Without notifying customers Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox – Any good alternatives to Backblaze?
Seems the downfall for Backblaze has begun. I discoverd this change recently because my mom was looking for a file that dropbox accidently deleted/overwrote and I thought let’s get that file from Backblaze backup – that’s why I pay backblaze for. To my surprise that file was not recoverable from Backblaze backups. I learned that this policy has changed few months ago and that Backblaze never informed us about this change.
Despite claiming to backup all your data, Backblaze quietly stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders – along with potentially many other things. A blogger too posted that they found out backblaze stopped backing .git folders which are required for your github. The user’s Onedrive folder (about 350GB data) was also missing from backblaze backup and backblaze simply didn’t notified it users.
I then searched hacker news and even this blog popped up. Lots of businesses and personal users have stopped using backblaze after this. If you read all those comments you’ll notice backblaze is now not a good provider for backing up your computer data. So I am looking for another paid/free alternative to Backblaze that allows dropbox/onedrive/google drive backups too.
On my personal Mac I have iCloud Drive syncing my desktop, and a while back iCloud ate a file I was working on. Backblaze had it captured, thankfully. But if they are going to exclude iCloud Drive synced folders, and sounds like that is their intention, Backblaze is useless to me.
This is very well put, and echoes my sentiments! I had installed Backblaze on my own home machine many, many years ago, and it has saved my bacon a few times. Since then I’ve also installed it on any family members’ machines that required backup and recommended it to friends. And I’ve been happy to pay for the service.
The deal was that Backblaze backs things up and I don’t have to worry about it. Learning that it does not back things up is a punch to the gut. I am familiar with the exclusions and I have a look at that list to make I’m not missing anything from my backups. I had always thought the exclusions list was exhaustive.
Excluding other files and folders without telling me about it breaks the deal. Dropbox is important to several of the users I installed it for. Ignoring .git folders is another one that affects me and I had not known about.
If you joined Backblaze today and looked at their list of file exclusions you would find no reference to Dropbox or OneDrive. No mention of Git either.
Here’s the thing, today they don’t back up Git or OneDrive. Who’s to say tomorrow they wont add to the list. Maybe some obscure file format that’s critical to your work flow. Or they will ignore a file extension that just happens be the same as one used by your DAW or 3D Modelling software. And they won’t tell you this. They wont even list it on their site.
File backup is a matter of trust. You are paying a monthly fee so that if and when things go wrong you can get your data back. By silently changing the rules, Back-blaze has not simply eroded my trust, but swept it away
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.