AFAICT Backblaze does back up .git directories. I have many repos backed up. The .git directory is hidden by default in the web UI (along with all other hidden files), but there is an option to show them.
You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.
> changes within .git directories occur far too often and over so many files that the Backblaze software simply would not be able to keep up.
I don’t really understand that. I’m using Windows File History, and while it’s limited to backing up changes only every 15 minutes, and is writing to a local network drive, it doesn’t seem to have any trouble with .git directories.
>File changes within .git directories occur far too often[..]
That's a crazy statement. The cloud backup system I use can be configured to how often it should bother even looking for new files, and for the section where I have my .git repos (they're actually "bare" git repos and I push to them, locally) I've set it to every two hours. Which is actually overkill because they absolutely do not change that quickly.
This is idiotic. All they have to do is schedule them and then introduce enough hysteresis to not constantly churn on their end. Even if they backed up at most once a day this would be better than this idiocy.
I'd be really curious to know why that's working for you and not me. I just tried restoring and none of my .git directories were included; just the working copy. I tried with both the web and desktop restore tool.
Deleting C:\Programdata\Backblaze\bzdata\bzexcluderules_mandatory.xml resolve the problem for me. Seems like at one point[1] they started excluding .git directories by default, got a bunch of backlash, reverted that change, but never changed the setting back for some users (like me).
Thanks. Silently ignoring .git folders would be much more egregious than not backing up cloud drives in my opinion. The latter is at least somewhat understandable, though they should have been more transparent about it.
You should try downloading one of your backed up git repos to see if it actually does contain the full history, I just checked several and everything looks good.