Posted by rrreese 5 days ago
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".
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.
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.
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.
"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.