Discussion
Robert Reese's Website
Terr_: I feel that's a systemic problem with all consumer online-backup software: They other use the barest excuse to not back things up. At best, it's to optimize local resources for the average user, and at worst it's to quietly renege on the "unlimited" capacity they promised when they took your money. ("We have your My Documents. Oh, you didn't manually add My Videos? That's your fault.")Trying to audit—let alone change—the finer details is a pain, and there's a non-zero risk the GUI is simply lying to you as undocumented rules are overriding what you specified.When I finally switched my main boot to Linux, many of those offerings were no longer available, so I wrote some systemd services for Restic... and it's been a real breath of fresh air. Also wayyy cheaper.
rrreese: Yes, you're exactly right. Once they decide not to exclude certain filetypes it puts the burden on the endusers who are unequipped to monitor these changes.
fuckinpuppers: 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.
dathinab: Ironically drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other ways (but potentially not reliable so I also understand why people do not like that).But .git? It does not mean you have it synced to GitHub or anything reliable?If you do anything then only backup the .git folder and not the checkout.But backing up the checkout and not the .git folder is crazy.
trvz: Meanwhile, Backblaze still happily backups up the 100TB+ I have on various hard drives with my Mac Pro.
aitchnyu: Umm, why didnt you find a GUI manager like Vorta (this one is Borg exclusive IIRC)?
Terr_: With restic I don't need some kind of special server daemon on the other end, I can point my backup destination to an arbitrary filesystem or a "dumb" store like S3 or B2.As for GUIs in general... Well, like I said, I just finished several years of bad experiences with some proprietary ones, and I wanted to see and choose what was really being configuredAt this point, I don't think I'd ever want a GUI beyond a basic progress-reporting widget. It's not like I need to regularly micromanage the backup set, especially when nobody else is going to change it under me.
klausa: Exclusions are one thing, but I've had Backblaze _fail to restore a file_. I pay for unlimited history.I contacted the support asking WTF, "oh the file got deleted at some point, sorry for that", and they offered me 3 months of credits.I do not trust my Backblaze backups anymore.
faangguyindia: I backup my data to s3 and r2 using local scripts, never had any issuesDon't even know why people rely on these guis which can show their magic anytime
100ms: 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.
mr_mitm: If there is a footgun I haven't considered yet in backup exclusions, I'd like to know more. Shouldn't it be safe to exclude $XDG_CACHE_HOME? Unfortunately, since many applications don't bother with the XDG standard, I have to exclude a few more directories, so if you have any stories about unexpected exclusions, would you mind sharing?
100ms: I don't remember why I started doing it, but I don't bulk exclude .cache for some reason or other. I have a script that strips down larger known caches as part of the backup. But the logic, whatever it was, is easy to understand: you're relying on apps to correctly categorise what is vs. isn't cache.Also consider e.g. ~/.cache/thumbnails. It's easy to understand as a cache, but if the thumbnails were of photos on an SD card that gets lost or immediately dies, is it still a cache? It might be the only copy of some once-in-a-lifetime event or holiday where the card didn't make it back with you. Something like this actually happened to me, but in that case, the "cache" was a tarball of an old photo gallery generated from the originals that ought to have been deleted.It's just really hard to know upfront whether something is actually important or not. Same for the Downloads folder. Vendor goes bankrupt, removes old software versions, etc. The only safe thing you can really do is hold your nose and save the whole lot.
jgrizou: What are you using now? Asking for a friend
mcherm: Does it? How do you know?If they start excluding random content (eg: .git) without effective notice, maybe they AREN'T backing up everything you think they are.
venzaspa: On the topic of backing up data from cloud platforms such as Onedrive, I suspect this is stop the client machine from actively downloading 'files on demand' which are just pointers in explorer until you go to open them.If you've got huge amounts of files in Onedrive and the backup client starts downloading everyone of them (before it can reupload them again) you're going to run into problems.But ideally, they'd give you a choice.
dspillett: > Pinning this squarely on user error.It isn't user error if it was working perfectly fine until the provider made a silent change.Unless the user error you are referring to is not managing their own backups, like I do. Though this isn't free from trouble, I once had silent failures backing up a small section of my stuff for a while because of an ownership/perms snafu and my script not sending the reports to stderr to anywhere I'd generally see them. Luckily my automated test (every now & then it scans for differences in the whole backup and current data) because it could see the source and noticed a copy wasn't in the latest snapshot on the far-away copy. Reliable backups is a harder problem then most imagine.
Jolter: 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.
noirscape: I can understand in theory why they wouldn't want to back up .git folders as-is. Git has a serious object count bloat problem if you have any repository with a good amount of commit history, which causes a lot of unnecessary overhead in just scanning the folder for files alone.I don't quite understand why it's still like this; it's probably the biggest reason why git tends to play poorly with a lot of filesystem tools (not just backups). If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just an example really), you wouldn't get so much unnecessary inode bloat.At the same time Backblaze is a backup solution. The need to back up everything is sort of baked in there. They promise to be the third backup solution in a three layer strategy (backup directly connected, backup in home, backup external), and that third one is probably the single most important one of them all since it's the one you're going to be touching the least in an ideal scenario. They really can't be excluding any files whatsoever.The cloud service exclusion is similarly bad, although much worse. Imagine getting hit by a cryptoworm. Your cloud storage tool is dutifully going to sync everything encrypted, junking up your entire storage across devices and because restoring old versions is both ass and near impossible at scale, you need an actual backup solution for that situation. Backblaze excluding files in those folders feels like a complete misunderstanding of what their purpose should be.
ciupicri: > If it'd been something like an SQLite database instead (just an example really)See Fossil https://fossil-scm.org/
argsnd: Safari’s reader mode is good for this. All you have to do is long press the icon on the left edge of the address bar.
dwayne_dibley: LONG PRESS????!?! you legend. How does one find these things out.
solarkraft: So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.Hetzner storagebox sounds good, what about S3 or Glacier-like options?
100ms: Backup is never a fire and forget solution and it can't be made into one, it's like paying for insurance doesn't somehow make you into a safer driver. It's definitely regretful Backblaze changed a default in a horrible way here, but the onus remains squarely on the user to ensure the backups do what they think they do. How can he even know if the files, assuming they were ever stored in Backblaze even restore correctly? It doesn't matter if it means actually checking the tapes left sitting in the sun, or some storage provider in another country, it's always necessary to complete the full cycle and actually test the flow works in the way expected way.
Timwi: Oftentimes the important data that needs restoring is in the checkout: uncommitted and unstaged changes that represent hours of work.
kaszanka: Surprisingly only the headings (2.05) and links (3.72) fail the Firefox accessibility check, the body text is 5.74. But subjectively it seems worse and I definitely agree with you that the contrast is too low.
readingnews: Completely agree with this comment. Had to cut / paste it into vim and q! when done, was getting a headache.
maalhamdan: document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(p => p.style.color = 'black');Use this command in the developer tools console to change the color.
Jolter: Yes, it’s a great workaround but website owners should not make me do that.
AegirLeet: At some point, Backblaze just silently stopped backing up my encrypted (VeraCrypt) drives. Just stopped working without any announcement, warning or notification. After lots of troubleshooting and googling I found out that this was intentional from some random reddit thread. I stopped using their backup service after that.
eviks: > 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
throwaway81998: 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."
mrighele: I think the author is referring to the personal backup plan [1] which has a fixed monthly amount[1] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
avidphantasm: 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.
SCdF: After mucking around with various easy to use options my lack of trust[1] pushed me into a more-complicated-but-at-least-under-my-control-option: syncthing+restic+s3 compatible cloud provider.Basically it works like this:- I have syncthing moving files between all my devices. The larger the device, the more stuff I move there[2]. My phone only has my keepass file and a few other docs, my gaming PC has that plus all of my photos and music, etc.- All of this ends up on a raspberry pi with a connected USB harddrive, which has everything on it. Why yes, that is very shoddy and short term! The pi is mirrored on my gaming PC though, which is awake once every day or two, so if it completely breaks I still have everything locally.- Nightly a restic job runs, which backs up everything on the pi to an s3 compatible cloud[3], and cleans out old snapshots (30 days, 52 weeks, 60 months, then yearly)- Yearly I test restoring a random backup, both on the pi, and on another device, to make sure there is no required knowledge stuck on there.This is was somewhat of a pain to setup, but since the pi is never off it just ticks along, and I check it periodically to make sure nothing has broken.[1] there is always weirdness with these tools. They don't sync how you think, or when you actually want to restore it takes forever, or they are stuck in perpetual sync cycles[2] I sync multiple directories, broadly "very small", "small", "dumping ground", and "media", from smallest to largest.[3] Currently Wasabi, but it really doens't matter. Restic encrypts client side, you just need to trust the provider enough that they don't completely collapse at the same time that you need backups.
XCSme: Initially I thought this was about their B2 file versions/backups, where they keep older versions of your files.
Jolter: Like this, by word of mouth. That’s how Apple has done UI design since they stopped printing paper manuals.- ctrl-shift-. to show hidden files on macOS - pull down to see search box (iOS 18) - swipe from top right corner for flashlight button - swipe up from lower middle for home screenEtc, etc
raptor99: Why don't you just go tell the WCAG on him yourself?
dnnddidiej: I use backblaze and have repos I dont push for this reason so I am a bit stunned lol
contravariant: I'm also pretty sure 14 points font is a bit outdated at this point, 16 should probably be a minimum with current screens. It's not as if screens aren't wide enough to fit bigger text.
lpcvoid: 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.
poisonborz: Until there is. Backblaze was also trusted years ago. Selfhost, it became easy enough.
Hendrikto: > My first troubling discovery was in 2025, when 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.I know this is besides the point somewhat, but: Learn your tools people. The commit history could probably have been easily restored without involving any backup. The commits are not just instantly gone.
baq: +1Firefox users: press F9
soblemprolver: F9 doesn't seem to do anything for me on Linux... Neither on the posted page nor on HN.What is it supposed to do?There is no mention of F9 on this support page either:https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perf...Am I missing something?
moebrowne: I assume they are trying to enable Reader mode which is Ctrl+Alt+R
nbernard: Probably. When available, reader mode can also be activated by clicking the little "page with text" icon on the right of the address bar.
freedomben: > So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?I assume when asking such a question, you expect an honest answer like mine:rclone is my favorite alternative. Supports encryption seamlessly, and loaded with features. Plus I can control exactly what gets synced/backed up, when it happens, and I pay for what I use (no unsustainable "unlimited" storage that always comes with annoying restrictions). There's never any surprises (which I experienced with nearly every backup solution). I use Backblaze B2 as the backend. I pay like $20 a month and have a ton of data up there
embedding-shape: > The commits are not just instantly gone.Indeed, the commits and blobs might even have still been available on the GitHub remote, I'm not sure they clean them on some interval or something, but bunch of stuff you "delete" from git still stays in the remote regardless of what you push.
cyanydeez: rhey alao stopped taking my cc and email me on a no+reply email about it like they dont want to get paid
trvz: You don’t do quarterly restore tests?
Hendrikto: > drop box and one drive folders I can still somewhat understand as they are "backuped" in other waysNo they are not. This is explicitly addressed in the article itself.
microtonal: 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!
massysett: How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour just to scan my files for changes.
einr: This is a pain, to be sure, but surely there is some sort of logic you could implement to detect whether a file is a Real File that actually exists on the device (if so, back it up) or a pointer to the cloud (ignore it by default, probably, but maybe provide a user setting to force it to back up even these)
ncheek: It looks like the following line has been added to /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml to stop Dropbox from syncing:</bzexclusions><excludefname_rule plat="mac" osVers="*" ruleIsOptional="f" skipFirstCharThenStartsWith="*" contains_1="/users/username/dropbox/" contains_2="*" doesNotContain="*" endsWith="*" hasFileExtension="*" />That is the exact path to my Dropbox folder, and I presume if I move my Dropbox folder this xml file will be updated to point to the new location. The top of the xml file states "Mandatory Exclusions: editing this file DOES NOT DO ANYTHING"..git files seem to still be backing up on my machine, although they are hidden by default in the web restore (you must open Filters and enable Show Hidden). I don't see an option to show hidden files/folders in the Backblaze Restore app.
azalemeth: I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited". They specifically exclude linux users because, well, we're nerds, r/datahoarders exists, and we have different ideas about what "unlimited" means. [1]This is another example in disguise of two people disagreeing about what "unlimited" means in the context of backup, even if they do claim to have "no restrictions on file type or size" [2].[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/jsrqoz/personal_... [2] https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
embedding-shape: Any company that does the "unlimited*" shenanigans are automatically out from any selection process I had going, wherever they use it. It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses, and they'll be quick to offload you from the platform given the chance, and you'll have no recourse.Always prefer businesses who are upfront and honest about what they can offer their users, in a sustainable way.
basilgohar: This is really disturbing to hear as I've incorporated B2 into a lot of my flow for backups as well as a storage backend for Nextcloud and planned as the object store for some upcoming archival storage products I'm working on.I know the post is talking about their personal backup product but it's the same company and so if they sneak in a reduction of service like this, as others have already commented, it erodes difficult-to-earn trust.
JLCarveth: > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.
bakugo: 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.
maalhamdan: I think they shouldn't back up git objects individually because git handles the versioning information. Just compress the .git folder itself and back it up as a single unit.
willis936: Better yet, include dedpulication, incremental versioning, verification, and encryption. Wait, that's borg / restic.This is a joke, but honestly anyone here shouldn't be directly backing up their filesystems and should instead be using the right tool for the job. You'll make the world a more efficient place, have more robust and quicker to recover backups, and save some money along the way.
ncts: That's good guidelines and all, but meanwhile you are posting it on a site with.. .default { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#828282; } .admin { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:8.5pt; color:#000000; } .title { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#828282; overflow:hidden; } .subtext { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt; color:#828282; } .yclinks { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; color:#828282; } .pagetop { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#222222; line-height:12px; } .comhead { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; color:#828282; } .comment { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; }
littlecranky67: Most home broadband providers offer unlimited network traffic.
willis936: And they have the necessary pipes to serve the rate they sell you 24/7.Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
mdevere: 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.
embedding-shape: They offer "unlimited" where I live, not "unlimited*".
QuantumNomad_: According to http://web.archive.org/web/20260317212538/https://support.mo... itsF9 on WindowsCtrl + Alt + R on LinuxCommand + Option + R on macOS(It uses JS to only show the one for your platform but with view source you can see it mentions all three of these different OSes.)So I guess the first guy is a Windows user and you other two use Linux.
e40: Wasabi + rclone works well for me. Previous BB customer.
christoff12: wut
finger: So that’s why Reader mode sometimes shows up directly when I click on the icon, I must be long clicking it by accident.
pkaeding: This is a good point, but you might expect them to back up untracked and modified files in the backup, along with everything else on your filesystem.
specialp: >I don’t require glasses (yet)One day try throwing a pair on you'll be surprised. The small thin font is causing this not the text contrast. This and low light scenarios are the first things to go.
nottorp: > The small thin font is causing this not the text contrast.Whatever causes it, I do wear glasses (and on a recent prescription too) and the text is still very hard to read.
mrighele: 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
avazhi: Your iPhone has this cool feature called reader mode if you didn’t know.As for mentioning WCAG, so what? It’s his personal website, he can do what he wants with it, surely. Telling him you found it difficult to read properly is one thing but referencing WCAG as if this guy is bound somehow to modify his own aesthetic preference for generic accessibility reasons is laughable.
mikepurvis: Unsure if sarcastic but most ISPs will throttle and "traffic" long before you use anything close to <bandwidth rating> times <seconds in a month>.
embedding-shape: I'm unsure if you're sarcastic or not, never have I've used a ISP that would throttle you, for any reason, this is unheard of in the countries I've lived, and I'm not sure many people would even subscribe to something like that, that sounds very reverse to how a typical at-home broadband connection works.Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
lelandfe: Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-intern...My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him.A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
kameit00: I once had to restore around 2 TB of RAW photos. The app was a mess. It crashed every few hours. I ended up manually downloading single folders over a timespan of 2 weeks to restore my data. The support only apologized and could not help with my restore problem. After this I cancelled my subscription immediately and use local drives for my backups now, drives which I rotate (in use and locations).I never trust them again with my data.
grumbelbart2: Git packs objects into pack-files on a regular basis. If it doesn't, check your configuration, or do it manually with 'git repack'.
rcxdude: It's probably primarily because Linus is a kernel and filesystem nerd, not a database nerd, so he preferred to just use the filesystem which he understood the performance characteristics of well (at least on linux).
ricardobeat: It’s funny that the same person asking for linux support would complain about B2 “not being for home users”. I sync my own backups to B2 and would set that up over installing linux any day of the week! It’s extremely easy.
rrreese: Your feedback is noted! I'll darken it down a few nootches and test it on mobile. Thanks for the feedback
billev2k: Please: Not "a few notches". All the way. Black. That is if you actually care if people read your posts.
bencevans: I found this to be a common theme in web design a while back, and in part led to an experiment developing a newspaper/Pocket-like interface to reading HN. It's not perfect, but is easier on the eyes for reading... https://times.hntrends.net/story/47762864
ethbr1: > It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businessesOr that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
michaelbuckbee: Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
Hamuko: B2 is not a backup service. It’s an object storage service.
rmccue: I think it's understandable for both Backblaze and most users, but surely the solution is to add `.git` to their default exclusion list which the user can manage.
dmantis: I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent amount. I guess it really depends on the country.
minebreaker: I just checked the Backblaze app and found that .iso is on the exclusion list. Just in case anyone here is as dumb as I...
shortformblog: The problem is less the color than the weight. If it was 500 rather than 300 it would be perfectly fine.
mhitza: Contrast looks good for the text, but the font used has very thin lines. A thicker font would have been readable by itself. At 250% page zoom it's good enough, if you don't enable the browser built-in reader mode.
yangm97: You don’t see ZFS/BTRFS block based snapshot replication choking on git or any sort of dataset. Use the right job for the tool or something.
deno: There’s about zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time. Residential network access is oversold as everything else. The only difference is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.
noirscape: I decided to look into this (git gc should also be doing this), and I think I figured out why it's such a consistent issue with git in particular. Running git gc does properly pack objects together and reduce inode count to something much more manageable.It's the same reason why the postgres autovacuum daemon tends to be borderline useless unless you retune it[0]: the defaults are barmy. git gc only runs if there's 6700 loose unpacked objects[1]. Most typical filesystem tools tend to start balking at traversing ~1000 files in a structure (depends a bit on the filesystem/OS as well, Windows tends to get slower a good bit earlier than Linux).To fix it, running> git config -g gc.auto=1000should retune it and any subsequent commit to your repo's will trigger garbage collection properly when there's 1000 loose files. Pack file management seems to be properly tuned by default; at more than 50 packs, gc will repack into a larger pack.[0]: For anyone curious, the default postgres autovacuum setting runs only when 10% of the table consists of dead tuples (roughly: deleted+every revision of an updated row). If you're working with a beefy table, you're never hitting 10%. Either tune it down or create an external cronjob to run vacuum analyze more frequently on the tables you need to keep speedy. I'm pretty sure the defaults are tuned solely to ensure that Postgres' internal tables are fast, since those seem to only have active rows to a point where it'd warrant autovacuum.[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc
dathinab: normally this folder are synced to dropbox and/or onedriveboth services have internal backups to reduce the chance they lose databoth services allow some limited form of "going back to older version" (like the article states itself).Just because the article says "sync is not backup" doesn't mean that is true, I mean it literally is backup by definition as it: makes a copy in another location and even has versioning.It's just not _good enough_ backup for their standards. Maybe even standards of most people on HN, but out there many people are happy with way worse backups, especially wrt. versioning for a lot of (mostly static) media the only reason you need version rollback is in case of a corrupted version being backed up. And a lot of people mostly backup personal photos/videos and important documents, all static by nature.Through1. it doesn't really fulfill the 3-2-1 rules it's only 2-1-1 places (local, one backup on ms/drop box cloud, one offsite). Before when it was also backed up to backblaze it was 3-2-1 (kinda). So them silently stopping still is a huge issue.2. newer versions of the 3-2-1 rule also say treat 2 not just as 2 backups, but also 2 "vendors/access accounts" with the one-drive folder pretty much being onedrive controlled this is 1 vendor across local and all backups. Which is risky.
willis936: Do you have any more details? This is a pretty big deal. The differentiators between Backblaze and Hetzner mostly boil down to this kind of thing supposedly not being possible.
klausa: I’m on my phone so forgive the formatting, but here’s my entire support exchange:- - -Hey, I tried restoring a file from my backup — downloading it directly didn't work, and creating a restore with it also failed – I got an email telling me contract y'all about it.Can you explain to me what happened here, and what can I do to get my file(s?) back?- - -Hi Jan,Thanks for writing in!I've reached out to our engineers regarding your restore, and I will get back to you as soon as I have an update. For now, I will keep the ticket open.- - -Hi Jan,Regarding the file itself - it was deleted back in 2022, but unfortunately, the deletion never got recorded properly, which made it seem like the file still existed.Thus, when you tried to restore it, the restoration failed, as the file doesn't actually exist anymore. In this case, it shouldn't have been shown in the first place.For that, I do apologize. As compensation, we've granted you 3 monthly backup credits which will apply on your next renewal. Please let me know if you have any further questions.- - -That makes me even more confused to be honest - I’ve been paying for forever history since January 2022 according to my invoices?Do you know how/when exactly it got deleted?- - -Hi Jan,Unfortunately, we don't have that information available to us. Again, I do apologize.- - -I really don’t want to be rude, but that seems like a very serious issue to me and I’m not satisfied with that response.If I’m paying for a forever backup, I expect it to be forever - and if some file got deleted even despite me paying for the “keep my file history forever” option, “oh whoops sorry our bad but we don’t have any more info” is really not a satisfactory answer.I don’t hold it against _you_ personally, but I really need to know more about what happened here - if this file got randomly disappeared, how am I supposed to trust the reliability of anything else that’s supposed to be safely backed up?- - -Hi Jan,I'll inquire with our engineers tomorrow when they're back in, and I'll update you as soon as I can. For now, I will keep the ticket open.- - -Appreciate that, thank you! It’s fine if the investigation takes longer, but I just want to get to the bottom of what happened here :)- - -Hi Jan,Thanks for your patience.According to our engineers and my management team:With the way our program logs information, we don't have the specific information that explains exactly why the file was removed from the backup. Our more recent versions of the client, however, have vastly improved our consistency checks and introduced additional protections and audits to ensure complete reliability from an active backup.Looking at your account, I do see that your backup is currently not active, so I recommend running the Backblaze installer over your current installation to repair it, and inherit your original backup state so that our updates can check your backup.I do apologize, and I know it's not an ideal answer, but unfortunately, that is the extent of what we can tell you about what has happened.- - -I gave up escalating at this point and just decided these aren’t trusted anymore.The files in question are four year old at this point so it’s hard for me conclusively state, so I guess there might be a perfect storm of that specific file being deleted because it was due to expire before upgraded to “keep history forever”, but I don’t think it’s super likely, and I absolutely would expect them to have telemetry about that in any case.If anyone from Backblaze stumbles upon it and wants to escalate/reinvestigate, the support ID is #1181161.
notrealyme123: Thank you for sharing this. A non-persistent backup service is on the same level as a zombie-insurance provider.
yard2010: Use restic with resticprofile and you won't need anything else. Point it to a Hetzner storagebox, the best value you can get. Don't trust fisher price backup plans
dgellow: Reader mode?
Tempest1981: Parent is using "backuped" to mean "likely in some cloud (latest version)". And that may explain why BB excludes .git folders.You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history", I believe? Another important consideration.
gilrain: > You are using it to mean "maintaining full version history", I believe?No, they are using it to mean “backed up”. Like, “if this data gets deleted or is in any way lost locally, it’s still backed remotely (even years later, when finally needed)”.I’m astonished so many people here don’t know what a backup is! No wonder it’s easy for Backblaze to play them for fools.
monooso: Unlimited means without limits or restrictions.If a company uses the word unlimited to describe their service, but then attempts to weasel out of it via their T&Cs, that doesn't constitute a disagreement over the meaning of the word unlimited. It just means the company is lying.
swiftcoder: From a philosophical standpoint, I agree, but it terms of service providers "unlimited" has always pretty much always been synonymous with "unmetered" (i.e. we don't charge you for traffic, but we will still throttle you if you are affecting service reliability for other customers)
4ggr0: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
noisy_boy: 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.
corndoge: 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.
notrealyme123: Selfhosting Offsite is hard. Accessing services via standard protocols like ssh/webdav and just pushing your encrypted blobs there is a good middle ground. They can't control what you upload, and you can easily point your end-point somewhere else if you need to move.
hiisukun: I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do? Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files they can 'see' just get magically backed up.It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see), that's the same ugly situation.
politelemon: I'd like to apologise to everyone for this situation. It's very likely because I've just started using it recently.
donatj: I can almost almost understand the logic behind not backing up OneDrive/Dropbox. I think it's bad logic but I can understand where it's coming from.Not backing up .git folders however is completely unacceptable.I have hundreds of small projects where I use git track of history locally with no remote at all. The intention is never to push it anywhere. I don't like to say these sorts of things, and I don't say it lightly when I say someone should be fired over this decision.
embedding-shape: > Alas, "isn't so developed" applies to the USWow, I knew that was generally true, didn't know it was true for internet access in the US too, how backwards...> A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_capI think most are familiar with throttling because most (all?) phone plans have some data cap at one point, but I don't think I've heard of any broadband connections here with data caps, that wouldn't make any sense.
adithyassekhar: I don’t think this is the right way to see this.Why should a file backup solution adapt to work with git? Or any application? It should not try to understand what a git object is.I’m paying to copy files from a folder to their servers just do that. No matter what the file is. Stay at the filesystem level not the application level.
noirscape: I'm not saying Backblaze should adapt to git; the issue isn't application related (besides git being badly configured by default; there's a solution with git gc, it's just that git gc basically never runs).It's that to back up a folder on a filesystem, you need to traverse that folder and check every file in that folder to see if it's changed. Most filesystem tools usually assume a fairly low file count for these operations.Git, rather unusually, tends to produce a lot of files in regular use; before packing, every commit/object/branch is simply stored as a file on the filesystem (branches only as pointers). Packing fixes that by compressing commit and object files together, but it's not done by default after a clone. Iterating over a .git folder can take a lot of time in a place that's typically not very well optimized (since most "normal" people don't have thousands of tiny files in their folders that contain sprawled out application state.)The correct solution here is either for git to change, or for Backblaze to implement better iteration logic (which will probably require special handling for git..., so it'd be more "correct" to fix up git, since Backblaze's tools aren't the only ones with this problem.)
Semaphor: How do you do that?My naive idea: Download 100 TB every 3 month to a 2nd device, create a list of files restored, validate checksums with the original machine, make a list of files differing and missing, check which ones are supposed to be missing? That sounds like a full time job.
nayhel89: I have the same experience with Backblaze. 3 years ago I tried to restore my files from Backblaze, using their desktop client.First thing I noticed is that if it can't download a file due to network or some other problem then it just skips it. But you can force it to retry by modifying its job file which is just an SQLite DB. Also it stores and downloads files by splitting them into small chunks. It stores checksums of these chunks, but it doesn't store the complete checksum of the file, so judging by how badly the client is written I can't be sure that restored files are not corrupted after the stitching.Then I found out that it can't download some files even after dozens of retries because it seems they are corrupted on Backblaze side.But the most jarring issue for me is that it mangled all non-ascii filenames. They are stored as UTF-8 in the DB, but the client saves them as Windows-1252 or something. So I ended up with hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like фикац, and I can't just re-encode these names back, because some characters were dropped during the process.I wanted to write a script that forces Backblaze Client to redownload files, logs all files that can't be restored, fixes the broken names and splits restored files back into chunks to validate their checksums against the SQLite DB, but it was too big of a task for me, so I just procrastinated for 3 years, while keeping paying monthly Backblaze fees because it's sad to let go of my data.I wonder if they fixed their client since then.
ape4: Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte
Dylan16807: > Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.Not important here because backblaze only has to match the storage of your single device. Plus some extra versions but one year multiplied by upload speed is also a tractable amount.
hypercube33: If they limit the rate of speed it's technically limited which really makes me wonder how they legally can say these things. I guess it means in a lot of cases it's like Comcast where they also limit the data a month perhaps but dang.
dboreham: In the language of marketing (in the USA at least) the word "unlimited" means "limited".
baq: if I can't read TFA because of its formatting it isn't tangential
Dylan16807: Worst case scenario you copy the text out. It's worth complaining sometimes, but yes it's tangential.
Neil44: The issue with a client app backing up dropbox and onedrive folders on your computer is the files on demand feature, you could sync a 1tb onedrive to your 250gb laptop but it's OK because of smart/selective sync aka files on demand. Then backblaze backup tries to back the folder up and requests a download of every single file and now you have zero bytes free, still no backup and a sick laptop. You could oauth the backblaze app to access onedrive directly, but if you want to back your onedrive up you need a different product IMO.
Dylan16807: Unless it does something very weird it won't trigger all those files to download at the same time. That shouldn't be a worry.And, as a separate note, they shouldn't be balking at the amount of data in a virtualized onedrive or dropbox either considering the user could get a many-terabyte hard drive for significantly less money.
bayindirh: > Unless it does something very weird it won't trigger all those files to download at the same time. That shouldn't be a worry.The moment you call read() (or fopen() or your favorite function), the download will be triggered. It's a hook sitting between you and the file. You can't ignore it.The only way to bypass it is to remount it over rclone or something and use "ls" and "lsd" functions to query filenames. Otherwise it'll download, and it's how it's expected to work.
SomeHacker44: What software/workflow do you use for this Linux to B2 backup please?
Zetaphor: rclone on a cron job
bayindirh: The font is dark enough, yet the weight is too light. Hairline or ultrathin or something. It's eye straining.
