This is terrifying. Aren't Backblaze users paying per-GB of storage/transfer? Why should it matter what's being stored, as long as the user is paying the costs? This will absolutely result in permanent data loss for some subset of their users.

I hope Backblaze responds to this with a "we're sorry and we've fixed this."

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.

> I made several errors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git history for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was. No problem I thought, I’ll just restore this from Backblaze.

`git reflog` is your friend. You can recover from almost any mistake, including force-pushed branches.

Blackblaze's personal backup solution is a mess in general. The client is clearly a giant pile of spaghetti code and I've had numerous issues with it, trying to figure out and change which files it does and doesn't backup is just one of them.

The configuration and logging formats they use are absolutely nonsensical.

The only right approach these days is a vps with a zfs partition with auto-snapshots, compression, and deduplication on and a syncthing instance running. Everything else is bound to lose money, and/or data (a comment mentions they lost a file and got 3 whole months FREE)

not helpful for non-mac users, but i really like the way arq separates the backup utility from the backup location. I feel like the the reason backblaze did this was to save money on "unlimited" storage and the associated complexity of cloud storage locations.

I didn't dig deep but I think Hindenburg Research saw this coming 1-2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827236

I recently stopped using Backblaze after a decade because it was using over 20GB of RAM on my machine. I also realized that I mostly wanted it for backing up old archival data that doesn’t change ever really. So I created a B2 bucket and uploaded a .tar.xz file.

Dropbox is literally the worst anmong all. For every little feature, like setting a password it requires upgrading your already paid plan. It’s slow and offers nothing.

I put a Nextcloud snap on a VPS in the same city. Fast and no limitations.

Was about to sign up for backblaze and came across this. Thank you for sharing. Where I sync my files to should not be a concern of my back up provider. I need plain and simple back up that isn’t opinionated.