Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox

It’s been the same for OneDrive files for a long time.

Most companies now treat release notes as adjuncts to the license.

They are no longer designed to inform users of changes, but rather to absolve the publisher of responsibility for changing the initial contract, usually to their advantage — adding more tracking, removing features, etc.

Since OS-level APIs change so quickly and security problems are so numerous, updates are mandatory anyway. Who’s seriously going to hold out on an update because somebody added a new AI assistant or destroyed an interface?

That also explains why release notes are increasingly hard to find. Technically, legally, they are somewhere public: on a random GitHub page, on an article in a monstrous Zendesk “Knowledge Base” whose URL changes all the time, deep in a byzantine forum… Meanwhile, Sparkle or the App Store only ever say “We’ve polished the app, so that it works even better for you.”

Keeping track of release notes now requires a combination of parsing RSS feeds, scraping HTML, and keeping tabs on Bluesky, Mastodon, and 𝕏. That is not wholly a coincidence…

Now, forgive me, my roll of tin foil needs an update…

My experience is different.

I just logged into my account on Backblaze.com and was able to see my Dropbox folder. It appeared to be properly stored on Backblaze showing recently created folders and documents.

As a test, I was able to find and restore a PDF file that I created two days ago (12/18/25) and moved in my Dropbox folder. It restored properly including maintaining the correct Creation and Modification dates. So Backblaze backed it up properly.

I am using the 9.2.2.898 Backblaze macOS client.

I should note that I use Sam Schott's Maestral app (version 1.9.5) as the client for Dropbox.

@Mark That must be the difference; I don’t think Maestral uses the File Provider Extension framework.

I wonder is symlinking still works?

I don't get it, why are people still using the consumer frontends to Backblaze/IDrive/whatever? They're inferior products that don't give you control and are landmines waiting to explode, why do you want this? I know Arq's had its issues (I actually just recently ran into a difficult-to-reproduce bug where it wouldn't detect filesystem changes properly and I do wish I could disable that functionality altogether and force full rescans every time) but it's been basically rock solid, is very efficient, and backs up everything without issue. (I'm not really bothered about Mac swank metadata, but it's nice I've got that as well.)

Right now I'm using IDrive E2 to back up about 1.5 TB, so with the minimum 1 TB plan, and I think it's excellent value. And if I get tired of Arq, there are the FLOSS options for cloud-native backups (I have nice things to say about restic, with which I've had great experience on Linux, and I really don't mind rolling my own snapshot support using tmutil, or email notifications, if it comes to that, but there are also the newer "lock-free" options to investigate as well which are known to support macOS better). I think this arrangement is simply better from a cost-risk perspective, but others may differ. My biggest consideration is the "house-burns-down" disaster scenario, but that's a question of bootstrapping access to the credentials I'll need. Mmm. So must think about that.

I tested on two Macs both with the latest version of Backblaze installed. One has the newer file provider API version of Dropbox, and one has not been updated to use the file provider API. Both have the latest version of Dropbox app. Dropbox was not backed up for either Mac.

The Exclusions tab in the Backblaze app does not list Dropbox as one of the exclusions, and the Learn More button on that screen leads to https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/supported-backup-data#exclusions which also doesn't mention Dropbox at all.

@Mark and @Michael Tsai Your theory that avoiding the Apple File Provider API is what would allow it to be backed up is not true as my Dropbox is not using it and isn't backed up. Is it purely looking at the path ~/Dropbox/ and would renaming the Dropbox folder let it backup? What is the path that Maestral uses?

@Sebby I thought I had made a comment in this thread but it may have been lost in the ether somewhere. But in it I mentioned that I had about 12 TB of data to backup, and therefore Backblaze's unlimited plan was far, far cheaper than using one of the open source backup utilities and backing up to my own purchased cloud storage. Or at least, this was the case the last time I priced it out.

That said, there's a lot about Backblaze I'm weary of, most of all the fact that it's not properly end-to-end encrypted, and you must give Backblaze access to your data in order to recover it. I hear that some of the open source options do E2EE properly.

I asked Backblaze support about iCloud (it being what ~/Documents and ~/Desktop are synced to) and got back "All cloud-synced folders from multiple services have been included in this update as excluded from the backup.” — so quite possibly they exclude iCloud incl. Documents now.

I couldn’t verify because by that time I have already deleted the backup, as it was support’s precondition to issuing a refund for my renewal literally the day before reading about it. Thanks Michael for spreading awareness about this.

IDrive can do dropbox backup now, thats for informing everyone on this.

I just set up a test Dropbox and Backblaze account and moved the Dropbox folder to ~/Test/Dropbox/

It isn't possible to rename the Dropbox folder, so all you can do is nest in another folder. Unfortunately Backblaze ignored ~/Test/Dropbox/

I did some more testing and they aren't matching by folder name so I don't know how they are determining what is a Dropbox folder if you aren't using new Apple File Provider API.

For example these folders I created were backed up, and they are not linked to the Dropbox app:

~/dropbox/
~/Dropbox Folder/
~/This is a Dropbox/
~/Test 2/Dropbox/

@Eric Thanks for testing. I think Dropbox stores the location in a dotfile. Maybe Backblaze reads that?

@Michael You are probably right. There are a bunch of files in ~/.dropbox/ but inside ~/Dropbox/ is the directory .dropbox.cache as well as the file .dropbox which for me has just this in it:

{"tag":"dropbox","ns":829074,"n":true,"root_type":"m"}