329
Backblaze silently redefines 'unlimited' backups and users discover it's not backing up DB and OD — as firm leans heavier into AI storage services, changes could signal shift away from home backups (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
59 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

DB = Dropbox, OD = Onedrive

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 0 points 6 months ago (18 children)

That's not surprising with all of the data hoarders abusing the unlimited backups to store hundreds of terabytes.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 18 child comments
    •
  • [–] 66 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    How is that abuse? "Unlimited" is a pretty audacious plan to offer. Maybe Backblaze shouldn't offer something impossible.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    The software only allows local drives to be backed up, but some people use workarounds to make it backup a large NAS or server.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    But that's not who is being targeted with the changes Backblaze has made. By silently excluding sync folders, they're casting a wide net and hoping it will catch those who use workarounds. It might, but in the process it reveals their comfort with deceptive business practices and harms users of the backup service who are not using workarounds.

    Are they boosting their AI business in anticipation of breaking encryption and then training their models on everyone's data? That's what I would assume of a company I no longer trust.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    About two weeks ago, Backblaze sent out an email

    Headlines are clickbait. Literally the first line in the article. What more can they do than send an email?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    The title is accurate.

    You just failed to read the article part the first ten words.

    However, roughly six months ago, Backblaze enacted a silent change that made its backup app stop uploading local data synced to "OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and others."

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    And I recall Backblaze stating that those users are a minority and aren't a big concern. I used to do that, but when I attempted to restore 7TB and it took well over a month to restore what I needed, I switched to other solutions.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    I'm asking as a genuine question, where or how should people backup large datastores? Also what counts as too large? I've heard Backblaze doesn't cover NAS so i wouldn't be able to backup my 2TB zfs RAID, but like is that too much?

    I want to do 3-2-1 for my homelab to preserve all pictures in my immich and the backups of my LXCs and VMs, but I'm just not sure how to go about it, and I was considering archives of those files + backblaze...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    A second offsite NAS with your friend? That's what I did when I grew out of my old synology. My new NAS capacity is noticeably impacted by things like frequent local snapshots but I don’t need to back those up remotely and it saves space.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Don't trust backblaze or any service that claims "unlimited".

    The overwhelming feedback I've seen is to "KISS" and use some combination of restic/borg/kopia and rclone to sync data or local backups to cloud storage like https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/.

    Restic/borg are more for whole system backups, where kopia is more for data (a central kopia server/repository can deduplicate and version data from multiple machines). Rclone is good for syncing local backups to cloud services, or perhaps e2ee synchronisation between machines (though it doesn't do versioning and multiple machines will cause problems).

    This is the most flexible, long-term, as you can just update the storage backend and transfer or re-upload everything as necessary.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    For a NAS, you can use Backblaze B2, but they certainly aren't the cheapest. B2 doesn't have the limitations that the personal and business plans have, but you pay by the TB.

    There are lots of cloud backup providers. Just make sure it supports the OS on your NAS. Any of them that claim to be unlimited will not truly be unlimited.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent