7 ms·

A lot of people sing BB's praises but I never had a good experience with them. The client was always slow, buggy, and resource hungry, and its UI is terrible. T

by galonk 5y ago

A lot of people sing BB's praises but I never had a good experience with them. The client was always slow, buggy, and resource hungry, and its UI is terrible. They got shirty with me for reporting bugs when I was using a macOS beta. And finally, at some point even though nothing about my computer changed (it was a Mac Mini, what was going to change), I got a message saying some security/copy protection system had detected that my computer was "different", and I had to un-install and re-install the entire app to fix it (there apparently being no easier way to unset a flag). I uninstalled and skipped the second part. Instead of using BB, get a Synology/Qnap/FreeNAS box to backup all your stuff locally, and back that up to another service (e.g. Glacier or Synology's own C2).

doublepg23 5y ago
I have a Synology NAS currently and use their HyperBackup hosted tier. Maxes out at 1TB sadly, not even enough for my laptop backup. C2 on the other hand is well priced for bulk storage but does not have the “free” deduplication.
- hedora 5y ago
  I use HyperBackup to backup multiple TB to Backblaze B2. Works great, FWIW.
  - doublepg23 5y ago
    The hosted version I'm thinking of is their Synology C2 personal it seems. Currently I use it to back up my lossless music collection and nothing else. Backblaze B2 was on the table too, however I think my asymetric internet connection is my biggest issue right now. Only 40-50Mbps upload won't do much for backing up multiple TBs of data. May need to consider pre-seeding drive option if I can justify the cost. Other solution was a separate, lower spec Synology I can pre-seed and send to a friend's house who has a homelab.
mlangenberg 5y ago
> get a Synology/Qnap/FreeNAS box to backup all your stuff locally, and back that up to another service (e.g. Glacier or Synology's own C2). I'm not a big fan of backing-up a back-up and opted for a Time Machine backup to a local nas and in parallel, an off-site backup to B2 with Arq on my macs.
willis936 5y ago
I caution the casual reader against glacier. It's not what it appears at a glance. Your files should be put into a single archive before upload otherwise you'll spend weeks waiting for AWS scripts to manage old files. B2/S3 is what most people want.
- iJohnDoe 5y ago
  > otherwise you'll spend weeks waiting for AWS scripts to manage old files. Can you elaborate on this part?
  - willis936 5y ago
    Every file uploaded is considered an immutable archive. It does not have a version history. So let's say you have 100,000 files you backed up and want to update them and don't want to pay for the storage of the old files. You need to request for a manifest of hashes for all files. This will take a few days to generate then you will be given a json file that is over a gigabyte. Next, you will write a script to delete each file one at a time, rate limited to one request per second. Have fun.
    - sreitshamer 5y ago
      Are you maybe referring to Glacier "vaults" (the original Glacier API)? With the old Glacier Vault API you had to initiate an "inventory-retrieval" job with an SNS topic etc. It took days. Painful. But these days you can store objects in an S3 bucket and specify the storage class as "GLACIER" for "S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval" (or "GLACIER_IR" for S3 Glacier Immediate Retrieval or "DEEP_ARCHIVE" for S3 Glacier Deep Archive). You can use the regular S3 APIs. We haven't seen any rate limiting on this approach. The only difference from the "online" storage classes like STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, etc is that downloading an object with GLACIER/GLACIER_IR/DEEP_ARCHIVE storage class requires first making it downloadable by calling the S3 "restore" API on it, and then waiting until it's downloadable (1-5 minutes for GLACIER_IR, 3-5 hours for GLACIER, and 5-12 hours for DEEP_ARCHIVE).
- linsomniac 5y ago
k8sToGo 5y ago
You need to differentiate between BB Personal Backup and BB B2 service which is more like something you suggested. But these days I just use rsync.net + Wasabi + Kopia + rclone.
- ericcholis 5y ago
  I really want to use rsync.net, but the price per GB scares me off.
  - john-shaffer 5y ago
    I have one of their borg accounts, which is a fraction of the normal price. https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
  - rsync 5y ago
    Please email us about the "HN Readers Discount" which we have offered for 12-ish years ...
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Do you understand that popping up like Beetlejuice every time someone mentions rsync pricing and being snarky about an unpublished discount is not a good look? Particularly given you never address the commenter's point, which is that your pricing is pretty expensive? "Price high, low volume" is certainly a valid pricing strategy, but you have no right to be snarky when people say you're priced high. The fact that people are consistently describing you as overpried means your marketing really isn't showing the corresponding value to them.
      - mekster 5y ago
        Not sure if they're overpriced when they also have borg discount and rsync.net is one of the only service that I can borg or "zfs send" directly as well as the fact that they've been running nearly 20 years? to know they don't disappear next year makes it rather feel not overpriced.
spacedcowboy 5y ago
I just bought a Quantum Superloader3 last Xmas. Each LTO-8 tape (it can take 16 in 2 magazines, I use 15 + 1 cleaning tape) will hold 12 TB without compression, 30TB with, and 7 of them can back up the 100TB used on the 128TB of disk that is the house RAID array. It takes about 2 days to make a full backup, and I can fit incrementals for the next 5 days on the batch-of-7. Then I switch to the second magazine, and do the same thing. I actually have 3 magazines, one of which I swap in and out every week, and during the before-times, I'd take that off-site to work. I have ~30 years of data, from back when I was in college and writing CD-ROMs for backup, all on the one system. Admittedly, the major space-taking thing is the Plex library, but I wouldn't want to lose that either. It takes about 5 minutes to walk into the garage (where the server-rack is), swap magazines and I'm done - the rest is automatic. I have vague ideas for writing a more-efficient tar designed for this specific type of setup (big disk with attached tape). The best way to do it I think is to have multiple threads reading and bzip2-compressing data, piping blobs through to a singleton tape-writer thread. Every now and then (50GB, 500GB, 1TB ?) close the device and reopen the non-rewindable device to get a record-marker on the tape, and then store the tape/record-marker/byte-offset etc. into a SQLite database on the disk. That way I'd get: - High levels of compression without making the tape head wait for the data, which ruins the tape head. Multiple threads pooling highly-compressed data into a "record" - fast lookup of what is where, I'm thinking a SQL LIKE query syntax for search, against the disk-based DB. No more waiting for the record to page in from the end of the tape. - fast find on-tape, since you'd know to just do the equivalent of 'mt fsf N' before you actually have to start reading data Right now, tar is good enough. One of these days when I get time, I'll write 'bar' (Backup And Restore :)
- simplyaccont 5y ago
  small question about superloader3. how noisy it is ?
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    Too loud for an office. Which is a shame because in these pandemic times, I repurposed the shed at the bottom of the garden as an office (insulated, add power and a/c) and I wanted it there. It's not noisy when writing to tape, but the mechanism is noisy when a tape is being loaded, the magazine is being shuffled to get the right tape, etc. It's the mechanical parts rather than the tape drive itself that's too loud, especially with Webex conferencing being a part of the day now. So I have it set up in the garage, in the server-rack. I was worried about temperatures in the Summer, so I bought a 100W solar panel, an attic fan, and linked them up, positioning the fan above the rack. That fan shifts so much air that the in-rack fans (with temperature monitoring) didn't get above 85 all summer, which is pretty amazing for the Bay Area. The tape deck seems to be fine in that sort of temperature, and yes I do do the occasional 'tar tvf' to check the data is readable :)
Osiris 5y ago
I have 3.5TB backed up to Backblaze for $5 a month. I haven't found any other online backup option that provides anywhere near that cost. I use a RAID 1 to handle drive failure and also keep local backups on a NAS. BB is my third layer of backup. I've never run into issues with BB backups so I'm happy for what I get for the price.
- janitha 5y ago
  S3 Glacier Deep Archive, $0.00099 per GB per month. I have a ZFS based NAS. And periodically do a incremental backup (zfs send) of the entire dataset, encrypt it gpg and pipe it straight up to S3 deep archive. Works like a charm. The catch with S3 deep archive is if you want to get the data back... It's reliable, but you will pay quite a bit more. So as a last resort backup, it's perfect.
  - mekster 5y ago
    Can you tell how it's done specifically? Are you zfs send'ing to another directory and encrypt it entirely on the fly while transferring to Glacier? Does it do incremental backup transfer to Glacier or does it have to transfer the entire encrypted blob every time?
    - janitha 5y ago
      No intermediate directory/file at all, all done on the fly. sudo zfs send -i <LAST_BACKUPED_SNAPNAME> <CUR_SNAPNAME> | gpg -e -r <YOURKEY> --compress-algo none -v | pv | aws s3 cp --storage-class DEEP_ARCHIVE - s3://<PATH_TO_DEST>.zfs.gpg The very first time you do it, you will need to do a full backup (ie. without the `-i <...>` option). Afterwards, subsequent backups can be done with the -i, so only the incremental difference will be backed up. I have a path/naming scheme for the .zfs.gpg files on s3 which include the snapshot from/to names. This allows to determine what the latest backed up snapshot name is (so the next one can be incremental against that). And also use when backing up, since the order or restore matters.
  - luckman212 5y ago
    But how do you verify or test your backups in this scenario?

by galonk 5y ago

doublepg23 5y ago

I have a Synology NAS currently and use their HyperBackup hosted tier. Maxes out at 1TB sadly, not even enough for my laptop backup. C2 on the other hand is well priced for bulk storage but does not have the “free” deduplication.

hedora 5y ago
I use HyperBackup to backup multiple TB to Backblaze B2. Works great, FWIW.
- doublepg23 5y ago
  The hosted version I'm thinking of is their Synology C2 personal it seems. Currently I use it to back up my lossless music collection and nothing else. Backblaze B2 was on the table too, however I think my asymetric internet connection is my biggest issue right now. Only 40-50Mbps upload won't do much for backing up multiple TBs of data. May need to consider pre-seeding drive option if I can justify the cost. Other solution was a separate, lower spec Synology I can pre-seed and send to a friend's house who has a homelab.

mlangenberg 5y ago

> get a Synology/Qnap/FreeNAS box to backup all your stuff locally, and back that up to another service (e.g. Glacier or Synology's own C2). I'm not a big fan of backing-up a back-up and opted for a Time Machine backup to a local nas and in parallel, an off-site backup to B2 with Arq on my macs.

willis936 5y ago

I caution the casual reader against glacier. It's not what it appears at a glance. Your files should be put into a single archive before upload otherwise you'll spend weeks waiting for AWS scripts to manage old files. B2/S3 is what most people want.

iJohnDoe 5y ago
> otherwise you'll spend weeks waiting for AWS scripts to manage old files. Can you elaborate on this part?
- willis936 5y ago
  Every file uploaded is considered an immutable archive. It does not have a version history. So let's say you have 100,000 files you backed up and want to update them and don't want to pay for the storage of the old files. You need to request for a manifest of hashes for all files. This will take a few days to generate then you will be given a json file that is over a gigabyte. Next, you will write a script to delete each file one at a time, rate limited to one request per second. Have fun.
  - sreitshamer 5y ago
    Are you maybe referring to Glacier "vaults" (the original Glacier API)? With the old Glacier Vault API you had to initiate an "inventory-retrieval" job with an SNS topic etc. It took days. Painful. But these days you can store objects in an S3 bucket and specify the storage class as "GLACIER" for "S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval" (or "GLACIER_IR" for S3 Glacier Immediate Retrieval or "DEEP_ARCHIVE" for S3 Glacier Deep Archive). You can use the regular S3 APIs. We haven't seen any rate limiting on this approach. The only difference from the "online" storage classes like STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, etc is that downloading an object with GLACIER/GLACIER_IR/DEEP_ARCHIVE storage class requires first making it downloadable by calling the S3 "restore" API on it, and then waiting until it's downloadable (1-5 minutes for GLACIER_IR, 3-5 hours for GLACIER, and 5-12 hours for DEEP_ARCHIVE).
linsomniac 5y ago

k8sToGo 5y ago

You need to differentiate between BB Personal Backup and BB B2 service which is more like something you suggested. But these days I just use rsync.net + Wasabi + Kopia + rclone.

ericcholis 5y ago
I really want to use rsync.net, but the price per GB scares me off.
- john-shaffer 5y ago
  I have one of their borg accounts, which is a fraction of the normal price. https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
- rsync 5y ago
  Please email us about the "HN Readers Discount" which we have offered for 12-ish years ...
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Do you understand that popping up like Beetlejuice every time someone mentions rsync pricing and being snarky about an unpublished discount is not a good look? Particularly given you never address the commenter's point, which is that your pricing is pretty expensive? "Price high, low volume" is certainly a valid pricing strategy, but you have no right to be snarky when people say you're priced high. The fact that people are consistently describing you as overpried means your marketing really isn't showing the corresponding value to them.
    - mekster 5y ago
      Not sure if they're overpriced when they also have borg discount and rsync.net is one of the only service that I can borg or "zfs send" directly as well as the fact that they've been running nearly 20 years? to know they don't disappear next year makes it rather feel not overpriced.

spacedcowboy 5y ago

I just bought a Quantum Superloader3 last Xmas. Each LTO-8 tape (it can take 16 in 2 magazines, I use 15 + 1 cleaning tape) will hold 12 TB without compression, 30TB with, and 7 of them can back up the 100TB used on the 128TB of disk that is the house RAID array. It takes about 2 days to make a full backup, and I can fit incrementals for the next 5 days on the batch-of-7. Then I switch to the second magazine, and do the same thing. I actually have 3 magazines, one of which I swap in and out every week, and during the before-times, I'd take that off-site to work. I have ~30 years of data, from back when I was in college and writing CD-ROMs for backup, all on the one system. Admittedly, the major space-taking thing is the Plex library, but I wouldn't want to lose that either. It takes about 5 minutes to walk into the garage (where the server-rack is), swap magazines and I'm done - the rest is automatic. I have vague ideas for writing a more-efficient tar designed for this specific type of setup (big disk with attached tape). The best way to do it I think is to have multiple threads reading and bzip2-compressing data, piping blobs through to a singleton tape-writer thread. Every now and then (50GB, 500GB, 1TB ?) close the device and reopen the non-rewindable device to get a record-marker on the tape, and then store the tape/record-marker/byte-offset etc. into a SQLite database on the disk. That way I'd get: - High levels of compression without making the tape head wait for the data, which ruins the tape head. Multiple threads pooling highly-compressed data into a "record" - fast lookup of what is where, I'm thinking a SQL LIKE query syntax for search, against the disk-based DB. No more waiting for the record to page in from the end of the tape. - fast find on-tape, since you'd know to just do the equivalent of 'mt fsf N' before you actually have to start reading data Right now, tar is good enough. One of these days when I get time, I'll write 'bar' (Backup And Restore :)

simplyaccont 5y ago
small question about superloader3. how noisy it is ?
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  Too loud for an office. Which is a shame because in these pandemic times, I repurposed the shed at the bottom of the garden as an office (insulated, add power and a/c) and I wanted it there. It's not noisy when writing to tape, but the mechanism is noisy when a tape is being loaded, the magazine is being shuffled to get the right tape, etc. It's the mechanical parts rather than the tape drive itself that's too loud, especially with Webex conferencing being a part of the day now. So I have it set up in the garage, in the server-rack. I was worried about temperatures in the Summer, so I bought a 100W solar panel, an attic fan, and linked them up, positioning the fan above the rack. That fan shifts so much air that the in-rack fans (with temperature monitoring) didn't get above 85 all summer, which is pretty amazing for the Bay Area. The tape deck seems to be fine in that sort of temperature, and yes I do do the occasional 'tar tvf' to check the data is readable :)

Osiris 5y ago

I have 3.5TB backed up to Backblaze for $5 a month. I haven't found any other online backup option that provides anywhere near that cost. I use a RAID 1 to handle drive failure and also keep local backups on a NAS. BB is my third layer of backup. I've never run into issues with BB backups so I'm happy for what I get for the price.

janitha 5y ago
S3 Glacier Deep Archive, $0.00099 per GB per month. I have a ZFS based NAS. And periodically do a incremental backup (zfs send) of the entire dataset, encrypt it gpg and pipe it straight up to S3 deep archive. Works like a charm. The catch with S3 deep archive is if you want to get the data back... It's reliable, but you will pay quite a bit more. So as a last resort backup, it's perfect.
- mekster 5y ago
  Can you tell how it's done specifically? Are you zfs send'ing to another directory and encrypt it entirely on the fly while transferring to Glacier? Does it do incremental backup transfer to Glacier or does it have to transfer the entire encrypted blob every time?
  - janitha 5y ago
    No intermediate directory/file at all, all done on the fly. sudo zfs send -i <LAST_BACKUPED_SNAPNAME> <CUR_SNAPNAME> | gpg -e -r <YOURKEY> --compress-algo none -v | pv | aws s3 cp --storage-class DEEP_ARCHIVE - s3://<PATH_TO_DEST>.zfs.gpg The very first time you do it, you will need to do a full backup (ie. without the `-i <...>` option). Afterwards, subsequent backups can be done with the -i, so only the incremental difference will be backed up. I have a path/naming scheme for the .zfs.gpg files on s3 which include the snapshot from/to names. This allows to determine what the latest backed up snapshot name is (so the next one can be incremental against that). And also use when backing up, since the order or restore matters.
- luckman212 5y ago
  But how do you verify or test your backups in this scenario?