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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.