Backblaze silently redefines 'unlimited' backups and users discover it's not backing up Dropbox and OneDrive — as firm leans heavier into AI storage services, changes could signal shift away from home backups

About two weeks ago, Backblaze sent out an email to its subscribers letting them know about the latest changes to its Terms of Service, and therein lies a paragraph that says that if your usage of the service exceeds "typical usage patterns" or "places an undue burden," the company may throttle or terminate your account, this despite the company's pledge of unlimited backups. There is no definition of what constitutes typical usage, so your guess is as good as ours. The company has also stopped uploading local data synced to other cloud storage suppliers. The changes come as the company has experienced a 40X year-over-year increase in AI data stored on its servers and has increased focus on its accelerating AI business.

Backblaze is perhaps the most popular home computer backup service, offering unlimited storage for a low monthly price and a simplified interface that backs up entire computers and external drives in one fell swoop. That's the sales pitch on the website, except the exact definitions of "unlimited," "computers," and "external drives" are all up for discussion thanks to the company's repeated ToS changes and possibly its market repositioning — and can lead to instances of data loss, as some users found out the worst way.

The new data limit might be lower than most would think. Data posted in 2021 purportedly by Backblaze's then-CTO Brian Wilson shows that storing just 2 TB would put you in the top 1% of users. It's been 5 years on now, and that figure has certainly changed, but even 4 TB isn't that many bytes in the era of affordable 20 TB external drives. Predictably, tech-minded users do not appreciate the change, especially given a price hike to B2, the company's business-oriented cloud storage, which is sometimes recommended as an alternative.

Knowing that you might be kicked off a service is bad enough, but it doesn't impose any losses on you beyond inconvenience. However, roughly six months ago, Backblaze enacted a silent change that made its backup app stop uploading local data synced to "OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and others."

The alteration was only published in the software's release notes, meaning that most everyone was unaware of it. Some users were caught by surprise by tangible data loss — quite the irony for a backup service, especially one that extolls the virtues of an actual backup versus a file sync in its own blog posts.

Developer Robert Reese found out about the changes in the worst way when he needed to recover data from his Git folders that had been silently added to Backblaze's file exclusions list. He then dug further and, along with other users, found that Backblaze never told anyone about its exclusions of file sync services or Git, and that it's hard to trust a backup service that can at any point unilaterally decide to stop backing up important data.

At face value, one might think that not backing up Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., is not a problem since you'll have copies of the files in those services, but then the difference between a sync and a backup rears its ugly head. First, most of those services only keep deleted data for 30 days, so if you only notice something is gone more than a month, you can't fetch it from Backblaze as expected.

Second, changes to files might fall into a similar trap, as most sync services have limits on age, number of versions, or both, particularly in the free tiers. Third, syncing files back to your PC might overwrite recent changes, and you won't be able to fetch the original copy.

Rubbing salt on the wound, although Backblaze is only meant to back up internal and external drives and not network shares, the client can trip you up in unexpected ways, as external encrypted drives are caught in the crossfire and likewise not backed up.

Other than "it's just business," all these changes might have to do with the fact that Backblaze apparently no longer sees home backups as a business priority. The homepage first and foremost touts cloud and AI storage, with the home backup service tucked away under two menu options.

Back in 2025, the company saw its backup revenue flatten as cloud storage grew and subsequently underwent a restructuring. The firm's latest quarterly results show that AI customers are making Backblaze a lot of money, so it's not hard to imagine the home backup service might be dropped altogether at some point.

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