[mkr-hn]

Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.

[throwaway832939]

It's a bit different to the original argument but there is the issue that people have more and more files created in those services and only existing within them (desktop Office tries its best to convince you to do this).

It's hard to convince people who go along with that "but you don't really have backups, you need to download everything locally and pay $5/month".

[encryptluks2]

restic + rclone = Google Drive backup with snapshots and dedupe. Not sure if you are just unaware, or didn't take the time to look into anything else.

[mkr-hn]

There's an infamous comment on the Dropbox launch that addresses this better than I can, but I can't find it. Suffice to say: yes, I'm aware there are solutions I can put together that are more work than I care to do to maybe save some portion of $65 a year. Putting those snapshots on Drive would tear through (expensive) space fast, so I'm not sure it's a savings. Backblaze provides incremental backup for my entire SSD. Even more if I ever fill that empty bay. I don't even pay for Drive since few things I do benefit from syncing, so this would probably cost more and be worse.

[martinald]

I actually got rid of backblaze a while back because I realised I had moved machines twice and didn't bother restoring files with it. I've had backblaze for years (maybe even a decade+?!)

Code is all on GitHub, all my docs and emails are in gsuite (and don't get backed up anyway by BB). The only thing that does get backed up is a load of cruft and junk I've accumulated which is actually nice to start over on tbh.

I imagine more and more people are like this. Designers who used to have to be meticulous at backing up their source files now all work in Figma, etc etc.

The major weakness now is if GH or Gsuite had a catastrophic error (or your account gets booted off for incorrect reasons). I actually think that is the more pressing backup need than local files for many.

[mkr-hn]

I'm sure it depends on needs. I have gigabytes of raw photos, videos, renders, stems, asset packs I can't count on being available from the original source, etc. I never need to access it on other computers, so they're not synced to services that charge a premium for space for the value of syncing, but I can grab a file outside a synced folder from the Backblaze website or app in a pinch.