Comment by fuckinpuppers
3 days ago
I noticed this (thankfully before it was critical) and I’ve decided to move on from BB. Easily over 10 year customer. Totally bogus. Not only did it stop backing it up the old history is totally gone as well.
The one thing they have to do is backup everything and when you see it in their console you can rest assured they are going to continue to back it up.
They’ve let the desktop client linger, it’s difficult to add meaningful exceptions. It’s obvious they want everyone to use B2 now.
What are you using now? Asking for a friend
Not OP, but I have been using borg backup [1] against Hetzner Storage Box [2]
Borg backup is a good tool in my opinion and has everything that I need (deduplication, compression, mountable snapshot.
Hetzner Storage Box is nothing fancy but good enough for a backup and is sensibly cheaper for the alternatives (I pay about 10 eur/month for 5TB of storage)
Before that I was using s3cmd [3] to backup on a S3 bucket.
[1] https://www.borgbackup.org/
[2] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd
[3] https://s3tools.org/s3cmd
I cannot edit any longer, the second link was supposed to be
[2] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
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This is quite a bit more expensive than Backblaze if you have more than 5 TBs or so
I use rsync.net. You can use basically any SSH tool or rclone interface. They have a cheaper plan for "experts" if you want to forgo zfs snapshots,https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=experts.
Rsync.net is really really good.
Just this weekend, my backup tool went rogue and exhausted quota on rsync.net (Some bad config by me on Borg.) Emailed them, they promptly added 100 GB storage for a day so that I could recover the situation. Plus, their product has been rock solid since a few years I've been using them.
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Just a note of caution: sync != backup. When I was younger and dumber, I had my own rsync cron script to do a nightly sync of my documents to a remote server. One day I noticed files were gone from my local drive; I think there were block corruptions on the disk itself, and the files were dropped from the filesystem, or something like that. The nightly rsync propagated the deletions to the remote "backup."
D'argh.
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Thanks for your kind words.
Just to clarify - there are discounted plans that don't have free ZFS snapshots but you can still have them ... they just count towards your quota.
If your files don't change much - you don't have much "churn" - they might not take up any real space anyway.
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rsync.net and rclone are great, my brain understood restic easier than borg for local backups over usb (ymmv), and plain old `rsync --archive` is most excellent wrt preserving file mod times and the like.
There is 100% a difference between "dead data" (eg: movie.mp4) and "live data" (eg: a git directory with `chmod` attributes)- S3 and similar often don't preserve "attributes and metadata" without a special secondary pass, even though the `md5` might be the same.
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I have used Arq for way over a decade. It does incremental encrypted backups and supports a lot of storage providers. Also supports S3 object lock (to protect against ransomware). It’s awesome!
How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour just to scan my files for changes.
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Restic to almost any cloud storage provider. It works perfectly, it is client-side encrypted with easily-configurable retention policies. I have been using it happily for many years (and also restored some files from the backups).
Wasabi + rclone works well for me. Previous BB customer.
Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.
It is true that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.
To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.
Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:
1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files. 2. We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud
We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.
We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.
We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
We are here to help.