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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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…

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.