Backblaze Is Silently Breaking Backups From Veracrypt Drives Without Warning

While I'm not sure I buy the etymology of logic behind disabling driver hardmounted storage, but backing up an encrypted volume to an untrusted destination is not and never should be an option.

Https is not a strong enough encryption protocol to convery exabytes of data without entropy.

GroundStateGecko:

> I explicitly asked about "backup VeraCrypt encrypted volumes (not vault stored as a file)", and they replied "The backup of any VeraCrypt-encrypted files is no longer supported."

bzChristopher (From Backblaze):

> Christopher from the Backblaze team here -> Backing up the mounted volume is no longer supported. However, you can still back up the unmounted image file without issue, provided the relevant file type exclusion has been removed.

s_i_m_s:

> This is viable for small containers but I can't see how this is in any way viable for fully encrypted drives. Like sure I could convert the full drive to a container but that makes the backup and restore process untenable. On the backup side a 1% full 4TB drive is now 4TB to backup and it's no longer possible to deduplicate between drives. On the restore side to get one 5MB file off that 4TB drive i'd then have to download the entire 4TB container.

GroundStateGecko:

> That doesn't work for encrypted partitions. Even for the image file, it is unreasonable to upload the whole image file every time one small portion of it gets updated.

bzChristopher (From Backblaze):

> The Backblaze client can deduplicate files and the unchanged parts of large (over 100 MB) files.

Its weird how poor of a product Backblaze backup is, while Backblaze B2 works great.

> The current Backblaze client excludes non-physical drives not connected via a USB or Firewire connector. While this has been Backblaze's policy for some time, our Client Teams have taken steps to reduce the number of allowed exceptions.

Ah, I see.

The backblaze backup cost is not size-based - people pay per computer, and this includes all internal and external hard drives (the external ones have to be attached every once in a while to be kept in backup). This definitely sounds like a game-able policy - what if I pay for a single computer license, and attach 100TB worth of drives there? What if I mount NFS share of my homeserver - can I backup it for the same PC fee a well?

I've used Backblaze backup for a long time (for my non-techinical friends) but never really thought long about how they can afford the flat price. Prohibiting non-physical drives would go a long way towards that. Looking at the docs, VeraCrypt can operate off the network drive, so I am guessing they had issues when it was used to present NAS/File share as a local drive?

That's… pretty gross.