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

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

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.

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.

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)

Ultimately the author is ranting about something that is likely an unintended bug where some update along the line reset the default exclusions list.

It almost seems like they’re taking it personally as some kind of intentionally slight against them.

Most users would not want Backblaze to back up other cloud synced directories. This default is sensible.

This is just wild.

I mean, they do one thing.

Looking forward to seeing if they respond.

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.

Is this grey-on-black just meant for LLMs to see for training, or is the intention that humans should be able to read it too?

I've recently been looking for online backup providers and Backblaze came highly recommended to me - but I think after reading this article I'll look elsewhere because this kind of behavior seems like the first step on the path of enshittification.

rhey alao stopped taking my cc and email me on a no+reply email about it like they dont want to get paid

ANY company, and I do mean any, that offers "unlimited" anything is 100% a scam. At best its a temporary growth hack to entice people who havent had technology rug-pulls. And when profits dwindle and the S curve is near the upper coast, you can guarantee that "unlimited" will get hidden restrictions, exclusions, "terms of service" changes, nebulous fair use policies that arent fair, and more dark patterns. And every one of them are "how do we worsen unlimited to make more money on captive customers?"

We're also seeing this play out in real time with Anthropic with their poop-splatter-llm. They've gone through like 4 rug-pulls, and people STILL pay $200/month for it. Every round, their unlimited gets worse and worse, like I outlined above.

Pay as you go is probably the more fair. But SaaS providers reallllllly hate in providing direct and easy to use tools to identify costs, or <gasp> limit the costs. A storag/backup provider could easily show this. LLM providers could show a near-realtime token utilization.

But no. Dark patterns, rug-pulls, and "i am altering the deal, pray i do not alter it further".

Dropping them like I accidentally picked up shit...

To the author: please use a darker font. Preferably black.

I’m only in my 40’s, I don’t require glasses (yet) and I have to actively squint to read your site on mobile. Safari, iPhone.

I’m pretty sure you’re under the permitted contrast levels under WCAG.

[dead]

Meanwhile, Backblaze still happily backups up the 100TB+ I have on various hard drives with my Mac Pro.

Why should Backblaze back up their competitors’ data? And what use is it to you for it to do so?

Managing backup exclusions strikes again. It's impossible. Either commit to backing up the full disk, including the 80% of easily regenerated/redownloaded etc. data, or risk the 0.001% critical 16 byte file that turns out to contain your Bitcoin wallet key or god knows what else. I've been bitten by this more times than I'd like to admit managing my own backups, it's hard to expect a shrink-wrapped provider to do much better. It only takes one dumb simplification like "my Downloads folder is junk, no need to back that up" combined with (no doubt, years later) downloading say a 1Password recovery PDF that you lazily decide will live in that folder, and the stage is set.

Pinning this squarely on user error. Backblaze could clearly have done better, but it's such a well known failure mode that it's not much far off refusing to test restores of a bunch of tapes left in the sun for a decade.