The ATP podcast talked about this very topic today!
The Positive Effect of Enthusiasm This link should take you right to the start of the discussion, if it doesn’t work it’s about 40 minutes into the episode.
They mentioned in this segment of the show that Backblaze is now backing up iCloud files again.
Also verified by this blog post from Backblaze that they linked to in the show notes.
“We’ve successfully added support for iCloud Drive and Google Drive by working within those platforms’ models.”
So I ran my little experiment again and low and behold, the iCloud files are there now. Including a file I created today to test. This must have been a very recent change because it was only 2 weeks ago when I ran this same experiment with Backblaze. The blog post is from April 17th and the file I created for the first test was from April 13th.
I’m still not sure I can trust them, but I do like the fact that they listened to the outcry and made it work for iCloud and Google Drive. I’m still going to kick the tires with Arq and see how they compare.
I am glad they fixed the issue, but I will never use them again. To the best of my knowledge, they never communicated that iCloud files were not being backed up. Many of their customers, like me, assumed that our critical files were protected. I could have lost thousands of important files. Fortunately, I had two separate external backups in addition to BackBlaze. Even so, they have lost my trust. It appears they would never have addressed the issue had it not been for the public outcry, bad press, and cancellations. If my interpretation is correct, BackBlaze is not a company with whom I wish to entrust my data or do business.
From skimming this thread, seems like Arq and iDrive are what most people are going to for replacing Backblaze. For my situation of having college kids with Macbook Airs a state away, which one seems best for “set it and forget it”? Backblaze had been perfect for this.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I know of two companies that went out of business after a major data loss. One was a small software developer that lost everything on their IBM midrange, then discovered that their logs were wrong and they had not made a good backup in 6 months.
The second was a company that was using a tape drive from a company that had gone out of business. And they did not a copy of the software needed to recover the data from their tapes.
Both will do this. From my experience, it might be easier to restore the files from iDrive. If your college children are tech savvy, either works. You will need to check how many can be added to one account. From my memory serves me, you will need a separate Arq license on each computer. iDrive, you will need to check.
I have no intention of trusting Backblaze again. In my view, they got caught when this started getting steam on a few podcasts and then “magically” found a solution. Orrrrr…they got caught trying to save resources by not backing up a lot of peoples’ stuff.
Yes, ATP mentioned the Backblaze saga. I sent them feedback immediately after I got to the end of that segment, pointing out that what they quoted from Backblaze about iCloud is only half the story.
You say your iCloud Drive files are backed up. Are all of your iCloud Drive files actually backed up, or are you only looking in your Documents folder?
Because I and others have checked and confirmed that stuff in Documents (and Desktop) is being backed up, but stuff in all other parts of iCloud Drive (e.g. the default folders for Pages, Numbers, etc) is not being backed up.
I have asked Backblaze (on Reddit) to clarify this but their ‘damage control’ extended to only a single day of posts there so my questions have been unanswered.
When I get the energy I will open an actual support request with them.
I have just cancelled my Backblaze billing which was due to renew in a few days. Taking advantage of the Arq Premium trial to test. My Mac is fully backed up and my husband’s machine is currently backing up as I type. We will be over the 1TB storage on Premium so it will be interesting to see how much we are charged extra over and above the 1TB.
For other Arq users, how often are you scheduling the Arq backup? I noticed the default is every hour and are you retaining any backups?
99% sure it’s $6/TB for overage. Which isn’t bad, as long as you factor in some extra for versioning.
If you have a lot of files, every hour is likely going to be overkill. I’d wait until you get your initial backup done, and see how long an incremental backup takes after that. For me, I think the incremental backup was taking over an hour for a large number of files.
I backup to Backblaze B2 on the hour, and to a local drive on the half hour.
I don’t have a ton of data because I don’t backup music and movies. I keep files for 2 to 4 years by creating a new “bucket” and starting a fresh backup every 2 years or so. Right now I have files going back to 2021 and will probably delete that backup early next year.
I’m getting a bit confused as to whether the issue is backing up its from the cloud or from peoples Macs.
Lots of my Mac computing decisions revolve around the need to have all files on my main iMac so it can be backed up to Backblaze. So I don’t optimise iCloud or iCloud photos storage for this reason.
As I understand it, this recent controversy is that Backblaze is now not backing up iCloud Drive files even though they are stored on my Mac.
So I am confused when people start talking about issues with Backblaze not backing up files that are stored only in the Cloud, Siracusa on ATP talked lots about placeholders for files in the Cloud but I didn’t think Backblaze had ever backed up these files.
Are there two actually problems here that people are discussing:
a) the ongoing issue that Backblaze has never backed up things in the CLoud, and people are saying there are alternatives (Arq and Parachute can do this)
b) Backblaze no longer even backs up things on your Mac that are also in the Cloud
Or am I missing iCloud Drive vs iCloud nuances? I am talking just about iCloud Drive as these are what I want to backup.
They DO back up files in ~/Documents even if that is synced to iCloud. They DO NOT back up things in, e.g. [iCloud]/Pages. That alone is confusing as heck.
As far as I know the above is true whether or not the files are local.
As Sircacusa said on ATP, there does exist a mechanism for applications to request an online-only file to be downloaded. Furthermore, I located a WWDC21 video that covered File Providers that clearly stated that software does not even need to be aware of these files being special as the OS would transparently block the read until it had downloaded the file.
Now, it may be that, as Siracusa said, this download process is not reliable. But then, why wouldn’t Backblaze just say that?
And in either case… how are they backing up files from my Document folder anyway?
There is more to this story. Either Backblaze don’t want to let on what the true story is or their PR staff have no idea.
The WWDC21 video was entitled “Dataless files” and stated
After listening to Siracusa on ATP I’m much more forgiving of Backblaze for not attempting to back up files that are in cloud services served by the File Providers framework.
HOWEVER
There is zero excuse for the really, really, really poor job they did in communicating the change. For a backup service, clearly and loudly communicating a change in what gets backed up is just as important as actually backing up data.
I agree there could be good reasons they didn’t, and I appreciated John’s explanation. But like you said the communication from them was awful.
That being said, I find it very odd Backblaze struggled to do this and Arq has no problem. To be clear, I’m speaking of files I have marked to remain downloaded on my hard drive. So maybe Arq just trusts that I know what I’m doing.
It’s ridiculous that Backblaze claimed they couldn’t back up files I have permanently marked to be downloaded.
Yeah. The “we can’t back up data you don’t have downloaded” reason makes sense. “We can’t back up data you have downloaded, because it’s stored somewhere else too” doesn’t.
I would imagine that it’s substantially harder to do. Arq prioritized it. Backblaze didn’t. But Arq is also a general-purpose backup client with a ton of fiddly settings, and charges you a significant fee for the app plus a bytes-based fee for any storage they provide. Backblaze is the opposite. It’s a single-purpose client built as a frontend for an “all you can eat” backup bucket.
I’d respect Backblaze taking the position that “we back up everything that’s on your computer. Anything that’s not downloaded isn’t on your computer, so it’s not included.” All they’d have to do is ask the File Provider API if a file was local, and if so, back it up. If not, don’t.
And the first time they didn’t back up a file, they could pop up a warning that files not stored locally wouldn’t be backed up. That’s all that would need to be done for users to have been informed, and to make their own decisions.
Arq doesn’t backup iCloud files by default. You have to specify (in Options) what you want it to do when it encounters these “dataless (“cloud-only”) files”.
Apple continues to modify the Mac’s file system and today many items that were located in ~Library are now hidden or located somewhere else using firmlinks. I can see how this could cause problems for third party developers, as well as users.
For example, I recently discovered that the Apple Reminders app on my Mac was frozen. Reminders weren’t syncing and I could not add any manually. A solution I found online involved deleting a file in the ~Library/Reminders directory which no longer exists in the Library folder. The only other solution suggested was to create a new user account, or reinstall macOS.