Posted by rrreese 17 hours ago
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.
> 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
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.
There's no mention of .git being excluded in the Settings or on their support page (https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-bac...); they just silently decided to not back up a bunch of my files without telling me... wonderful.
It seems incredibly stupid for a BACKUP PROGRAM to not list the hidden files instead of indicating they're hidden (e.g. _(hidden)_.git)
You all skipped the most important part: 3, 2, 1 backup rule.
Basically, you all were using Backblaze as a centered backup system, what do you think it was going to happen???
You do not backup data and call it a day, you must have a process in place to go there and check random files and folders for corruption. This process would have warned you that the sync was not 1:1
The thing to empathize here is those who purchased these retail Backblaze plans fell into two buckets:
1. The technically savvy who were following the industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule, arbitraging the "unlimited" plan, waiting for the game to be over.
2. The technically unsavvy who believed in the "unlimited" plan
My bet is that 2 is screwed and that's majority of the users of this specific Backblaze plan.
This is likely to have rippling effects on Backblaze including their unrelated, object store plans. When there are choices available, people don't appreciate being ripped off and right now, there are a lot of choices in object stores.
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.
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.
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)
No they are not. This is explicitly addressed in the article itself.
You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history", I believe? Another important consideration.
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.
Maintaining version history out to a set retention period is a backup...no?
> 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.
Feel free to use my reputation, instead: when I say a system is backed up, data cannot be lost by that system being destroyed, because an independent copy always exists. This satisfies those whom it concerns, who put their money where their mouth is, whereas your more generous but insufficient definition would absolutely not be good enough.
When you assure a client that a system is backed up, which definition do they expect from you?
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.
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.
I wish lifetime licences were still sold.
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.
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
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
(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)
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?
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.
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.