Backups software written by Claude? No thanks.

I've used enough Claude coded applications that I wouldn't trust that with a backup, unless it had extensive tests along with it.

If I backup a file, I need to read that file. The rest is in the management layer underneath that file.

Seems simple enough to do for Backblaze, no?

Good point (I’m assuming you’re right here and it trusts file metadata and doesn’t read files it’s already backed up?)

It would still happen with the first backup - or first connection of the cloud drive - though, which isn’t a great post-setup new user experience. It probably drove complaints and cancellations.

I feel like I’ve accidentally started defending the concept of not backing up these folders, which I didn’t really intend to. I’d also want these backed up. I’m just thinking out loud about the reasons the decision was made.

> I know you haven’t technically said that, but that’s what it sounds like.

Yes, I didn't technically said that.

> It sounds like you are arguing it is impossible to backup files in Dropbox in any reasonable way, and therefore nobody should backup their cloud files.

I don't argue neither, either.

What I said is with "on demand file download", traditional backup software faces a hard problem. However, there are better ways to do that, primary candidate being rclone.

You can register a new application ID for your rclone installation for your Google Drive and Dropbox accounts, and use rclone as a very efficient, rsync-like tool to backup your cloud storage. That's what I do.

I'm currently backing up my cloud storages to a local TrueNAS installation. rclone automatically hash-checks everything and downloads the changed ones. If you can mount Backblaze via FUSE or something similar, you can use rclone as an intelligent MITM agent to smartly pull from cloud and push to Backblaze.

Also, using RESTIC or Borg as a backup container is a good idea since they can deduplicate and/or only store the differences between the snapshots, saving tons of space in the process, plus encrypting things for good measure.

You can't trust size and modification time all the time, though mdate is a better indicator, it's not foolprooof. The only reliable way will be checksumming.

Interestingly, rclone supports that on many providers, but to be able to backblaze support that, it needs to integrate rclone, connect to the providers via that channel and request checks, which is messy, complicated, and computationally expensive. Even if we consider that you won't be hitting API rate limits on the cloud provider.

The problem is, downloading files and disk management is not in your control, that part is managed by the cloud client (dropbox, google drive, et. al) transparently. The application accessing the file is just waiting akin to waiting for a disk spin up.

The filesystem is a black box for these software since they don't know where a file resides. If you want control, you need to talk with every party, incl. the cloud provider, a-la rclone style.

I think you might be confusing Backblaze reading files and how Dropbox/OneDrive/Nextcloud/etc. work. NC doesn't enable this by default (I don't think), but Windows calls it virtual file support. There is no avoiding filling the upload buffer, because Backblaze has zero control over how Dropbox downloads files. When Backblaze requests that a file be opened and read, Windows will ask Dropbox or whatever to open the file for it, and to read it. How that is done is up to whatever handles the virtual files. To Backblaze, your Dropbox folder is a normal directory with all that that entails, so Backblaze thinks that it can just zip through the directory and it'll read data from disk, even though that isn't really what's happening. I had to exclude my Nextcloud directory from my Duplicati backups for precisely this reason -- my Nextcloud is hosted on my server, and Duplicati was sending it so many requests it would cause my server to start sending back error 500s.

And no, my server isn't behind cloudflare, primarily because I don't have $200 to throw at them to allow me to proxy arbitrary TCP/UDP ports through their network, and I don't know how to tell CF "Hey, only proxy this traffick but let me handle everything else" (assuming that's even possible given that the usual flow is to put your entire domain behind them).

Maybe it'll, maybe it won't, but it'll cycle all files in the drive and will stress everything from your cloud provider to Backblaze, incl. everything in between; software and hardware-wise.