Replacing Backblaze

Posted Dec 3, 2025

I’ve been a Backblaze customer since 2018 when a friend recommended their computer backup service to me, and for the most part I’ve been satisfied with it. Unlimited storage for 10€/month is pretty cheap and their software seems to work well, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. The only people worth listening to when it comes to backup program recommendations are the ones who have successfully restored data with it in an emergency, and I’m lucky to not count myself among those. That means my general recommendation of Backblaze never carried much weight, but for what it’s worth I can recommend it no longer.

By complete accident, I noticed that at some point in October, Backblaze had stopped backing up files in iCloud Drive, even though I store its contents locally. For me, iCloud Drive might be one of the most important things to back up, something Backblaze has been happily doing for the past 7 years, so seeing it vanish from my backups was concerning to say the least. Looking into it I found a Reddit thread explaining that Backblaze version 9.2.2.878 silently stopped backing up cloud storage folders, among other things:

The Backup Client now blocks SSHFS-mounted drives and excludes system and cloud-synced folders like ~/Library/CloudStorage, Caches, Developer, Metadata, and Mobile Documents to prevent unintended backups and reduce data usage.

This is a frankly major change in functionality, and Backblaze apparently decided the best way to let their paying customers know was to bury it in a bullet point in a bunch of dry, technical release notes for an ordinary maintenance release of their software – under “Improvements” no less! It’s clear they’re not really interested in “preventing unintended backups” – there’s already a folder exclusion feature in Backblaze for this exact purpose – but I guess offering unlimited storage was a zero interest rate phenomenon.

What’s especially funny is that their own support site still has an article explaining specifically how to back up iCloud Drive, even though that feature is now removed. The Supported Backup Data article, linked to in the same release notes that , doesn’t mention cloud storage folders at all (as of 3 Dec 2025), and they’ve previously written about how Backblaze complements sync services since it also backs up cloud synced files.

Backblaze now does less for the same monthly price, which sucks. Having to find out by accident sucks even more. If I wasn’t some weirdo inspecting his automated backups, I would probably only find out when I needed to restore something, at which point it would no longer exist. I have more than one backup medium, of course. It’s going to be worse for those of us who have been sold the idea that Backblaze backs up your entire computer, when that claim becomes less true with each app update.

As I can no longer trust Backblaze to keep my data safe, I will not be renewing my subscription next month. So I found an alternative solution. The open source CLI program Restic has been on my radar for a while now because it seems to do a lot of things right:

As with Backblaze, my recommendation of Restic is basically irrelevant until I have experienced real disaster recovery, but what I can say is this: it’s very fast at backing up, and test restores have worked as they should. It’s also likely to survive in some state or another for a long time just due to the size of the community and the distinct lack of dependencies.

Unlike Backblaze, Restic comes with no predetermined backup destination. While I can easily use it to back up my computer to my NAS, I also need an offsite storage location in the unlikely event that my house burns down with the NAS inside. Since Restic works great with an SFTP backend, the most appealing option is currently a Storage Box from Hetzner (coincidentally, a provider I already use for other things). It’s supposedly just consumer hardware in some sort of RAID configuration, but you get 1 TB storage space, a few automated snapshots, and unlimited traffic for 4€/month, which is decently priced. You also get limited shell access, but it’s practically useless, so consider these boxes nothing more than remote filesystems.

I use the excellent Resticprofile wrapper to configure and schedule backups, and since Restic repositories are just regular folders, a repository can be easily rsynced offsite. For now, my backup system is not quite as smooth as the dedicated Backblaze app, and a plain 1 TB disk is not quite the same as the supposedly “unlimited storage” that Backblaze advertises, but at least this system doesn’t change its rules without notice.