Here in Singapore the terminals work well! The latency has definitely gone down. Ironically the Japanese McDonald's website loads faster than the Singapore one... so they've got some work to do.
This article answers the question, "What does Backblaze back up?" Backblaze backs up all of your data across all of the user profiles that are on your computer as soon as you install the client.
Backblaze believes that you do not need to worry whether you selected all of the files that you care about, put any files in a different location on your computer, or added new files that may not be included in your online backup. Therefore, Backblaze automatically selects all of your data.
This is at best flat out wrong, at worst a blatant lie. But this was what I thought I was buying and paying for. Turns out you do have to worry!
Don't lie about other stuff you don't back up. Very disappointed in Backblaze.
This is very well put, and echoes my sentiments! I had installed Backblaze on my own home machine many, many years ago, and it has saved my bacon a few times. Since then I've also installed it on any family members' machines that required backup and recommended it to friends. And I've been happy to pay for the service.
The deal was that Backblaze backs things up and I don't have to worry about it. Learning that it does not back things up is a punch to the gut. I am familiar with the exclusions and I have a look at that list to make I'm not missing anything from my backups. I had always thought the exclusions list was exhaustive.
Excluding other files and folders without telling me about it breaks the deal. Dropbox is important to several of the users I installed it for. Ignoring .git folders is another one that affects me and I had not known about. Ouch.
I will now have to look for alternatives. It has to be easy to install, run seamlessly on non-technical users' machines and be reliable.
I find it hard to be think of a worse breach of trust for a backup service than not to back up files!
Hello, Jim from Backblaze here. I wanted to offer some insight into what happened with backing up cloud-synced folders.
It is true 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:
1. We wanted the backup client to be light on the system and only back up needed user-generated files.
2. 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 don't hesitate to reach out to me or our support team directly if you have any questions. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
As others have said, this is something that should have been communicated very clearly. The reason for using Backblaze is to have my data backed up, and not to worry about it. You say so yourself on your website.
Could you also provide an exhaustive list of items that are NOT being backed up, e.g. the .git folder? I can't find any reference to that anywhere on your website or in the app. What else is not being backed up? I know about the exclusion list in the app, which I have adjusted to suit my requirements, but you need to be clear, explicit and upfront about what you are not backing up. This is critical information.
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.
You should tell your support teams that, because when I asked them if local Google Drive files were excluded they affirmed, and directed me to instructions on how to dissolve my business account.
I'm not surprised that support was wrong, but I was somewhat surprised there was zero attempt at customer retention.
It is not entirely clear to me from reading TFA, but infer from its description and other comments here that Photo only works with RAW input files. Is this correct? Or can I use it on JPEGs?
No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly.
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
The article as written is entirely consistent with John Cochrane's style. I have been reading him off and on over the years so I think I have a decent baseline for comparison. It doesn't smell of AI to me.
If anything, even the included quotes from Refine don't smell much of typical AI, but maybe I am less discerning there. I did notice the em-dashes though!
Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in other shady business. It's detailed in the article... There is a personal component to it, but that's a very minor part of the article which documents the various misdeeds.
I had to go back and re read the article. This blog has a rather generic design on mobile, with one big glaring flaw: in the middle of the article there's a picture (I didn't look at this, I usually ignore images and this I've does a good job of blending into the dark background as part of the styling), a quote, a subscription button, and a button to leave a comment - all at a natural stopping point for a short blog post, which usually implies you've reached the end. It also happened to be at the bottom of my screen given the way I scrolled.
If you read it as I did initially, it simply looks like a post by someone pointing out that someone they don't like had some trouble.
Heh. I grew up writing C code and had real trouble adapting to Matlab's 1-based indexing. Much later I tried Python and was constantly confused by 0-based indexing.
I don't think one is better than the other but my mind is currently wired to see indexing with base 1.
Then there's Option Base 1 in VBA if you don't like the default behavior. Perfect for creating subtle off-by-one bugs.
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