I need it to capture local data, even though that local data is getting synced to Google Drive. Where we sync our data really has nothing to do with Backblaze backing up the endpoint. We don't wholly trust sync, that's why we have backup.
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.
I have no clue why people still use it and I'd cut my losses if I were you, either backup to the cloud or pull from it, not both at the same time like an absolute tictac.
This is an instance of someone familiar with complex file access patterns not understanding the normal use case for these services.
The people using these bidirectional sync services want last writer wins behavior. The mild and moderately technical people I work with all get it and work with it. They know how to use the UI to look for old versions if someone accidentally overwrites their file.
Your characterization as complete chaos with constant problems does not mesh with the reality of the countless low-tech teams I've seen use Dropbox type services since they were launched.
No, I'm not joking. We used to allow arbitrary paths in a cloud API I owned. Within about a month someone had figured out that the cost to store a single byte file was effectively zero, and they could encode arbitrary files into the paths of those things. It wasn't too long before there was a library to do it on Github. We had to put limits on it because otherwise people would store their data in the path, not the file.
Reason - to not overcomplicate or give appearance of nickel-and-diming
Would there be any engineering/management pushback on the customer side? "we have to write a tiny script", "this is non-standard" / "why are you the only ones who charge us for filenames?"
(have limited knowledge here)
You can 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.
If we remove the whole linux section and just ask "why not map a folder in Explorer" it's a reasonable question, probably even more reasonable in 2026 than in 2007. The network got faster and more reliable, and the dropbox access got slower.
But the moment that hits normal users, yeah, mess
It works perfectly fine as long as you keep how it works in mind, and probably most importantly don't have multiple users working directly on the same file at once.
I've been using these systems for over a decade at this point and never had a problem. And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.
“Every file is only ever written to from a single client, and will be asynchronously made available to all other clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you can safely switch to always writing to the file from a different client”.
:P
What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make sure it’s not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely hard to deal with because the backup systems don’t seem to be 100% reliable.
I think there are a lot of solutions these days that error on the side of claiming success.
That being said i understand how it works at a high level.
Managing exclusions is something to keep vaguely on top of (I've accidentally had a few VM disk images get backed up when I don't need/want them) but the default exclusions are all very reasonable.
It's set it and forget.
You will need to set it up for them, then you get an email (from borgbackup, not the client so it works when the client is not running) when a backup hasn't happened for a while.
As client there are more options now (like Vorta, from them), but I have had success with https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest and the Restic backend.
Set up your config to exclude common non-file dirs, or say "only `/Applications` and `Home` and that's about it. If it's a file then it's a file, and it will be synced up.
But I have no idea where the company currently sits on the spectrum from good actor to fully enshittified.
My dad had a file untouched in Dropbox for 2 years. He overwrote it 2 days prior to me trying to recover it from Dropbox/Backblaze. They said he couldn't access the version that was just overwritten because that was over 30 days old, which is not what the definition of 30-day history is....
Just because files are in bespoke folders, does NOT mean they are being backed up.
Example: I'm 1,016% over my OneDrive limit because I canceled my Microsoft 365 account due to their price hike to cover for AI costs. My laptop still pushes files there upon save thanks to Microsoft defaults (my desktop was moved to CachyOS long ago).
If I had been using Backblaze for backup, those files would not have been backed up.
Luckily, I'm a nerd and I'm way ahead of this (I moved away from OneDrive long ago and never deleted the files). Most folks aren't.
Backblaze should be alerting users when stuff isn't backed up. I've strongly considered their B2 offering for a big project. The fact that they changed this without proper notification has made me decide NOT to move forward.
My comment was pretty orthogonal to all the Backblaze stuff, which I realize now was confusing.
Now I need a new solution that will work for my parents
You can't connect to their Computer Backup service through third-party software.