[tushartyagi]

That's an interesting viewpoint to strike a balance between privacy and secrecy.

Can you shed some light on how you share the photos with non-technical family and friends, given that B2 has no app as such?

I have some experience with AWS/Azure and both of them do not support folders, and the workaround is to have slashes in the filename to create a virtual directory. Is it the same with B2?

[bad_user]

I'm only using B2 for backup and it's doing a fine job, since from what I understand it also does unlimited history of the files, so in case files get corrupted, theoretically I still have previous versions around.

I keep my photos on Dropbox too, which is how I share them with family, besides sending files over WhatsApp, which is popular these days. But they only provide the history of changes for 1 month, or 3 months for Pro. As has been said before, solutions like Dropbox are not reliable for doing backups without specialized software like Rclone or Arq Backup, that can keep a version history.

My archive is currently less than 150 GB, so B2 is really cheap. I also have an offline backup on a portable hard drive. The idea with backups is that if you have data you care about, then it's a good idea to have at least 2 backups in different locations, made via different software.

> I have some experience with AWS/Azure and both of them do not support folders, and the workaround is to have slashes in the filename to create a virtual directory. Is it the same with B2?

B2 has folders, you can navigate them in the online interface. That said the service doesn't have polished apps available, being a platform like S3. It has no desktop or mobile apps currently. Although if they survive, given its price, I'm sure apps will happen at some point.

[gizmo686]

B2 doesn't have folders.

The online interface simply assumes that a slash in the filename should be represented as a folder; and they encourage apps to do the same. I believe they also enforce a max distance between slashes that is smaller than the max filename length.

What this means is that their is no way to, for instance, query what the root directories are, short of listing all files.

If you have a directory, you can list its contents using a prefix search (although the prefix need not be a directory, and this will not just list the toplevel elements)

[brianwski]

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

>their is no way to, for instance, query what the root directories are, short of listing all files

This is not true! Try this from the b2.py command line:

b2.py ls <bucketName>

That would list all the top level folders. The APIs are designed to support two things: 1) listing all files, or 2) navigating and listing the contents of each folder.

[extra88]

> it also does unlimited history of the files

Yes, but you're paying for that storage. If you sync 100GB of photos then locally make a small EXIF data change to all of them and sync again, you're now paying for 200GB of storage. B2 has Lifecycle Rules [0] to help keep versions from getting out of control and the API has methods for handling versions for clients like rclone [1] to use.

B2 doesn't have it's own desktop app but 3rd party desktop apps like Cyberduck use the API work with B2.

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-lifecycle-rules/ [1] https://rclone.org/b2/#versions

[candiodari]

I would like to point out that given [1] in the US that means online services don't agree with your balance. Anything that is hosted is accessible to law enforcement, and potentially to anyone that has a legal disagreement with you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)