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Comment by stuartd | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze is great, but it’s not a replacement for time machine (and I use both).

Being able to buy a new Mac and make it into an exact copy of the old Mac by using time machine is amazing - I’ve done it a few times over the years, and it still impresses me every time. Plus I have time machine backups from 2011 which I occasionally browse to see what my kids were up to then.

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I found out the hard way that Backblaze, despite their claims of "...automatically back up all your files including documents, photos, music, movies, and more. It’s that easy.", do not back up .dmg files (among others) by default. Which seems to be a huge omission considering the numerous use cases outside of just application installers.

I'm going ot go out on a limb and say that for the majority of users, any dmg they have is a software installer they could easily redownload. so a waste to backup

I'm surprised that backblaze doesn't checksum the files on the user's computer to see if they already have it on their servers to avoid duplicate uploads.

The first time that backfires, though…

They apparently do but only within a users computer (or account, I don't remember). I would be pretty uncomfortable they comparing my files checksum to a master list of sorts

This is exactly what Dropbox does: they hash a file, compare with all known hashes, and deduplicate accordingly. The file is then encrypted with the hash of its contents.

Dropbox had to quit doing this 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478567#2478608

Apparently Dropbox notices they already have that file, and instead of you uploading it they just make it appear in your account.

That is very disappointing. Do they block ISO files too?

I don’t think it’s a matter of blocking, they’re just filtered by default. You can edit the filter list though so those files are backed up, and that’s what I do.

If I had known about their filter list, I would've done exactly that. But their implication that everything was backed up from the beginning by default is what got me.

ISO files are included in that filter list, among other files like VMs and such. Seems like a massive exclusion net to cast when claiming everything is backed up.

Backblaze has a bunch of sheisty rules put in place because they're afraid of supporting data hoarders, and want to minimize the amount of space users take as part of their 'unlimited' plan, so I am not surprised.

Nothing is being blocked. They have a default exclusion list which works very well for the overwhelming majority of users. It prevents people spending forever backing up large downloads that they can just get newer versions of.

Removing these exclusions is very easy and obvious.

No need to go on a limb, .dmg files are usually software installers. But if I'm paying for a backup service that claims to back everything up, I want them to do exactly that, regardless of whether it can be re-downloaded or not (which takes additional time, not to mention figuring out what was missing from the supposed "everything" backup in the first place).

Go into the settings and remove it from the exclude list then. Storing a billion copies of Spotify.dmg is very wasteful

How about just not claiming to backup everything in the first place if it isn’t the default case?

Complain to their support rather than not even open the settings panel before complaining on "Hacker" news, come on

You are a different target market, always check for silly normie settings

The majority of users have no backups at all. The ones that do either use one of the big three cloud syncing things (Google Drive, iCloud Drive, OneDrive) or use a local backup (TimeMachine). Everything else is just a niche. (unless you want to pull in corporate users)

Time machine isn't that great as a backup system and has issues. Carbon copy cloner is a better system to create snapshots to restore to as a local back up system IMO.

Why is TimeMachine not great? „Has issues“ can be said about pretty much every software out there …

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