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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

I feel that's a systemic problem with all consumer online-backup software: They other use the barest excuse to not back things up. At best, it's to optimize local resources for 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 main 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]

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[1] Along the lines of "We have your My Documents. Oh, you didn't manually add My Videos? That's your fault." Or in some cases, video file extensions are on the ignore list by default for no discernible reason.

[2] Currently a dollar or two a month for ~200gb. Anything that could be redownloaded from Steam is not included, and years of family videos are elsewhere in the care of other relatives.

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

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.