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Posted by rrreese 5 days ago

Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others(rareese.com)
1120 points | 687 commentspage 8
infogulch 4 days ago|
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.
mdevere 5 days ago||
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.
latentframe 4 days ago||
This looks like a systemic issue and not just Backblaze : because we’ve layered cloud on top of cloud and call it backup but it’s very linked. When a provider changes the rules then a big part of that safety just disapears and its the same pattern in finance: looks diversified but it isn’t
PunchyHamster 4 days ago||
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".

itintheory 4 days ago||
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 4 days ago|
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.

tempaccount5050 4 days ago||
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 4 days ago|
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
runjake 4 days ago||
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.

pastage 5 days ago||
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.
mk12 4 days ago||
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 4 days ago|
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.

proactivesvcs 5 days ago|
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.

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