking his thumb and clutching
| his blanket despondently.
|
| In the last panel, Charlie Brown tells him, "You have to
| move your feet, too."
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And I've used enough "gold standard" commercial
| applications, _like the one being discussed in this very
| article_ , that I don't trust those either. If you recoil
| in horror at code written by LLMs, I'm afraid that the
| vendors you're already working with have some really bad
| news for you. You can get over it now or get over it
| later. You _will_ get over it.
|
| I can audit and verify Claude's output. Code running at
| BackBlaze, not so much. Take some responsibility for your
| data. Rest assured, nobody else will.
| samspot wrote:
| You are not wrong, but I just don't have time. My choices
| are pay someone or throw my hands up. I have been paying
| backblaze. But I recently had a drive die, and discovered
| the backups are missing .exe and .dll files, and so that
| part of the restore was worthless.
|
| What time I do have, I've been using to try and figure
| out photo libraries. Nothing is working the way I need it
| to. The providers are a mess of security restrictions and
| buggy software.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| >You can get over it now or get over it later. You will
| get over it
|
| You're forgetting the third option:
|
| You can remain blissfully unaware of it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _You can remain blissfully unaware of it._
|
| And you can read many accounts of the outcome of that
| strategy in this very thread.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| The choices are maybe eat shit, or spend your own time
| auditing and polishing shit into something edible before
| eating it?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's the general conclusion you will draw after reading
| the comments on this story, yes.
| sreitshamer wrote:
| (Arq developer here) Haven't gotten many requests for it at
| all over the years. I presume it's because there are so
| many free options for Linux.
| bartvk wrote:
| Just wanted to say that for many years, Arq has been my
| backup solution. It's amazing and I advise it to everyone
| I know.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I for one would pay for Arq on Linux as I now do on Mac.
| It would be fantastic to be able to use the same "it just
| works" backup solution on all my computers.
| SSLy wrote:
| we already have restic which is really really great.
| vunderba wrote:
| I honestly didn't even realize Backblaze had a clientside
| app. Very happy user of Arq - been running a daily scheduled
| dual backup of my HDD to an external NAS and Backblaze B2 for
| years with zero issues.
| justusthane wrote:
| That was their whole business originally. The block storage
| is a newer offering.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That doesn't really make a lot of sense, though. Reading a file
| that's not actually on disk doesn't download it permanently. If
| I have zero of 10TB worth of files stored locally on my 1TB
| device, read them all serially, and measure my disk usage,
| there's no reason the disk should be full, or at least it
| should be cache that can be easily freed. The only time this is
| potentially a problem is if one of the files exceeds the total
| disk space available.
|
| Hell, if I open a directory of photos and my OS tries to pull
| exif data for each one, it would be wild if that caused those
| files to be fully downloaded and consume disk space.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's generally _now_ handled decently well, but with three or
| four of these things it can make backups take annoying long
| as without "smarts" (which are not always present) it may
| force a download of the entire OneDrive/Box each time - even
| if it never crashes out.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > it may force a download of the entire OneDrive/Box each
| time - even if it never crashes out.
|
| I am not aware of any evidence supporting this.
| jrmg wrote:
| Right, but even if that's working it breaks the user
| experience of services like this that 'files I used recently
| are on my device'.
|
| After a backup, you'd go out to a coffee shop or on a plane
| only to find that the files in the synced folder you used
| yesterday, and expected to still be there, were not - but
| photos from ten years ago were available!
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| There's no reason to think that would happen - files you
| had from ten years ago would have been backed up ten years
| ago and would be skipped over today.
| jrmg wrote:
| Good point (I'm assuming you're right here and it trusts
| file metadata and doesn't read files it's already backed
| up?)
|
| It would still happen with the first backup - or first
| connection of the cloud drive - though, which isn't a
| great post-setup new user experience. It probably drove
| complaints and cancellations.
|
| I feel like I've accidentally started defending the
| concept of not backing up these folders, which I didn't
| really intend to. I'd also want these backed up. I'm just
| thinking out loud about the reasons the decision was
| made.
| wtallis wrote:
| That shouldn't be seen as Backblaze's problem. It's
| Dropbox's problem that they made their product too
| complicated for users to reason about. The original Dropbox
| concept was "a folder that syncs" and there would be
| nothing problematic about Backblaze or anything else trying
| to back it up like any other folder.
|
| Today's Dropbox is a network file system with inscrutable
| cache behavior that seeks to _hide from the users_ the
| information about which files are _actually present_. That
| makes it impossible for normal users to correctly reason
| about its behavior, to have correct expectations for what
| will be available offline or what the side effects of
| opening a file will be, and Backblaze is stuck trying to
| cope with a situation where there is no right answer.
| realo wrote:
| 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?
| wtallis wrote:
| Do you really _want_ Backblaze to ignore all the side
| effects of scanning through the entire contents a badly-
| designed network filesystem?
| realo wrote:
| 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| > How that is achieved is not my concern.
|
| You're dodging the question. Wanting to ignore the side
| effects does not mean they won't affect you.
| thecapybara wrote:
| 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.
| whimblepop wrote:
| The whole "just sync everything, and if you can't seek
| everything, pretend to sync everything with fake files and then
| download the real ones ad-hoc" model of storage feels a bit
| ill-conceived to me. It tries to present a simple facade but
| I'm not sure it actually simplifies things. It always results
| in nasty user surprises and sometimes data loss. I've seen
| Microsoft OneDrive do the same thing to people at work.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| I've lost data not realizing I was backing up placeholder
| files (iCloud).
|
| Hiding the network always ends in pain. But never goes out of
| style.
| whimblepop wrote:
| My own approach to simplicity generally means "hide
| complexity behind a simple interface" rather than pushing
| for simple implementations because I feel that too much
| emphasis on simplicity of implementations often means
| sacrificing correctness.
|
| This particular example is a useful one for me to think
| about, because it's a version of hiding complexity in order
| to present a simple interface that I actually hate.
| (WYSIWYG editors is another one, for similar reasons: it
| always ends up being buggy and unpredictable.)
| eblume wrote:
| Same. I lost a lot of photos this way. I've recently moved
| over to Immich + Borg backup with a 3-2-1 backup between a
| local synology NAS and BorgBase. Painful lesson, but at
| least now I feel much more confident. I've even built some
| end-to-end monitoring with Grafana.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Careful w that Synology NAS, mine's now a brick that may
| also have led to permanent data loss.
| signorovitch wrote:
| The primary trouble I have with backblaze was that this change
| was not clearly communicated, even if perhaps it could be
| justified.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That seems like a pretty straightforward issue to solve, to
| simply backup only those files that are actually on the system,
| not the stubs. If it's on your computer, it should able to get
| backed up. If it's just a shadow, a pointer, it doesn't.
|
| Making the change without making it clear though, that's just
| awful. A clear recipe for catastrophic loss & drip drip drip of
| news in the vein of "How Backblaze Lost my Stuff"
| lazide wrote:
| The stubs _are_ the thing on your computer?
| coldtea wrote:
| Imagine if they could detect stab or real file huh? Space
| technology, I know! Or just fucking copy them as stubs and
| what's actually downloaded as actually downloaded! Boggles
| the mind!
|
| Or maybe just do what they do now, but WARN about that in
| HUGE RED LETTERS, in the website and the app, instead of
| burying it in an update note like weasels!
| wrs wrote:
| The OP's complaint is that the files were not backed up. If
| they had discovered that only stubs were backed up, I don't
| think they'd be any happier.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Not what I meant: The other cloud storage services
| connected to the computer, eg OneDrive. _Those_ files, when
| they are just stubs. I 'm saying that Backblaze could
| simply _not_ backup stubs, if the person isn 't syncing the
| actual file to their drive. If they are, backblaze should
| back it up.
| bombcar wrote:
| The issue really isn't that it's not backing up the folder
| (which I can see an argument for both sides and various ways to
| do it) - it's that they changed what they did in a surprising
| way.
|
| Your backup solution is not something you _ever_ want to be the
| source of surprises!
| downrightmike wrote:
| The fault is with the PC manufacturers screwing you on disk
| space claiming 1TB, when its only 256gb. bait and switch
| tencentshill wrote:
| Cloud placeholders have been a feature for years, plenty of
| programs have mitigations for this behavior.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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 enough process that I don't do anything nearly close to
| enough testing to make sure my backups are restorable, which is a
| self-inflicted future injury.
|
| Here's the thing: I'm paying about $14/month for that S3 storage,
| which makes $99/year a total steal. I don't use
| Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/iCloud so the grievances mentioned by the
| author are not major hurdles for me. I do find the idea that it
| is silently ignoring .git folders troubling, primarily because
| they are indeed not listed in the exclusion list.
|
| I am a bit miffed that we're actively prevented from backing up
| the various Program Files folders, because I have a large number
| of VSTi instruments that I'll need to ensure are rcloned or
| something for this to work.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If you don't really want backups you can save a lot more money
| by not signing up for Backblaze.
| peteforde wrote:
| Are they known for accidentally erasing your backups?
|
| I get that this is not a restorable image, but for $100 a
| year I'm not expecting that.
| justin66 wrote:
| "Maybe they're only incompetent in the ways that have been
| enumerated in this blog post" does not seem like much of a
| sales pitch. Baffling.
| peteforde wrote:
| I'm happy to pay an annual fee for a one-size fits all
| approach that I don't have to think about. I read the post
| and I'm just saying that his blockers are not blockers for
| me.
|
| I would ask you: what is the better alternative? That's not a
| rhetorical question; they don't have my credit card details
| for another two weeks.
| malfist wrote:
| This whole post is saying that you _do_ have to think about
| it.
| tonymet wrote:
| You lose a bit of control. With S3 you can preprocess
| (transform, index, filter, downcode, etc) before storing. You
| can index metadata in place (names, sizes, metadata) for low-
| cost searching.
|
| As for testing recovery, you can validate file counts, sizes +
| checksums without performing recovery.
|
| A few shell scripts give you the power of advanced enterprise
| backup, whereas backblaze only supports GUI restores.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Here 's the thing: I'm paying about $14/month for that S3
| storage, which makes $99/year a total steal. I don't use
| Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/iCloud so the grievances mentioned by the
| author are not major hurdles for me. I do find the idea that it
| is silently ignoring .git folders troubling, primarily because
| they are indeed not listed in the exclusion list._
|
| A big difference here is that Backblaze only keeps
| deleted/changed files for 30 days. Deleted files can go
| unnoticed for some time, especially if done by a malicious app
| or ignorant AI.
|
| I'd pay that extra few dollars for peace of mind.
| peteforde wrote:
| Thanks so much! That is super valuable input.
|
| I do notice in their GUI that they offer a >30 memory for
| extra $:
|
| 30-Day Version History (Current) Included
|
| 1-Year Version History
|
| Forever Version History $.006/GB/Month for versions changed
| or deleted more than 1 year ago
|
| They are not giving much information here at all. The above
| is not a pasting artifact; their page literally doesn't give
| any indication of how they price the 1-year history.
| Presumably it's not just as simple as click to 12x your
| retention for free.
|
| Meanwhile, it's even more unclear whether that $.006/GB is
| assessed for change deltas or for the total file size.
| Indeed, it's not clear if it's assessed against your entire
| fileset or just files that changed.
|
| I'll have to email them, I guess.
| ValentineC wrote:
| It looks like the 1 year option was introduced maybe 2
| years ago:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/175haik/is_upgr
| a...
|
| (Ironic that their ex-employee wrote: "In this case, it is
| always kind of scary for Backblaze to just quietly change a
| setting from one setting to a different setting in the
| product for the customer without the customer taking that
| action themselves." -- when that's what happened in this
| case.)
|
| I don't use Backblaze, but I found the Version History doc
| for you:
|
| https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/version-
| histo...
|
| Seems like whatever version is _not_ currently on your
| local disk would be chargeable.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's pretty crazy because I just set up personal backups with a
| different service (rsync.net, I was already using it for WP
| website backups) and my git folders were literally my first
| priority
| lukewarm707 wrote:
| i think at this point i have had enough of the majority of
| consumer products and just use production.
|
| backup to real s3 storage.
|
| llms on real api tokens.
|
| search on real search api no adverts.
|
| google account on workspace and gcp, no selling the data.
|
| etc.
|
| only way to stop corpos treating you like a doormat
| nstj wrote:
| As an FYI you can recover from force pushes to GitHub using the
| GitHub UI[0] or their API[1]. And if you force push to one of
| your own machines you can use the reflog[2]. [0]:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/78872853 [1]:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/48110879 [2]:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/24236065
| bombcar wrote:
| And as a double FYI this means a force push does _not_
| permanently delete sensitive data! Beware. Rotate that API key,
| even if it 's a pain in the arse.
| jackdh wrote:
| I was always roughly of the mind that Backblaze was just too
| close to the "If it's too good to be true it probably is", seems
| like that may have been a good decision.
| nekusar wrote:
| ANY company, and I do mean any, that offers "unlimited" anything
| is 100% a scam. At best its a temporary growth hack to entice
| people who havent had technology rug-pulls. And when profits
| dwindle and the S curve is near the upper coast, you can
| guarantee that "unlimited" will get hidden restrictions,
| exclusions, "terms of service" changes, nebulous fair use
| policies that arent fair, and more dark patterns. And every one
| of them are "how do we worsen unlimited to make more money on
| captive customers?"
|
| We're also seeing this play out in real time with Anthropic with
| their poop-splatter-llm. They've gone through like 4 rug-pulls,
| and people STILL pay $200/month for it. Every round, their
| unlimited gets worse and worse, like I outlined above.
|
| Pay as you go is probably the more fair. But SaaS providers
| reallllllly hate in providing direct and easy to use tools to
| identify costs, or <gasp> limit the costs. A storag/backup
| provider could easily show this. LLM providers could show a near-
| realtime token utilization.
|
| But no. Dark patterns, rug-pulls, and "i am altering the deal,
| pray i do not alter it further".
| massysett wrote:
| I just looked in my Backblaze restore program, and all my .git
| folders are in there. I did have to go to the Settings menu and
| toggle an option to show hidden files. This is the Mac version.
| infogulch wrote:
| I found out the hard way that backblaze just deletes backed up
| data from external hard drives that haven't been connected in a
| while. I had like 2TB total.
| dangus wrote:
| Ultimately the author is ranting about something that is likely
| an unintended bug where some update along the line reset the
| default exclusions list.
|
| It almost seems like they're taking it personally as some kind of
| intentionally slight against them.
|
| Most users would not want Backblaze to back up other cloud synced
| directories. This default is sensible.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Hidden default to not backup is incompetent not sensible.
| dangus wrote:
| It's not hidden it's right there in the exclusions list.
| wtallis wrote:
| If the user didn't put it there, it's hidden. Nobody
| routinely inspects the detailed configuration settings of
| their backup system, especially when it does appear to be
| working if you see it transferring data to the cloud and
| spot-check a file or two.
|
| Any addition to the exclusions list that wasn't added by
| explicit user action is a hidden change and a data loss
| bug.
| ethin wrote:
| This "let's not back up .git folders" thing bit me too. I had
| reinstalled windows and thought "Eh, no big deal, I'll just
| restore my source code directory from Backblaze". But, of course,
| I'm that kind of SWE who tends to accumulate very large numbers
| of git repositories over time (think hundreds at least), some
| big, some small. Some are personal projects. Some are forks of
| others. But either way, I had no idea that Backblaze had decided,
| without my consent, to not back up .git directories. So, of
| course, imagine how shocked and dismayed I was when I discovered
| that I had a bunch of git repositories which had the files at the
| time they were backed up, but absolutely no actual git repo data,
| so I couldn't sync them. At all. After that, I permanently
| abandoned Backblaze and have migrated to IDrive E2 with Duplicati
| as the backup agent. Duplicati, at least, keeps _everything_
| except that which I tell it not to, and doesn 't make arbitrary
| decisions on my behalf.
|
| Edit: spelling errors and cleanup
| balderdash wrote:
| not helpful for non-mac users, but i really like the way arq
| separates the backup utility from the backup location. I feel
| like the the reason backblaze did this was to save money on
| "unlimited" storage and the associated complexity of cloud
| storage locations.
| conception wrote:
| Arq is on windows now!
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Commenting on the presentation, not the content: Why is there a
| white haze over the entirety of this website?
| creatonez wrote:
| Hi-DPI displays have convinced web designers it's okay to use
| ludicrously thin fonts with barely any contrast.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I was waiting for some kind of pop up, so I could click "Deny
| all" and then the text would be readable. But no. It just
| stayed essentially greyed out, like reading it is an invalid
| option (which turns out to be the case).
| philjohn wrote:
| For those looking for something at a decent price for up to 5TB,
| take a look at JottaCloud, which is supported by rclone, and then
| you can layer restic on top for a complete backup solution.
|
| JottaCloud is "unlimited" for $11.99 a month (your upload speed
| is throttled after 5TB).
|
| I've been using them for a few years for backing up important
| files from my NAS (timemachine backups, Immich library, digitised
| VHS's, Proxmox Backup Server backups) and am sitting at about
| 3.5TB.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| The only right approach these days is a vps with a zfs partition
| with auto-snapshots, compression, and deduplication on and a
| syncthing instance running. Everything else is bound to lose
| money, and/or data (a comment mentions they lost a file and got 3
| whole months FREE)
| pjdesno wrote:
| Why should Backblaze back up their competitors' data? And what
| use is it to you for it to do so?
| conception wrote:
| It's my data not their competitors'.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| 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.
| andybak wrote:
| 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 not be able to keep
| up. It's beyond
|
| > the scope of our application.
|
| > The Personal Backup Plan is a consumer grade backup product.
| Unfortunately we
|
| > will not be able to meet your needs in this regard.
|
| > Let me know if you have any other questions.
|
| > Regards,
|
| > Bob The Backblaze Team
| layer8 wrote:
| > changes within .git directories occur far too often and
| over so many files that the Backblaze software simply would
| not be able to keep up.
|
| I don't really understand that. I'm using Windows File
| History, and while it's limited to backing up changes only
| every 15 minutes, and is writing to a local network drive, it
| doesn't seem to have any trouble with .git directories.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Does the UI atleast hint there's hidden files or is it only by
| going to the filters you can find this out?
|
| It seems incredibly stupid for a BACKUP PROGRAM to not list the
| hidden files instead of indicating they're hidden (e.g.
| _(hidden)_.git)
| himata4113 wrote:
| restic and with cloudflare r2 (safety) or new hetzner storage
| boxes(cost effectiveness) are almost cheaper than backblaze
| 'unlimited' with full control and 'unlimited' history.
|
| I still like backblaze, they've been nice for the days where I
| was running windows. Their desktop app is probably one of the
| best in the scene.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| Should really qualify this headline with which backblaze product.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If you can't trust one of their products, you can't trust the
| company.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| I use Kopia Backup software, sending all my important files to a
| compatible S3 bucket, using retention-mode: compliance as
| ransomware protection. I have access to every incremental
| snapshot Kopia makes using kopia-ui.
| mcast wrote:
| I've been very content moving away from OneDrive/GDrive to a
| personal NAS setup with Synology/Ugreen. You can access a shared
| drive/photo drive and use Tailscale to mount your volume from
| anywhere.
|
| I've also configured encrypted cloud backups to a different
| geographic region and off-site backups to a friend's NAS
| (following the 3-2-1 backup rule). It does help having 2.5Gb
| networking as well, but owning your data is more important in the
| coming age of sloppy/degrading infrastructure and ransomware
| attacks.
| decadefade wrote:
| This is why I use Arq with Backblaze. They just see a bunch of
| encrypted files with random GUID filenames. They don't need to
| know what I'm backing up, just that I am backing it up.
| keitmo wrote:
| It seems to me that Backblaze does NOT exclude ".git". It's not
| shown by default in the restore UI -- you must enable "show
| hidden files" to see it -- but it's there. I just did a test
| restore of my top-level Project directory (container for all of
| my personal Git projects) and all .git directories are included
| in the produced .zip file.
| module1973 wrote:
| Time to make the move over to linux and use Duplicati with
| Backblaze or any other bucket. You get the benefit of encrypted
| backups, have more control over what to back up, and will be
| notified upon failure.
| overtone1000 wrote:
| Restic+Backblaze
| julianozen wrote:
| We are going to drop blackblaze over this
|
| We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for
| a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said
| "no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze"
|
| We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and
| we were never notified. File was unrecoverable
|
| If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so
| I can install you on my parents machine and never worry about it
| again. You decided saving on cloud storage was worth breaking
| this promise. Bad bad call
| ibizaman wrote:
| Why not just use backblaze as cold storage and use restic or
| another tool with a GUI to backup to it?
| julianozen wrote:
| Well this wasn't the promise backblaze made a decade ago when
| we started using their products.
|
| Now I need a new solution that will work for my parents
| ibizaman wrote:
| Of course, I wouldn't use their client anymore. Actually, I
| would have never used it from the start as it's not open
| source. I think for backups there's no better guarantee
| than that. I don't mean because you could look at the
| source code, I mean because in my experience open source
| products tend to care more about their users than not. At
| least for such foundational tools.
| reddalo wrote:
| Backblaze Computer Backup != B2 Cloud Storage
|
| You can't connect to their Computer Backup service through
| third-party software.
| cortesoft wrote:
| That is a lot more expensive if you have more than a small
| amount of data.
| jsw97 wrote:
| When an org quietly degrades one of their products, you
| should expect this behavior to occur again.
| julianozen wrote:
| Also taking recommendations for a _simple_ services I can
| install on my dads windows machine and my moms Mac that will
| just automatically backup the main drive to the cloud just in
| case
| jamie_ca wrote:
| I've been extremely happy with Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/
| for several years as a quiet backup solution, bring your own
| storage. I've done a few small restores and it's been just
| fine, and it automatically thins your backups to constrain
| storage costs.
|
| Managing exclusions is something to keep vaguely on top of
| (I've accidentally had a few VM disk images get backed up
| when I don't need/want them) but the default exclusions are
| all very reasonable.
| physicles wrote:
| Installed Carbonite on my parents' computer something like 15
| years ago, and it still works (every now and then my dad
| tells me he used it to recover from a bug or a mistake).
|
| But I have no idea where the company currently sits on the
| spectrum from good actor to fully enshittified.
| web007 wrote:
| `rclone` with AWS credentials. Go make a bucket and a key
| that can read/write to it.
|
| Set up your config to exclude common non-file dirs, or say
| "only `/Applications` and `Home` and that's about it. If it's
| a file then it's a file, and it will be synced up.
| noja wrote:
| I like https://www.borgbase.com
|
| It's set it and forget.
|
| You will need to set it up for them, then you get an email
| (from borgbackup, not the client so it works when the client
| is not running) when a backup hasn't happened for a while.
|
| As client there are more options now (like Vorta, from them),
| but I have had success with
| https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest and the Restic
| backend.
| wafflebot wrote:
| 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. Backblaze had
| it captured, thankfully. But if they are going to exclude
| iCloud Drive synced folders, and sounds like that is their
| intention, Backblaze is useless to me.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Throw some clock skew into the mix and it's even more
| hilarious!
| Gud wrote:
| Why is this downvoted?
| adamsb6 wrote:
| The insult to tictacs.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think this is a case of people using bidirectional file
| sync wrong. The point is to make the most up to date
| version of a file available across multiple devices, not to
| act as a backup or for collaboration between multiple
| users.
|
| It works perfectly fine as long as you keep how it works in
| mind, and probably most importantly don't have multiple
| users working directly on the same file at once.
|
| I've been using these systems for over a decade at this
| point and _never_ had a problem. And if I ever do have one,
| my _real_ backup solution has me covered.
| senkora wrote:
| +1. It works perfectly if your mental model is:
|
| "Every file is only ever written to from a single client,
| and will be asynchronously made available to all other
| clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you
| can safely switch to always writing to the file from a
| different client".
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Bidirectional file sync is also in hot demand from people
| who don't know the words, "file", "client", "write",
| "async", "available", or "time"
|
| :P
| babypuncher wrote:
| The fact that lay people can and will use a tool
| incorrectly does not mean said tool is not useful
| andrejserafim wrote:
| I agree. I use syncthing for syncing phones and laptops.
| For data like photos, which aren't really updated. It
| works very nice. And for documents updated by one user,
| moving between devices is totally seamless.
|
| That being said i understand how it works at a high
| level.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has
| me covered.
|
| What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make
| sure it's not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely
| hard to deal with because the backup systems don't seem
| to be 100% reliable.
|
| I think there are a lot of solutions these days that
| error on the side of claiming success.
| omnimus wrote:
| I also have no clue why people use it.
|
| You can build such a system yourself quite trivially by
| getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs,
| and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From
| Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through
| built-in software.
| j1elo wrote:
| Wait a moment, you just gave me an idea for a product
| burnte wrote:
| 1 out of a thousand people might do that, the others will
| buy the product. That's why people use it, most people
| don't want to build everything themselves.
| srdjanr wrote:
| It's a reference to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But as usual it forgets the "For a Linux user" part.
|
| If we remove the whole linux section and just ask "why
| not map a folder in Explorer" it's a reasonable question,
| probably even _more_ reasonable in 2026 than in 2007. The
| network got faster and more reliable, and the dropbox
| access got slower.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Slow as fuck compared to 2 synced dirs
| zymhan wrote:
| This cannot be a serious proposal. You should probably
| talk to people who don't use technology because they love
| it, but because they need it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This reference is 19 years old this month, in case anyone
| who recognized it was still feeling young.
| morganf wrote:
| noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!
| lazide wrote:
| Obvious. Explorer even has support built in for
| transparent 'native' gui support. I'm not even sure why
| you felt the need to explain it in detail. Next you'll be
| explaining how to walk. (/s, I loved it)
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It works perfectly fine if you're user that know how it
| works. I use it with Syncthing and it works coz I know to
| not edit same file at the same time on 2 devices (my third
| and fourth device is always on internet so chances
| propagate reasonably fast even if the 2 devices aren't on
| on the same time)
|
| But the moment that hits normal users, yeah, mess
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| Anamon wrote:
| This would be half OK if it worked, but you can't trust
| it to. OneDrive, for instance, has an open bug for years
| now where it will randomly revert some of your files to a
| revision from several months earlier. You can detect and
| recover this from the history, but only if you know that
| it happened and where, which you usually won't because it
| happens silently. I only noticed because it happened to
| an append-only text file I use daily.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Even crazier is one drive has a limit on the total length
| of a file path, how is this even a thing that exists.
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| 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 otherwise people would store their
| data in the path, not the file.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Just include filename size in file size for billing
| purposes?
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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?
| thebrain wrote:
| Everything needs limits otherwise someone will figure out
| how to or accidentally break it.
| therealpygon wrote:
| Same. Specifically I was considering Backblaze for our
| company's backups (both products, computers and their bucket
| for server backups. That is no longer the case as of the
| news.
| petercooper wrote:
| I'm going to join the exodus, though for a different reason.
| Switched to Orbstack and ever since Backblaze refuses to back
| up saying "disk full" as Orbstack uses a 8TB sparse disk image.
| You can exclude it, but if they won't (very easily) fix a known
| issue by measuring file sizes properly I don't feel confident
| about the product.
| varenc wrote:
| Dropbox itself should already keep version history of files for
| 30 days with the free plan, or more if you pay.
| conception wrote:
| A lot of personal "nerd" options are listed in the thread (and
| like restic/borg are really good!) but nothing really
| centralized. Backblaze was a great fire and forget option for
| deploying as a last resort backup. I don't think there are any
| competitors in that space if you are looking for continuous
| backup, centralized management and good pricing that doesn't
| require talking to a salesperson to get things going and is pay
| as you go.
| dashesyan wrote:
| Time Machine has a similar issue. OneDrive silently corrupted
| hundreds of my files, replacing their content with binary zeros
| while retaining the original file size. I have Time Machine
| backups going back years, but it turns out TM does not backup
| Cloud files, even if you have them pinned to local storage! So I
| lost sales those files, including some irreplaceable family
| photos
|
| I've added restic to my backup routine, pointed at cloud files
| and other critical data
| josecapurro wrote:
| This is not a Backblaze issue.
|
| When trying to copy files from a OneDrive folder, the operation
| fails if the file must be sync'd first.
|
| I, for one, do not think it is fair to blame Backblaze for the
| shortcomings of another application who breaks basic funtionality
| like copying files.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/onedriveforb...
| runjake wrote:
| I already dropped Backblaze over this stuff and I do not intend
| to ever consider using them again.
|
| Now, I:
|
| - Put important stuff in a SyncThing folder and sync that out to
| 2 different nodes.
|
| - Clone stuff to an encrypted external drive at home.
|
| - Clone stuff to an encrypted external drive at work and hide it
| out in the datacenter (fire suppression, HVAC, etc).
|
| It's janky but it works.
|
| I used to use a safe deposit box but that got too tedious.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| This is an absolutely massive loss for me. I had no idea it
| wasn't backing up my OneDrive files. A horrible way to find out
| and a massive loss of trust.
| coldtea wrote:
| Dropping them like I accidentally picked up shit...
| nla wrote:
| I left them years ago when they wouldn't package a download for
| restore. Total waste of money and false sense of security.
| andybak wrote:
| 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
| wafflebot wrote:
| Well I do pay for their business product, I have a "Business
| Groups" package with a few dozen endpoints all backing up for
| $99/year per machine.
|
| According to support's reply just now, my backups are crippled
| just like every other customer. No git, no cloud synced
| folders, even if those folders are fully downloaded locally.
|
| (This is also my personal backup strategy for iCloud Drive: one
| Mac is set to fully download complete iCloud contents, and that
| Mac backs up to Backblaze.)
| nodesocket wrote:
| I use Backblaze to backup my gaming PC. While .git and Dropbox
| does not affect me it's worrisome that OneDrive is not backed up
| seeing as Windows 11 somehow automatically/dark pattern stores
| local files in OneDrive.
|
| You have to give Apple credit, they nailed Time Machine. I have
| fully restored from Time Machine backups when buying new Macs
| more times than I can count. It works and everything comes back
| to an identical state of the snapshot. Yet, Microsoft can't seem
| to figure this out.
| jtagen wrote:
| Well shit. If this is right, I'm dropping Backblaze and
| recommending all my friends/customers do the same. I pay for and
| rely on Backblaze as the "back up everything" they advertise....
| to silently stop backing up the vast majority of my work is
| unacceptable!
| rietta wrote:
| Seems Backblaze does not even read their own blog with articles
| about 3-2-1 backups and sync not being the same as backup.
| devnulled wrote:
| I highly recommend switching to something more like Arq and then
| using whatever backend storage that you want. There are probably
| some other open source ways to do it, etc, but Arq scratches the
| itch of having control over your backups and putting them where
| you want with a GUI to easily configure/keep track of what is
| going on.
|
| Maybe there's something newer/better now (and I bought lifetime
| licenses of it long ago), but it works for me.
|
| That said, I use Arq + Backblaze storage and I think my monthly
| bill is very low, like under $5. Though I haven't backed-up much
| media there yet, but I do have control over what is being backed-
| up.
| brandon272 wrote:
| I have used Arq for years. It has always been the least
| problematic, least intrusive, most reliable backup and restore
| option for me. Appreciative to Stefan Reitshamer for creating
| and maintaining it.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Arq saved me a few hours of work recently when VS Code's GitHub
| Copilot looped out on a Playwright screenshot (>8k pixel
| height) and I had to manually edit the JSONL chat history, but
| accidentally restored to the previous checkpoint. That was one
| time I really appreciated that I set Arq to back up hourly. (I
| only restore from Arq maybe 2-3 times a year.)
|
| I wish lifetime licences were still sold.
| mlmonkey wrote:
| I would love to see a summary of all of the various options being
| bandied about.
|
| There are 2 components in my mind: the backup "agent" (what runs
| on your laptop/desktop/server) and the storage provider (which BB
| is in this context).
|
| What do people recommend for the agent? (I understand some
| storage providers have their own agents) For Linux/MacOS/Windows.
|
| What do people recommend for the storage provider? Let's assume
| there are 1TB of files to be backed up. 99.9% don't change
| frequently.
| vsl wrote:
| Dropped Backblaze over this when I learned about it in December
| (https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs...)
| and went to Arq. Not as polished, especially on Windows, but
| works and is actually cheaper.
| mig39 wrote:
| I'm Backblaze user -- multiple machines, multiple accounts. I'm
| going to be dropping Backblaze over this change, that I'm only
| learning about from this thread.
|
| Any suggestions for alternatives?
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > I made several errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew
| away the git history for a half decade old repo. No data was
| lost, but the log of changes was. No problem I thought, I'll just
| restore this from Backblaze.
|
| `git reflog` is your friend. You can recover from almost any
| mistake, including force-pushed branches.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| WJW. This sort of blanket policy change should be called-out in
| ALL CAPS, bold-faced, and underlined as it changes one of the
| implicit assumptions with the service's execution.
|
| The technical and performance implications of backing-up cloud
| mount-points are real, but that's _zero_ excuse for the way this
| change was communicated.
|
| This is a royal screw-up in corporate communications and I would
| not be surprised if it makes a _huge_ negative impact in their
| bottom line and results in a few terminations.
| itintheory wrote:
| Anyone have suggestions for backing up Google Drive + local
| files? I keep reading the horror stories about people getting
| locked out of cloud services, and worry about my 20 years of
| history stored in Drive. Less worried about local files which are
| sync'd to an external disk, but it'd be nice to have something in
| place for everything.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I have the same worry about being locked out.
|
| So I back it up to a NAS. I bought a Synology NAS (back before
| they turned into an evil company) which includes a Cloud Sync
| app which will connect to your Google Drive and sync changes
| every hour. It's technically sync not backup, but because all
| deleted files go into a "Trash bin" directory that you can set
| to never empty, it effectively works as backup for deleted
| files too (though you can't recover older versions of a file
| that still exists). The really great feature is that it has the
| option to sync all files that are in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides
| format as converted to Word/Excel/PPT. And the great thing
| about the backup running on your NAS is that it doesn't depend
| on your computer being on or anything.
|
| I know Synology's considered an evil company now because they
| seem to tie you to their own hard drives now, but I don't know
| if there's anything else as easy to set up for reliably syncing
| consumer cloud files to a NAS. Hopefully there is though, if
| anyone else knows?
|
| And of course, you can similarly run a backup program on your
| computer to back up your local files to it, as it's just a
| network mount.
| bede wrote:
| Thanks for publicising. I recently decided not to renew my
| Backblaze in favour of 'self hosting' encrypted backups outside
| the US. But I was horrified to learn that my git repos may not
| have been backed up, nor my Dropbox, whose subscription I also
| recently cancelled. Good riddance.
|
| My experience using restic has been excellent so far, snapshots
| take 5 mins rather than 30 mins with backblaze's Mac client. I
| just hope I can trust it...
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| This is just wild.
|
| I mean, they do one thing.
|
| Looking forward to seeing if they respond.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Windows is constantly pushing my wife and inlaws to move all
| their files to OneDrive while Backblaze is no longer backing up
| OneDrive. There are similar things going on with Apple and
| iCloud.
|
| What is the point of Backblaze at all at this point? If you are a
| consumer, all your files are probably IN OneDrive or iCloud or
| soon will be.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| 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 if the local system is low
| on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually
| data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.
|
| Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every
| minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?
|
| IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and
| it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it.
| Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.
|
| But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It's
| crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly
| advertised.
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| 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.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| 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 personal Sharepoint site under the hood). Trying to
| back them up would result in downloading potentially hundreds of
| gigabytes of files to the desktop only to them reupload them to
| OneDrive. That would also likely trigger data exfiltration flags
| at your corporate IT.
|
| A Dropbox/OneDrive/Drive/etc folder is a network mount point by
| another name. (Many of them are not implemented as FUSE mounts or
| equivalent OS API, not folders on disk.) It's fundamentally
| reasonable for software that promises backing up the local disk
| not to backup whatever network drives you happen to have signed
| in/mounted.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| Great explanation, very reasonable.
|
| Except that before they did and then they didn't without any
| proper notification (release notes don't count for significant
| changes like this).
|
| They should have just added a pop up or at least email or both,
| given a heads-up and then again when the change actually kicked
| in
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| fluxusars wrote:
| I dropped them when they silently dropped support for
| veracrypt/truecrypt drives:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1ol0pgf/backblaz...
|
| They're really proving lately that they are a company that can't
| be trusted with your data.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I assume they do some form of de-duplication across all files in
| their system. Most windows system files, and binaries would be
| duplicates, and only need to be stored once. I'm relatively sure
| this is true for most other systems, like Linux, MacOS, etc. Why
| not just back everything up for everyone?
|
| It really shouldn't take up much more space or bandwidth.
|
| Personally: I had to go in and edit the undisclosed exclusions
| file, and restart the backup process. I've got quite a few
| gigabytes of upload going now.
| defaultcompany wrote:
| They encrypt files on the client before transmission.
| herf wrote:
| Both Dropbox and OneDrive default to "online first" for most
| users (including Dropbox on macOS which has moved itself into
| File Provider). It is a technically sound and sane default for
| Backblaze to ignore these mounts, especially given their policy
| not to backup network drives. They really should have informed
| legacy users about it.
|
| Technically speaking, imagine you're iterating over a million
| files, and some of them are 1000x slower than the others, it's
| not Backblaze's fault that things have gone this way. Avoiding
| files that are well-known network mount points is likely
| necessary for them to be reliable at what they do for local
| files.
|
| It's important to recognize that these new OS-level filesystem
| hooks are slow and inefficient - the use case is opening one file
| and not 10,000 - and this means that things you might want to do
| (like recursive grep) are now unworkably slow if they don't fit
| in some warmed-up cache on your device.
|
| To fix it, Backblaze would need a "cloud to cloud" backup that is
| optimized for that access pattern, or a checkbox (or detection
| system) for people who manage to keep a full local mirror in a
| place where regular files are fast. This is rapidly becoming a
| less common situation. I do, however, think that they should have
| informed people about the change.
| mk12 wrote:
| Glad I switched from their personal computer backup to using
| restic + B2 a while ago. Every night my laptop and homelab both
| back up to each other and to B2. It takes less than a minute and
| I have complete control over the exclusions and retention. And I
| can easily switch off B2 to something else if I want.
| thecapybara wrote:
| I was using Restic + B2 for a while, but recently switched to
| Restic + Hetzner Storage Box.
|
| Storage Box is a little more effort to setup since it doesn't
| provide an S3 interface and I instead had to use WebDAV, but
| it's more affordable and has automated snapshots that adds a
| layer of easy immutability.
| simon_bitwise wrote:
| Yeah this is the core problem with how most backup tools handle
| Dropbox / iCloud / OneDrive now. Those folders aren't really
| "normal files" anymore -- a lot of the time they're just
| placeholders, and touching them can trigger downloads or other
| weird behavior depending on the client. That said, just skipping
| the entire folder is kind of the worst possible outcome. Backup
| should be predictable. If something is on disk, it should get
| backed up. If it's not, you should at least know that, not find
| out later when you need it. I've been working on Duplicati
| (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati) and one thing we've
| tried to be careful about is not silently ignoring data. If
| something can't be backed up, it should be visible to the user.
|
| Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about
| setting up duplicati.
| seany wrote:
| FWIW You can put a rpi in gadget mode and use nbd kit to mount
| nfs/smb shares..
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Having option to not do that is great, we did it for our backup
| system, because our cloud stores were backed up separately.
|
| Doing it silently is disaster.
|
| Making excludes doing it hidden from UI is outright malice,
| because it's far too easy to assume those would just be added as
| normal excludes and then go "huh, I probably just removed those
| from excludes when I set it up".
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| At least at the enterprise level, I've never seen anyone use
| Backblaze for this. You want to use a cloud level backup like
| Rubrik/Veeam/Cohesity. Trying to back up cloud based files
| locally is a fools errand. Granted it sucks that they dropped
| this without proper communication, but it's already a bad
| solution.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| We just use restic with B2 and some local S3 servers rather
| than relying on proprietary solutions. If it goes to shit we
| will just change the provider
| evanmoran wrote:
| Thank you. I will also immediately stop using backblaze. Its
| purpose is to independently back up my hard drive. Not to pick
| and choose.
| tencentshill wrote:
| They need to be reminded they are a utility. It's not up to them
| to have an opinion about my data. "Utilities" with an opinion
| carry a lot more liability.
| aklein wrote:
| Longtime backblaze user. Time to vibecode myself a replacement.
| chinathrow wrote:
| I discovered Backblaze through their disk reliabilty posts here
| on HN and became a customer for a family laptop many years ago.
|
| Now I discover again through HN, that it's time to find another
| solution.
| gadders wrote:
| I've been on Backblaze for a few years now, ever since Crashplan
| decided it didn't want individuals to use its service any more.
|
| It's always been just janky. A bad app that constantly throws low
| disk warnings and opens a webpage if you click anywhere on it.
| Being told the password change dialogue in the app doesn't work
| and having to use the website etc etc.
|
| Just all round not an experience that inspires confidence. In
| comparison, Crashplan just worked.
| Anamon wrote:
| But Crashplan also had an absolute abomination of a bloated,
| sluggish, Java-based client.
| gadders wrote:
| It was a bit, but I never found it as bad as Backblaze.
| ValentineC wrote:
| CrashPlan required, if I recall correctly, 1GB of RAM for
| every 1TB backed up. It got a bit unwieldy after a while,
| because I have multiple terabytes of photos and videos over
| many years.
| nippoo wrote:
| It's ironic that Backblaze themselves wrote a blog post a couple
| of years ago explaining why Dropbox isn't enough as a backup
| service and you need Backblaze as an additional layer of
| protection: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-
| google-drive...
|
| That aged well...
| vondur wrote:
| Isn't it challenging to back up a directory that's being synced
| with a 3rd party service? Especially if more than one person may
| be working on one of those files in OneDrive or DropBox?
| tonymet wrote:
| > My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when I made several
| errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git history
| for a half decade old repo
|
| git reflog is your "backup". it contains every commit and the
| resulting log (DAG) going back 90 days. If you do blow away a
| remote commit, don't fret, it's in your reflog #
| list all of the remote HEAD commits you've ever worked with
| git reflog origin/master # double check it's the right
| one git log -5 origin/master@{2} # reset the
| remote to the right one git push -f origin $(git rev-parse
| origin/master@{2}):master # (optional) reset your
| local branch git reset origin/master@{2} # at
| this point your local branch has time-traveled, but your working
| dir will be in the present state (e.g. all the relevant files
| will show as changed)
| mrwetsnow wrote:
| fwiw, the .git files are being backed... but..
|
| 1. You have to check "show hidden files" in the web ui (or the
| app) when restoring and
|
| 2. If you restore a folder that has a '.git' folder inside of it
| (by checking it in the ui) but you DID NOT check "show hidden
| files", then the '.git' (or any other hidden file/folder) does
| not get restored.
|
| Which is.. unexpected.. if I check a folder to restore, I expect
| *everything* inside of it to be restored.
|
| But the dropbox folder is, in fact, not there. Which is a
| surprise to me as well. :(
| raincole wrote:
| Why tho? Doesn't Backblaze sell cloud storage, and more files you
| backup the more profit they make? Or I misunderstand what it is?
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Was about to sign up for backblaze and came across this. Thank
| you for sharing. Where I sync my files to should not be a concern
| of my back up provider. I need plain and simple back up that
| isn't opinionated.
| abcqwerty9876 wrote:
| Borgbase is decent. rsync.net as well if you're comfy with a
| terminal
| aborsy wrote:
| Dropbox is literally the worst anmong all. For every little
| feature, like setting a password it requires upgrading your
| already paid plan. It's slow and offers nothing.
|
| I put a Nextcloud snap on a VPS in the same city. Fast and no
| limitations.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Nobody mentioning HDD prices? Disk prices had ~doubled over the
| last half a year.
| robertjpayne wrote:
| While there may be some issues with Backblaze there's no real
| trusted alternative with such a long history.
|
| Regardless to the OP's issues:
|
| - on macOS since 9.0.2.784 released in 2023 all .git folders are
| included in backups - Cloud drives are problematic to backup
| because they all use extension plugins to hide the network and
| your local disk only contains stubs instead of actual files. If
| Backblaze scans it fully it'll download everything and exhaust
| your disk space there's no easy solution here.
|
| I don't buy for a minute they were trying to be "sneaky" to save
| some $$ I instead feel like for the majority of users they felt
| it was misleading to backup stubs only and would rather not brick
| user computers by downloading all the files. Remember they can't
| access your cloud disk directly so the only way they can get the
| file contents is by doing an fread and letting the cloud drive
| client sync the content on demand.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-14 23:00 UTC)