Your Backups Might Not Be Backing Up — Backblaze's Silent Policy Change

“It’s all backed up with Backblaze.” That’s what a lot of people believed. Turns out, for many of them, critical files hadn’t been backed up in months. A quiet policy change at Backblaze has cracked open a much bigger question about how much trust we should place in any single backup service.

The Exclusions Nobody Was Told About

In late 2025, developer Robert Reese published a blog post titled “Backblaze has quietly stopped backing up your data.” The finding was straightforward: at some point, Backblaze began excluding local sync folders for Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Box, and iDrive from its backups.

On Mac, the change arrived with version 9.2.2.878. It was mentioned briefly in the release notes. No pop-up notification. No email. If you opened the Exclusions tab in the Backblaze app, Dropbox and OneDrive didn’t even appear on the list. The official documentation on file exclusions made no mention of these services either.

Users had virtually no way to know.

“All User Data Included by Default” — Remember That?

Backblaze built its reputation on a simple promise. Back in 2015, their website stated plainly: “All user data included by default. No restrictions on file type or size.” That clarity was the entire selling point. One flat fee, everything backed up, no gotchas.

Fast forward to now. Cloud storage folders are silently excluded. So are .git directories — which, for any developer, contain the entire change history of a project. Reese discovered this the hard way when he tried to restore a repository from Backblaze and found the git history was simply gone.

Backblaze’s justification is that this prevents “performance issues and excessive data usage.” There’s a technical argument here — Dropbox syncing online-only files could generate unnecessary traffic for the backup client. But the problem isn’t the decision itself. It’s the delivery. Changing the default behavior of a backup product without clearly notifying users, without reflecting it in the app UI, is a fundamentally different kind of mistake than a technical trade-off.

The Community Reacts

Once Reese’s post circulated, the response was sharp. A thread on TidBITS Talk titled “WARNING! Backblaze now ignoring Dropbox” ran past two pages of heated discussion. Reports also surfaced on the Dropbox community forums: “Using Dropbox Backup with Backblaze no longer works.”

The complaints boiled down to two things. First, a backup service should transparently show what it isn’t backing up. Second, a change this significant deserves more than a single line in release notes. As one user put it: “Backblaze is backing up some of my data. Not all of it.”

CrashPlan, a major competitor, has similarly stopped backing up Dropbox folders. But tools like Arq still back up everything you point them at. Users are already shopping around.

The Deeper Problem: Backups That Silently Stop

This is just the most visible symptom. Backblaze has a feature called “Safety Freeze” — a mechanism that pauses backups under certain conditions. The catch is that many users never notice when it kicks in. One Hacker News commenter reported getting hit by Safety Freeze two or three times a year, each time requiring a manual restart.

External drives get even worse treatment. If a drive isn’t connected for 30 days, Backblaze automatically removes it from your backup set. Go on a long work trip, leave a drive at home, and by the time you’re back, that backup is gone. One Trustpilot reviewer described losing a 4TB drive to hardware failure — only to discover the backup had expired during a three-week absence.

The 3-2-1 Rule Exists for a Reason

The lesson here isn’t that Backblaze is uniquely bad. It’s that no single backup service deserves blind trust.

The old 3-2-1 rule still holds: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one stored offsite. Cloud backup made people lazy about this. “It’s in the cloud” became a mental shorthand for “it’s safe,” and a lot of people stopped thinking any further.

Backup is not a set-and-forget operation. It needs periodic verification — what’s actually being backed up, when the last successful backup completed, and whether a restore actually works. The Backblaze situation is a reminder that the service you’re paying to protect your data might have quietly stopped doing exactly that. When was the last time you checked yours?