Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

I’ve been using it for years, and the one time I needed to restore a file, I realized that VMware VMs files were excluded from the backup. They are so many exclusion that I start doing physical backup again.

It seems to me that Backblaze does NOT exclude ".git". It's not shown by default in the restore UI -- you must enable "show hidden files" to see it -- but it's there. I just did a test restore of my top-level Project directory (container for all of my personal Git projects) and all .git directories are included in the produced .zip file.

Dropped Backblaze over this when I learned about it in December (https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs...) and went to Arq. Not as polished, especially on Windows, but works and is actually cheaper.

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.

> 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.

I feel that's a systemic problem with all consumer online-backup software: They often use the barest excuse to not back things up. At best, it's to show a fast progress bar to the average user, and at worst it's to quietly renege on the "unlimited" capacity they promised when they took your money. [1]

Trying to audit—let alone change—the finer details is a pain even for power users, and there's a non-zero risk the GUI is simply lying to everybody while undocumented rules override what you specified.

When I finally switched my default boot to Linux, I found many of those offerings didn't support it, so I wrote some systemd services around Restic + Backblaze B2. It's been a real breath of fresh air: I can tell what's going on, I can set my own snapshot retention rules, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper. [2]

____

[1] Along the lines of "We have your My Documents. Oh, you didn't manually add My Videos or My Music for every user? Too bad." Or in some cases, certain big-file extensions are on the ignore list by default for no discernible reason.

[2] Currently a dollar or two a month for ~200gb. It doesn't change very much, and data verification jobs redownload the total amount once a month. I don't backn up anything I could get from elsewhere, like Steam games. Family videos are in the care of different relatives, but I'm looking into changing that.

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.

My takeaway is that for data that matters, don't trust the service. I back up with Restic, so that the service only sees encrypted blobs.

Commenting on the presentation, not the content: Why is there a white haze over the entirety of this website?

I'm Backblaze user -- multiple machines, multiple accounts. I'm going to be dropping Backblaze over this change, that I'm only learning about from this thread.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

This is why I use Arq with Backblaze. They just see a bunch of encrypted files with random GUID filenames. They don't need to know what I'm backing up, just that I am backing it up.

So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?

Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.

Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?

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.

Hetzner storagebox. 1TB for under 5 bucks/month, 5TB for under 15. Sftp access. Point your restic there. Backup game done, no surprises, no MBAs involved.

I backup my data to s3 and r2 using local scripts, never had any issues

Don't even know why people rely on these guis which can show their magic anytime

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.

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.

Well shit. If this is right, I'm dropping Backblaze and recommending all my friends/customers do the same. I pay for and rely on Backblaze as the "back up everything" they advertise.... to silently stop backing up the vast majority of my work is unacceptable!

Seems Backblaze does not even read their own blog with articles about 3-2-1 backups and sync not being the same as backup.

Time to make the move over to linux and use Duplicati with Backblaze or any other bucket. You get the benefit of encrypted backups, have more control over what to back up, and will be notified upon failure.

I left them years ago when they wouldn't package a download for restore. Total waste of money and false sense of security.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I just looked in my Backblaze restore program, and all my .git folders are in there. I did have to go to the Settings menu and toggle an option to show hidden files. This is the Mac version.

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."

I was always roughly of the mind that Backblaze was just too close to the "If it's too good to be true it probably is", seems like that may have been a good decision.

Initially I thought this was about their B2 file versions/backups, where they keep older versions of your files.

i think at this point i have had enough of the majority of consumer products and just use production.

backup to real s3 storage.

llms on real api tokens.

search on real search api no adverts.

google account on workspace and gcp, no selling the data.

etc.

only way to stop corpos treating you like a doormat

That's pretty crazy because I just set up personal backups with a different service (rsync.net, I was already using it for WP website backups) and my git folders were literally my first priority

restic and with cloudflare r2 (safety) or new hetzner storage boxes(cost effectiveness) are almost cheaper than backblaze 'unlimited' with full control and 'unlimited' history.

I still like backblaze, they've been nice for the days where I was running windows. Their desktop app is probably one of the best in the scene.

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.

FWIW You can put a rpi in gadget mode and use nbd kit to mount nfs/smb shares..

Windows is constantly pushing my wife and inlaws to move all their files to OneDrive while Backblaze is no longer backing up OneDrive. There are similar things going on with Apple and iCloud.

What is the point of Backblaze at all at this point? If you are a consumer, all your files are probably IN OneDrive or iCloud or soon will be.

Ouch. The only reason their “well figured out what to include and exclude” policy made sense was an implicit assumption that they’d play it safe

Just switched from Backblaze to Cloudflare R2 (using restic). Now it makes me think if I should check for such issues with R2 as well.

Should really qualify this headline with which backblaze product.

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

This is not a Backblaze issue.

When trying to copy files from a OneDrive folder, the operation fails if the file must be sync'd first.

I, for one, do not think it is fair to blame Backblaze for the shortcomings of another application who breaks basic funtionality like copying files.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/onedriveforb...

Restic+Backblaze

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'd like to apologise to everyone for this situation. It's very likely because I've just started using it recently.

This is just wild.

I mean, they do one thing.

Looking forward to seeing if they respond.

I use Kopia Backup software, sending all my important files to a compatible S3 bucket, using retention-mode: compliance as ransomware protection. I have access to every incremental snapshot Kopia makes using kopia-ui.

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)

Holy Hannah, this is such bullshit from Backblaze. Both the .git directory (why would I not SPECIFICALLY want this backed up for my projects?) and the cloud directories.

I get that changing economics make it more difficult to honor the original "Backup Everything" promise but this feels very underhanded. I'll be cancelling.