[NR-backblaze]

Natasha from Backblaze here. This is a situation people rely on backups for, and I can understand how frustrating it is to run into this when you need a restore.

I also want to be clear, this wasn’t about saving on storage. It came from cases where backing up cloud-synced folders (like Dropbox) was leading to unreliable or incomplete restores because of how those files are managed under the hood.

When Dropbox began using reparse points for synced files, those files no longer behaved like standard local files. Because of that, Backblaze Computer Backup can’t reliably back them up or restore them. The current behavior is focused on ensuring we only back up data we can reliably restore, and we are actively exploring ways to better support Dropbox and data touched by other sync services.

[julianozen]

If I can make a product suggestion, Backboard has a part of the interface that shows excluded folders. This should explicitly call out the Dropbox folder as being excluded. The software update that removed support for this should’ve included a pop-up that said “Dropbox is no longer being backed up” (though candidly if this pop-up existed on my dad’s machine and he didn’t see it, my mistake).

My frustration stems from paying hundreds of dollars over several years to pay for backup and then silently learning Dropbox was no longer supported when we went to look for it in our backup. We could’ve made other choices about how to store/bavkup our own files with better communication.