NR-backblaze

Natasha from Backblaze here. Fair criticism. This should have been communicated more directly.

For context, this was driven by changes on the Dropbox side in how synced files are handled, which affects how reliably they can be backed up. But even with that, it should have been surfaced much more clearly.

Totally fair. If you end up taking another look, happy to help.

Natasha from Backblaze here. This is a situation people rely on backups for, and I can understand how frustrating it is to run into this when you need a restore.

I also want to be clear, this wasn’t about saving on storage. It came from cases where backing up cloud-synced folders (like Dropbox) was leading to unreliable or incomplete restores because of how those files are managed under the hood.

When Dropbox began using reparse points for synced files, those files no longer behaved like standard local files. Because of that, Backblaze Computer Backup can’t reliably back them up or restore them. The current behavior is focused on ensuring we only back up data we can reliably restore, and we are actively exploring ways to better support Dropbox and data touched by other sync services.

Hello everyone. Natasha from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders. You are correct that we recently updated how Backblaze Computer Backup handles cloud-synced folders. This decision was driven by a consistent set of technical issues we were seeing at scale, most of them driven by updates created by third-party sync tools, including unreliable backups and incomplete restores when backing up files managed by third-party sync providers.

To give a bit more context on the “why”: these cloud storage providers now rely heavily on OS-level frameworks to manage sync state. On Windows, for example, files are often represented as reparse points via the Cloud Files API. While they can appear local, they are still system-managed placeholders, which makes it difficult to reliably back them up as standard on-disk files.

Moreover, we built our product in a way to not backup reparse points for two reasons:

We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files.

We wanted the service to be unlimited, so following reparse points would lead to us backing up tons of data in the cloud

We’ve made targeted investments where we can, for example, adding support for iCloud Drive by working within Apple’s model and supporting Google Drive, but extending that same level of support to third-party providers like Dropbox or OneDrive is more complex and not included in the current version.

We are currently exploring building an add-on that either follows reparse points or backs up the tagged data in another way.

We also hear you clearly on the communication gap. Both the sync providers and Backblaze should have been more proactive in notifying customers about a change with this level of impact. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.