[nicolaslem]

I started using Backblaze B2 on servers for storing database backups and so far it's been great.

Now I wonder if `b2 sync` is a good candidate for more traditional desktop backups (documents, lots of photos...). Does anyone have feedback on it?

[waffle_ss]

B2 can't do simple things like move or copy,[1] so in my opinion it's really bad for those kinds of applications. For example, if you move a 5GB video file, you shouldn't have to delete+re-upload the entire thing just to change the path.

[1]: https://github.com/Backblaze/B2_Command_Line_Tool/issues/525

[danillonunes]

Using a file storage service like B2 or S3 as a file system is a bad idea anyway. You won’t be able to use features such as deduplication and incremental backup.

It’s better to use an external tool such as Restic or Duplicacy. So moving 5GB file is just a matter of changing a few KB index file.

[waffle_ss]

Depends what you're backing up IMO.

In the case of my home video and pictures, I have terabytes of data that is largely unique+incompressible so the "dedupe" step on every backup program I've used so far takes a ridiculously long time and yields approximately zero space savings.

Incremental backup I also don't care about because `s3 sync` already only syncs what changed, and I don't care about restoring to previous versions because I want it to be an append-only store, which S3 versioning gives me.

I also need it to be simple for my family to recover data from in case I die suddenly, so I don't want them to have to decode some binary format to get at our pictures and video.

[danillonunes]

Makes sense. I wasn’t think about all this use case.

[simplyinfinity]

I'm using b2 on both desktop and couple of servers. On desktop i use Cloudberry backup, but that has some irritating "features", such as not deleting remote files sometimes and getting out of sync and having to sync manually. I'm still using it because i'm cheap and don't wanna spend money on something else. but b2, itself is great!