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We are going to drop blackblaze over this

We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze”

We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable

If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so I can install you on my parents machine and never worry about it again. You decided saving on cloud storage was worth breaking this promise. Bad bad call

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.

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

As an FYI you can recover from force pushes to GitHub using the GitHub UI[0] or their API[1]. And if you force push to one of your own machines you can use the reflog[2]. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78872853 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48110879 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24236065

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.

They 100% should have communicated this change, absolutely unacceptable to change behavior without an extremely visible warning.

However, backing up these kinds of directories has always been ill-defined. Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. files are not actually present locally - at least not until you access the file or it resides to cache it. Should backup software force you to download all 1TB+ of your cloud storage? What if the local system is low on space? What if the network is too slow? What if the actually data is in an already excluded %AppData% location.

Similar issue with VCS, should you sync changes to .git every minute? Every hour? When is .git in a consistent state?

IMO .git and other VCS should just be synced X times per day and it wait for .git to be unchanged for Y minutes before syncing it. Hell, I bet Claude could write a special Git aware backup script.

But Google Drive and Dropbox mount points are not real. It’s crazy to expect backup software to handle that unless explicitly advertised.

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.

Weirdly, reading this had the net impact of me signing up to Backblaze.

I had no idea that it was such a good bargain. I used to be a Crashplan user back in the day, and I always thought Backblaze had tiered limits.

I've been using Duplicati to sync a lot of data to S3's cheapest tape-based long term storage tier. It's a serious pain in the ass because it takes hours to queue up and retrieve a file. It's a heavy enough process that I don't do anything nearly close to enough testing to make sure my backups are restorable, which is a self-inflicted future injury.

Here's the thing: I'm paying about $14/month for that S3 storage, which makes $99/year a total steal. I don't use Dropbox/Box/OneDrive/iCloud so the grievances mentioned by the author are not major hurdles for me. I do find the idea that it is silently ignoring .git folders troubling, primarily because they are indeed not listed in the exclusion list.

I am a bit miffed that we're actively prevented from backing up the various Program Files folders, because I have a large number of VSTi instruments that I'll need to ensure are rcloned or something for this to work.

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.

Some companies are in the business of trust. These companies NEED to understand that trust is somewhat difficult to earn, but easy to lose and nearly IMPOSSIBLE to regain. After reading this article I will almost certainly never use or recommend Backblaze. (And while I don't use them currently, they WERE on the list of companies I would have recommended due to the length of their history.)

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.

It looks like the following line has been added to /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml which excludes my Dropbox folder from getting backed up:

</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 Files). I don't see an option to show hidden files/folders in the Backblaze Restore app.

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.

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.

The fact that they’d exclude “.git” and other things without being transparent about it is scandalous

I had a back and forth with them about .git folders a couple of years back and their defence was something like "we are a consumer product - not a professional developer product. Pay for our business offering"

But if that's truly their stance, then they are being deceptive about their non-business offering at the point of sale.

EDIT - see my other comment where I found the actual email

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.

> 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.

A lot of personal “nerd” options are listed in the thread (and like restic/borg are really good!) but nothing really centralized. Backblaze was a great fire and forget option for deploying as a last resort backup. I don’t think there are any competitors in that space if you are looking for continuous backup, centralized management and good pricing that doesn’t require talking to a salesperson to get things going and is pay as you go.

Everyone is acting like this is obviously wrong, and they clearly should have communicated the change and made it visible in the exclusion settings.

However, there is a very good reason for not backing up what is in effect network attached storage. Particularly for OneDrive, as it often adds company SharePoint sites you open files from as mountpoints under your OneDrive folder (business OneDrive is basically a personal Sharepoint site under the hood). Trying to back them up would result in downloading potentially hundreds of gigabytes of files to the desktop only to them reupload them to OneDrive. That would also likely trigger data exfiltration flags at your corporate IT.

A Dropbox/OneDrive/Drive/etc folder is a network mount point by another name. (Many of them are not implemented as FUSE mounts or equivalent OS API, not folders on disk.) It's fundamentally reasonable for software that promises backing up the local disk not to backup whatever network drives you happen to have signed in/mounted.

AFAICT Backblaze does back up .git directories. I have many repos backed up. The .git directory is hidden by default in the web UI (along with all other hidden files), but there is an option to show them.

You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.

I just checked the Backblaze app and found that .iso was on the exclusion list. Just in case anyone here is as dumb as I...

I highly recommend switching to something more like Arq and then using whatever backend storage that you want. There are probably some other open source ways to do it, etc, but Arq scratches the itch of having control over your backups and putting them where you want with a GUI to easily configure/keep track of what is going on.

Maybe there's something newer/better now (and I bought lifetime licenses of it long ago), but it works for me.

That said, I use Arq + Backblaze storage and I think my monthly bill is very low, like under $5. Though I haven't backed-up much media there yet, but I do have control over what is being backed-up.

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.

It's ironic that Backblaze themselves wrote a blog post a couple of years ago explaining why Dropbox isn't enough as a backup service and you need Backblaze as an additional layer of protection: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-wrong-with-google-drive...

That aged well...

Dropbox is literally the worst anmong all. For every little feature, like setting a password it requires upgrading your already paid plan. It’s slow and offers nothing.

I put a Nextcloud snap on a VPS in the same city. Fast and no limitations.

I think this is a risk with anything that promotes itself as "unlimited", or otherwise doesn't specify concrete limits. I'm always sceptical of services like this as it feels like the terms could arbitrarily change at any point, as we've found out here.

(as a side note, it's funny to see see them promoting their native C app instead of using Java as a "shortcut". What I wouldn't give for more Java apps nowadays)

For those looking for something at a decent price for up to 5TB, take a look at JottaCloud, which is supported by rclone, and then you can layer restic on top for a complete backup solution.

JottaCloud is "unlimited" for $11.99 a month (your upload speed is throttled after 5TB).

I've been using them for a few years for backing up important files from my NAS (timemachine backups, Immich library, digitised VHS's, Proxmox Backup Server backups) and am sitting at about 3.5TB.

Both Dropbox and OneDrive default to "online first" for most users (including Dropbox on macOS which has moved itself into File Provider). It is a technically sound and sane default for Backblaze to ignore these mounts, especially given their policy not to backup network drives. They really should have informed legacy users about it.

Technically speaking, imagine you're iterating over a million files, and some of them are 1000x slower than the others, it's not Backblaze's fault that things have gone this way. Avoiding files that are well-known network mount points is likely necessary for them to be reliable at what they do for local files.

It's important to recognize that these new OS-level filesystem hooks are slow and inefficient - the use case is opening one file and not 10,000 - and this means that things you might want to do (like recursive grep) are now unworkably slow if they don't fit in some warmed-up cache on your device.

To fix it, Backblaze would need a "cloud to cloud" backup that is optimized for that access pattern, or a checkbox (or detection system) for people who manage to keep a full local mirror in a place where regular files are fast. This is rapidly becoming a less common situation. I do, however, think that they should have informed people about the change.

I think this should not be attributed to malice, however unfortunate. I had also developed some sync app once and onedrive folders were indeed problematic, causing cyclic updates on access and random metadata changes for no explicit reason.

Complete lack of communication (outside of release notes, which nobody really reads, as the article too states) is incompetence and indeed worrying.

Just show a red status bar that says "these folders will not be backed up anymore", why not?

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.

Unrelated to the main point, and probably too late to matter, but you can access repo activity logs via Github's API. I had to clean up a bad push before and was able to find the old commit hash in the logs, then reset the branch to that commit, similarly to how you'd fix local messes using reflog.

WJW. This sort of blanket policy change should be called-out in ALL CAPS, bold-faced, and underlined as it changes one of the implicit assumptions with the service's execution.

The technical and performance implications of backing-up cloud mount-points are real, but that's zero excuse for the way this change was communicated.

This is a royal screw-up in corporate communications and I would not be surprised if it makes a huge negative impact in their bottom line and results in a few terminations.

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

Yeah this is the core problem with how most backup tools handle Dropbox / iCloud / OneDrive now. Those folders aren’t really “normal files” anymore — a lot of the time they’re just placeholders, and touching them can trigger downloads or other weird behavior depending on the client. That said, just skipping the entire folder is kind of the worst possible outcome. Backup should be predictable. If something is on disk, it should get backed up. If it’s not, you should at least know that, not find out later when you need it. I’ve been working on Duplicati (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati) and one thing we’ve tried to be careful about is not silently ignoring data. If something can’t be backed up, it should be visible to the user.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about setting up duplicati.

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.

Was about to sign up for backblaze and came across this. Thank you for sharing. Where I sync my files to should not be a concern of my back up provider. I need plain and simple back up that isn’t opinionated.

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.

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.

Nobody mentioning HDD prices? Disk prices had ~doubled over the last half a year.

I've been very content moving away from OneDrive/GDrive to a personal NAS setup with Synology/Ugreen. You can access a shared drive/photo drive and use Tailscale to mount your volume from anywhere.

I've also configured encrypted cloud backups to a different geographic region and off-site backups to a friend's NAS (following the 3-2-1 backup rule). It does help having 2.5Gb networking as well, but owning your data is more important in the coming age of sloppy/degrading infrastructure and ransomware attacks.

Time Machine has a similar issue. OneDrive silently corrupted hundreds of my files, replacing their content with binary zeros while retaining the original file size. I have Time Machine backups going back years, but it turns out TM does not backup Cloud files, even if you have them pinned to local storage! So I lost sales those files, including some irreplaceable family photos

I’ve added restic to my backup routine, pointed at cloud files and other critical data

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.

I've been on Backblaze for a few years now, ever since Crashplan decided it didn't want individuals to use its service any more.

It's always been just janky. A bad app that constantly throws low disk warnings and opens a webpage if you click anywhere on it. Being told the password change dialogue in the app doesn't work and having to use the website etc etc.

Just all round not an experience that inspires confidence. In comparison, Crashplan just worked.

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.

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

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.

I assume they do some form of de-duplication across all files in their system. Most windows system files, and binaries would be duplicates, and only need to be stored once. I'm relatively sure this is true for most other systems, like Linux, MacOS, etc. Why not just back everything up for everyone?

It really shouldn't take up much more space or bandwidth.

Personally: I had to go in and edit the undisclosed exclusions file, and restart the backup process. I've got quite a few gigabytes of upload going now.

Why tho? Doesn't Backblaze sell cloud storage, and more files you backup the more profit they make? Or I misunderstand what it is?

fwiw, the .git files are being backed... but..

1. You have to check "show hidden files" in the web ui (or the app) when restoring and

2. If you restore a folder that has a '.git' folder inside of it (by checking it in the ui) but you DID NOT check "show hidden files", then the '.git' (or any other hidden file/folder) does not get restored.

Which is.. unexpected.. if I check a folder to restore, I expect *everything* inside of it to be restored.

But the dropbox folder is, in fact, not there. Which is a surprise to me as well. :(

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.

I dropped them when they silently dropped support for veracrypt/truecrypt drives: https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1ol0pgf/backblaz...

They're really proving lately that they are a company that can't be trusted with your data.

Having option to not do that is great, we did it for our backup system, because our cloud stores were backed up separately.

Doing it silently is disaster.

Making excludes doing it hidden from UI is outright malice, because it's far too easy to assume those would just be added as normal excludes and then go "huh, I probably just removed those from excludes when I set it up".

At least at the enterprise level, I've never seen anyone use Backblaze for this. You want to use a cloud level backup like Rubrik/Veeam/Cohesity. Trying to back up cloud based files locally is a fools errand. Granted it sucks that they dropped this without proper communication, but it's already a bad solution.

So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?

Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.

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

I would love to see a summary of all of the various options being bandied about.

There are 2 components in my mind: the backup "agent" (what runs on your laptop/desktop/server) and the storage provider (which BB is in this context).

What do people recommend for the agent? (I understand some storage providers have their own agents) For Linux/MacOS/Windows.

What do people recommend for the storage provider? Let's assume there are 1TB of files to be backed up. 99.9% don't change frequently.

Isn't it challenging to back up a directory that's being synced with a 3rd party service? Especially if more than one person may be working on one of those files in OneDrive or DropBox?

Thanks for publicising. I recently decided not to renew my Backblaze in favour of 'self hosting' encrypted backups outside the US. But I was horrified to learn that my git repos may not have been backed up, nor my Dropbox, whose subscription I also recently cancelled. Good riddance.

My experience using restic has been excellent so far, snapshots take 5 mins rather than 30 mins with backblaze's Mac client. I just hope I can trust it…

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

Glad I switched from their personal computer backup to using restic + B2 a while ago. Every night my laptop and homelab both back up to each other and to B2. It takes less than a minute and I have complete control over the exclusions and retention. And I can easily switch off B2 to something else if I want.

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.

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.

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.

I discovered Backblaze through their disk reliabilty posts here on HN and became a customer for a family laptop many years ago.

Now I discover again through HN, that it's time to find another solution.

> 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 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

They need to be reminded they are a utility. It's not up to them to have an opinion about my data. "Utilities" with an opinion carry a lot more liability.

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.

Thank you. I will also immediately stop using backblaze. Its purpose is to independently back up my hard drive. Not to pick and choose.

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.

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'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?

> 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Longtime backblaze user. Time to vibecode myself a replacement.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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

git reflog is your "backup". it contains every commit and the resulting log (DAG) going back 90 days. If you do blow away a remote commit, don't fret, it's in your reflog

  # list all of the remote HEAD commits you've ever worked with 
  git reflog origin/master

  # double check it's the right one
  git log -5 origin/master@{2}

  # reset the remote to the right one
  git push -f origin $(git rev-parse origin/master@{2}):master

  # (optional) reset your local branch
  git reset origin/master@{2}

  # at this point your local branch has time-traveled, but your working dir will be in the present state (e.g. all the relevant files will show as changed)

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.