this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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That's not surprising with all of the data hoarders abusing the unlimited backups to store hundreds of terabytes.
How is that abuse? "Unlimited" is a pretty audacious plan to offer. Maybe Backblaze shouldn't offer something impossible.
The software only allows local drives to be backed up, but some people use workarounds to make it backup a large NAS or server.
But that's not who is being targeted with the changes Backblaze has made. By silently excluding sync folders, they're casting a wide net and hoping it will catch those who use workarounds. It might, but in the process it reveals their comfort with deceptive business practices and harms users of the backup service who are not using workarounds.
Are they boosting their AI business in anticipation of breaking encryption and then training their models on everyone's data? That's what I would assume of a company I no longer trust.
so it seems like they should just “limit” the storage to a reasonable number of TB that is more than most desktops/laptops, and less than NASes with hundreds of TB.
Headlines are clickbait. Literally the first line in the article. What more can they do than send an email?
The title is accurate.
You just failed to read the article part the first ten words.
And I recall Backblaze stating that those users are a minority and aren't a big concern. I used to do that, but when I attempted to restore 7TB and it took well over a month to restore what I needed, I switched to other solutions.
If you can't afford to offer unlimited backups, maybe put a limit?
Yeah, screw those people. I can't think of a single other reason a profit driven company would cut corners while storage prices rise due to AI companies.
I'm asking as a genuine question, where or how should people backup large datastores? Also what counts as too large? I've heard Backblaze doesn't cover NAS so i wouldn't be able to backup my 2TB zfs RAID, but like is that too much?
I want to do 3-2-1 for my homelab to preserve all pictures in my immich and the backups of my LXCs and VMs, but I'm just not sure how to go about it, and I was considering archives of those files + backblaze...
A second offsite NAS with your friend? That's what I did when I grew out of my old synology. My new NAS capacity is noticeably impacted by things like frequent local snapshots but I don’t need to back those up remotely and it saves space.
Local tape. If you need offsite, rotate tapes. If you need cloud, Amazon Glacier or equivalent (which are backed by tape, I assume).
Tape drives are expensive as fuck though.
Before the storage wars it was cheaper to just build a second shitty NAS and backup there
Don't trust backblaze or any service that claims "unlimited".
The overwhelming feedback I've seen is to "KISS" and use some combination of restic/borg/kopia and rclone to sync data or local backups to cloud storage like https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/.
Restic/borg are more for whole system backups, where kopia is more for data (a central kopia server/repository can deduplicate and version data from multiple machines). Rclone is good for syncing local backups to cloud services, or perhaps e2ee synchronisation between machines (though it doesn't do versioning and multiple machines will cause problems).
This is the most flexible, long-term, as you can just update the storage backend and transfer or re-upload everything as necessary.
For a NAS, you can use Backblaze B2, but they certainly aren't the cheapest. B2 doesn't have the limitations that the personal and business plans have, but you pay by the TB.
There are lots of cloud backup providers. Just make sure it supports the OS on your NAS. Any of them that claim to be unlimited will not truly be unlimited.
Hard to say thats it if just having 2TB uploaded is enough to be considered in the top.
Especially if they've already started ignoring other cloud files in people's backups
Yeah, a few hundred outliers can really ruin it. People: have some self awareness and don’t be a douchebag.
You’re talking to the crowd where if it can be done, it should be done, and bragged about. Sadly.