Backblaze Silently Stopped Backing Up Cloud Storage Folders and Git Repos

A longtime Backblaze customer discovered that the backup service has been quietly excluding entire categories of files without meaningful user notification. The author first noticed the gap when trying to restore a .git folder after a destructive force-push, only to find Backblaze had started ignoring .git directories entirely - with no option to re-enable backup and no mention in the exclusions list.

The bigger blow came when the author found that Backblaze now excludes folders from OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, iDrive, and other cloud storage providers. The change was buried in release notes under “Improvements,” framed as preventing performance issues and excessive data usage. No email, no alert, no in-app warning - just 383GB of data silently dropped from backup. The exclusions don’t even appear on Backblaze’s published file exclusion list.

The author pushes back hard on the implicit logic that cloud-synced files don’t need backup. Sync services retain deleted files for only 30 days, offer limited version history unless you pay extra, and can terminate accounts at will. Backblaze offered one-year or unlimited retention - a fundamentally different guarantee. By narrowing what it backs up without transparency, the service has undermined the core trust proposition that made unlimited personal backup worth paying for in the first place.