You would never use a backup app that didn’t remember which folders your files were in, so I don’t know why people consider it acceptable to lose their Finder tags. not finding the correct set of invoices for a time period). they disappear from smart folders or sort incorrectly), even leading to errors (i.e. For example, losing dates can make it harder to find your files (i.e. But I think most users would as well, if they knew to think about it. Dropbox supports all of them except creation dates, locks, and symlinks.Īs a programmer, I especially care about metadata. Arq, CrashPlan (as of version 3), SuperDuper, and Time Machine all support all of these. It fails all but one of the Backup Bouncer tests, discarding file permissions, symlinks, Finder flags and locks, creation dates ( despite claims), modification date ( timezone-shifted), extended attributes (which include Finder tags and the “where from” URL), and Finder comments. My other concern is that Backblaze doesn’t actually back up everything. The situations in which my Mac is not able to back up for a while are exactly the ones in which I (or my survivors) would want to be able to depend on a cloud backup! And if, for some reason, my Mac doesn’t back up for 6 months, Backblaze will expunge all my data, even if my subscription is still paid-up. It’s also worrisome that it only retains deleted files for 30 days-meaning that a file is truly lost if I don’t notice that it’s missing right away. I’ve read about problems with large bzfileids.dat files sucking RAM and preventing backups entirely once they get too large. I’d previously been hesitant about Backblaze because of the way it handles external drives. It has a native Mac app, is developed by ex-Apple engineers, and sponsors many fine podcasts. In any event, my strategy is to have multiple cloud backups-Arq and CrashPlan (which has been working very well recently)-so this got me thinking about possibly adding a third. It would not surprise me if the files are still there Arq just isn’t seeing them. This is so at odds with Amazon Glacier’s reputed 11-nines durability that I’m guessing it’s due to an application bug. Arq recently reported hundreds of GB of missing files, across multiple backup targets.

Backblaze photos library