Backblaze has stopped backing up your data

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

So what are HN’s favorite alternatives?

Preferably cheap and rclone compatible.

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

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

Meanwhile, Backblaze still happily backups up the 100TB+ I have on various hard drives with my Mac Pro.

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.

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.

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?

rhey alao stopped taking my cc and email me on a no+reply email about it like they dont want to get paid

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.

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.