Hacker News Sees Backblaze's OneDrive and Dropbox Exclusions as a Trust Problem, Not a Footnote

Why Hacker News reacted so strongly

This blew up on Hacker News because readers saw it as a trust failure in consumer backup software, not just another complaint about a cloud folder edge case. At crawl time the discussion had 681 points and 419 comments, and many replies focused on one question: if users pay for a backup client to be their last line of defense, how can a major exclusion ship without a loud warning? One commenter described learning about the policy change only after Dropbox had overwritten a file they assumed Backblaze had preserved. That captures the tone of the thread. The anger was less about OneDrive or Dropbox themselves and more about silently changing what “your files are backed up” means in practice.

What the linked complaint says

In the linked post, Robert Reese says he discovered that Backblaze was no longer backing up his OneDrive folder and had earlier stopped backing up .git directories as well. He points to Backblaze release notes stating that the backup client now excludes popular cloud-storage providers, including mount points and cache directories for services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and others, and that the change aligns with a policy of backing up only local and directly connected storage. Reese’s main argument is straightforward: sync is not backup. A cloud-sync folder can still be overwritten, deleted, or made inaccessible by account problems, while backup products are supposed to offer a longer-retention recovery path outside the sync system itself.

Why the technical details are messy

Hacker News also surfaced the engineering side of the issue. Files-on-demand systems blur the meaning of “local.” A laptop might show a terabyte-scale OneDrive tree while only caching a small subset of the actual files. If a backup client treats that entire tree as normal local storage, it can trigger mass downloads, fill a small SSD, or try to back up placeholders that are not really there yet. So the vendor’s motivation is not hard to understand. But that did not persuade the thread that the rollout was acceptable. The common view was that difficult edge cases require more visibility and more explicit control, not less. If a folder class is no longer protected, users need to know before they test recovery during a real failure.

Why this matters beyond Backblaze

This is a high-signal IT story because it exposes a broader mismatch between backup, sync, and virtualized local storage. More desktop workflows now route important files through cloud-managed directories, sparse files, and application-owned caches. That makes “back up my computer” a much more ambiguous promise than it used to be. User expectations, though, have not changed nearly as fast as storage architecture has. People still hear “unlimited backup” and assume the critical folder is covered. Hacker News reacted so hard because silent exclusions create false confidence, and false confidence is exactly what backup software is supposed to eliminate.

Sources: Robert Reese article · Hacker News discussion