How do I choose a Backup source that isn't one of the generic pre-listed opions?

ADDITIONAL INFO: 

I've tried working around this by taking my Desktop out of the Sync location, and making a link within it to the location that I want backed up, but I can't get that to work, either.

First, I tried moving Desktop back to its original location (), which for me is on drive C.  DB absurdly complained that my desktop and my Dropbox sync directory were on different drives, and told me to fix that.

So I moved it to same drive as the Dropbox sync directory.  Then, DB complained that the Desktop directory wasn't in its default location!  It's absurd.  

So at this point, I'd love to either know the correct way to specify a backup source location that isn't one of the few "magic" Windows directories (and in its default location, to boot!), or a workaround that DB can actually cope with and backup successfully, despite the locations of other unrelated things.

Any help is appreciated. 

BRebey wrote:

I'd love to either know the correct way to specify a backup source location that isn't one of the few "magic" Windows directories (and in its default location, to boot!)

When backing up folders, you can only select from certain folders located within your user profile, and those folders must be in their default location.

Another option, if those folders are located on an external drive, is to let Dropbox backup the external drive.

That might be the single most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my life, and it makes the product unusable to me for backups.  You need to let your engineers know that these arbitrary restrictions are losing customers.  I can't be the only one.

Agreed, which is why I don't use the Backup feature (I'm a user, not a Dropbox employee). While Backup has gotten better (it used to just be a sync by moving key folders into the Dropbox folder) it has a LONG way to go before it's a true backup service.

Thanks, Rich.  Didn't realize you were a community user. 

In the past 2 weeks, I've been through OneDrive, Google Drive, iDrive, and DropBox in an effort to find something that can do meaningful Sync, meaningful backup, handle large numbers of files, and can filter out unwanted directories for both Sync and Backup (like obj/, bin/, and node_modules). 

Most of the services make it impossible to upload TBs of data across 100s of thousands of files in less than a year, though iDrive was able to do it in a couple days, across many, many manual restarts (it gets "stuck" all the time).  The problem with iDrive is it won't sync for a long, long time (in the hour range), if at all.

If anyone knows of a product that works well for these scenarios, I'd love to hear about it.

It sounds like you're trying to use a file sync service for backup. In my opinion, these are two different types of services. If you want file sync, any of the services you listed are fine (though I believe Dropbox handles it the best, and yes, I use most of them). If you're after an actual backup, use a service that specializes in cloud backup, such as Carbonite or Backblaze, and not one that has a so called backup feature tacked on to a sync service.

BRebey wrote:

If anyone knows of a product that works well for these scenarios, I'd love to hear about it

I personally use BackBlaze which works very well. I currently have a few hundred thousand files backed up across a TB or so. It syncs in real time and is very low on resources. 

I also agree with Rich.... Dropbox backup is not just not very good - and the UI of it is even worse. 

Thanks, guys, for the feedback.  DropBox was a no-go all around. 

As already discussed, the backup feature is an after-thought for DropBox, at best.  The Sync feature may or may not work OK, but I couldn't find out because I couldn't upload the 600GB of stuff that I wanted to be Synced, either. 

Even with "rclone", and attempts at every settings tweak I could find, the throttling from DropBox seems to make it unusable for a non-trivial initial upload.  It produces "too many requests or writes" error all the time, and makes me wait 5 minutes before trying again to upload something.

So I've cancelled my OneDrive, DropBox, Google One (Google Drive), and IDrive subscriptions, and am using CrashPlan for backups, which I've been using seamlessly for many years, and Resilio, a non-cloud Peer to Peer syncing service, to keep my computers in sync.   

Resilio works extremely well - syncs in seconds, even with 500,000+ files in the sync pool.  I used "rclone" to initially sync the computers on a LAN, which was comparatively fast (did it in a day), and everything seems to be running smoothly now. 

CrashPlan and Resilio both support glob-like file and directory exclusions (think .gitignore), and both of those work well for keeping things like /bin/, /obj/, and /node_modules/ directories from being wastefully backed up or synced.   

I still have small amounts of free DropBox, OneDrive (included with Office), and Google Drive cloud storage for cloud-based syncing and file sharing.  

This is a very cost-effective and technologically-effective service stack that does exactly what I need.