alt Hacker NewsRight, but even if that’s working it breaks the user experience of services like this that ‘files I used recently are on my device’.
After a backup, you’d go out to a coffee shop or on a plane only to find that the files in the synced folder you used yesterday, and expected to still be there, were not - but photos from ten years ago were available!
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NetMageSCW • today at 2:03 PM
There’s no reason to think that would happen - files you had from ten years ago would have been backed up ten years ago and would be skipped over today.
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That shouldn't be seen as Backblaze's problem. It's Dropbox's problem that they made their product too complicated for users to reason about. The original Dropbox concept was "a folder that syncs" and there would be nothing problematic about Backblaze or anything else trying to back it up like any other folder.
Today's Dropbox is a network file system with inscrutable cache behavior that seeks to hide from the users the information about which files are actually present. That makes it impossible for normal users to correctly reason about its behavior, to have correct expectations for what will be available offline or what the side effects of opening a file will be, and Backblaze is stuck trying to cope with a situation where there is no right answer.