7 ms·

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this servic

by stigz 3y ago

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IntelMiner 3y ago
I'm curious how the prices shake out against services like Wasabi, since it's just dumping to an AWS S3 bucket Wasabi does $7/TB with no ingress/egress fees. My NAS is set up to rclone to it about once a day and I've yet to have any problems
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  I haven’t checked the pricing in a long time but you can use Tarsnap also if you have to backup only 7.3kb (okay I might ne exaggerating here but you get the drift) and pay for only that much. You can’t do that with Wasabi et al. Also it’s really simple and does what it says it does, nothing more, nothing less. In today’s everything convoluted and bloated world this is a luxury imho. The GUI app is also quite good and functional. Support is prompt (that is if you need it). You don’t have to worry about file being deleted just because your machine didn’t connect or backup for some time even if you keep paying (hello Backblaze) etc. I mean there’s no circus, melodrama , and cliffhangers involved. I personally would never use it backup my entire laptop, due to price alone. But I have a subset of VVI files and Tarsnap is one of more than one backups for those files. So for that use-case Tarsnap is perfect for me, so far.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Backblaze has kept my ‘shutdown two years ago’ machine data without issue. What problems did you have with them (or did others have)?
    - terinjokes 3y ago
      Backblaze has a policy of allowing backups of external disks, but the disks have to be connected at least once every 30 days, or they'll delete the backups. I understand they want to avoid abuse, but the lack of any grace period, or ability of support to ad an override, really soured the service for me.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        Huh, I had to start paying them $2 more for my nonexistent PC I think, but otherwise was fine. I have only 1 TB of total storage on that PC though, so maybe that’s the reason.
      - andrioni 3y ago
        You can just pay extra for extended or infinite retention. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-version-history https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-ver...
        seanthemon 3y ago
        I did this, it's come in use a few times..
throwaway290 3y ago
What use is SLA? If a service goes down for too long, are you really going to hire a lawyer sue it over SLA or just... use another backup?
- abofh 3y ago
  Not even then - most SLAs say that if it's breached, you pay less. Not that you get money back
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service. For example, my team has people across the world for HW bringup, so we can't allow our code hosting or CI to be down for more than a few hours. Of course, backups have different uptime requirements, but as for everything, it's a tradeoff between features, of which an SLA is one. Tarsnap's features are granularity of cost, reliability of storage, and encryption, but not 99.999% uptime.
  - playingalong 3y ago
    Then SLO (service level objectives) should be enough.
    - AceJohnny2 3y ago
      huh, never heard of SLO before.
      - toong 3y ago
        and now also go google what SLI means ;-)
        lifeisstillgood 3y ago
        Very roughly: SLI - Service Level Indicators - Metrics ie Latency of each request / response cycle SLO - Service Level Objective - What threshold we are aiming for - 10 ms from request to response averaged over 1 hour period. SLA - SL agreement - contract with custom yet what happens if we breach (credits given, put the CTO in stocks and throw eggs at him etc)
crossroadsguy 3y ago
You really shouldn’t if that’s a major concern for you and that is a valid concern. For the same reason I’ll never use PurelyMail otherwise it’s perfect. I know you didn’t ask me — but I don’t think Colin can answer differently other than saying that he is training a family member or friend to take over if needed. Here’s more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 this is also linked there http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html Very old threads but I am not sure much has changed there https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html Why would you use it instead of restic? Well, for pricing in pico dollars ;-) and for it has a functional GUI with tiny system footprint and that there really aren’t many such solutions out there.
k8sToGo 3y ago
If the data is super important you should be setting on two different providers anyways for backups.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  Honestly, whose data isn't "super important"?. All my data is super important. Even the crap I just throw on my Google drive. I want to keep it. What is this mythical unimportant data that people still want to back up?
  - ilyt 3y ago
    The stuff I don't want to fuck around searching re-downloading from torrent for example.
  - rocqua 3y ago
    My nginx config is not super important. My old reports written for study are not super important. My pirated movie copies are not super important. These are examples of data that I could easily live without. Where losing it would either be a matter of re-doing old work, or just forgetting about old and minor things.
  - ivanhoe 3y ago
    Anything that you stashed just for convenience, but you could re-download or re-generate it if really needed, or simply live without it... frankly, like 90% of stuff on my disks fall in the category "I'll read/view it one day", which in reality I'll probably never have time or patience to open ever again.
    - nixpulvis 3y ago
      Strange, 90% of the things trapped in my flash memory are system files.
      - vntok 3y ago
        You should get another drive and reserve it to Data. The cost is negligible and it really makes everything much simpler. Optimizing your system or upgrading it just becomes a "trash boot drive and reinstall" operation, applied without a care in the world.
amluto 3y ago
tarsnap natively protects against inadvertent or malicious deletion or corruption — old tarsnap backups are immutablez The low-cost competitors (restic, borg, etc) seem to have this feature as an afterthought, and they make it surprisingly difficult. (FWIW, S3 can be somewhat straightforwardly configured so that old data is effectively immutable. Google Cloud Storage’s similarly named versioning feature appears to be far weaker.)
- e1g 3y ago
  Yep, S3 is reasonably easy to configure for immutability. I personally use restic to send (encrypted) blobs to https://www.borgbase.com https://www.borgbase.com which has append-only mode and monitoring to warn me if some backups didn't happen.
  - crossroadsguy 3y ago
    borgbase is another “little” service that I use and like just like tarsnap and to some extent rsync.net. And they also have an excellent gui app Vorta (it’s FOSS; borgbase dev is the maintainer).
ivanhoe 3y ago
It's a pretty well-known fact for years that tarsnap is basically a one-man show, and yet Colin has managed to provide fantastic service so far. Sometimes having ppl who built the service also managing it is actually a big plus, compared to other services where you first have to fight through outsourced & underpaid support that's limited to template answers, only to finally get some "engineer" who got that job 2 months ago and is more clueless on their system than myself...
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Why the scare quotes? I would expect any well-experienced power user to know a complicated system better than a fresh engineer two months into working on it, with no previous experience on the system. Especially if the power user is an engineer themself.
- andrewmunsell 3y ago
  I hate to bring this up, but what about the bus factor? If Colin is physically unable to continue maintaining the service and something like this happens again, how will anyone be able to get their data out? It's not really a concern about the service Tarsnap provides today
  - Alupis 3y ago
    There's an old Sys Admin saying (perhaps from Allan Jude of ScaleEngine) that goes something like "if your data doesn't exist in at least three places, it doesn't actually exist at all..." That is to say, if Tarsnap is the only place you've keeping sensitive/important data, then you're "not doing it right" as a backup. Things happen... your hard drive can die suddenly, and a data center bursts into flames all on the same day.
    - dryrun 3y ago
      I feel like ovh will never stop earing about this. This has been, frankly, a traumatic event for many sysadmins I believe, and one that was shared by many from the same source, which is quite different from the standard variation of "that time when I erased the production database" (looking at you gitlab, but also at myself!). I mean, at this point it's between a legend and a warning tale and I don't know what else to call it. A bad Wednesday probably.
88913527 3y ago
Even large organizations can have fairly regular availability issues. I appreciate the noted flaws of "single point of failure", but I also see orgs where 100s of people have access to the infrastructure, make a change, and then it breaks something. I wouldn't do business with an org just because they have many people, that won't mean they're operationally sound, at least not to my expectations.
twic 3y ago
> God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service Hence the toddler.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  Are you suggesting that those who build enterprises don't have time for kids? Seems plausible, but is the difference in lifestyle so consistently prevalent as to be stereotypical? Elon has 10!
  - molsongolden 3y ago
    Raising the toddler to have some help running the business.
    - saurik 3y ago
      Not just help: there is now a clear heir to take over if (the gods forbid) cperciva ever succumbs to illness or is defeated in battle.
    - cperciva 3y ago
      Might take a while. Tarsnap has never had an employee without a doctorate. She's a very bright girl but I'll be surprised if she gets her doctorate before 2040.
      - mdda 3y ago
        So you're the one in charge of the unix epoch rollover?
- devonkim 3y ago
  I am really confused by the communication thread and am interpreting that the toddler is somehow in charge of running the infrastructure as a joke. Yet I can’t see it as either a joke or serious. I’m a native English speaker but sometimes I swear I’m losing grasp on communication in the Internet age and am sincerely trying to understand this all.
Mawr 3y ago
Uptime isn't an important property of a backup solution, so I'm not sure where the expectation comes from?
- vntok 3y ago
  It sure should be up when you need it, exactly at the time you need it.

by stigz 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

IntelMiner 3y ago

I'm curious how the prices shake out against services like Wasabi, since it's just dumping to an AWS S3 bucket Wasabi does $7/TB with no ingress/egress fees. My NAS is set up to rclone to it about once a day and I've yet to have any problems

crossroadsguy 3y ago
I haven’t checked the pricing in a long time but you can use Tarsnap also if you have to backup only 7.3kb (okay I might ne exaggerating here but you get the drift) and pay for only that much. You can’t do that with Wasabi et al. Also it’s really simple and does what it says it does, nothing more, nothing less. In today’s everything convoluted and bloated world this is a luxury imho. The GUI app is also quite good and functional. Support is prompt (that is if you need it). You don’t have to worry about file being deleted just because your machine didn’t connect or backup for some time even if you keep paying (hello Backblaze) etc. I mean there’s no circus, melodrama , and cliffhangers involved. I personally would never use it backup my entire laptop, due to price alone. But I have a subset of VVI files and Tarsnap is one of more than one backups for those files. So for that use-case Tarsnap is perfect for me, so far.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Backblaze has kept my ‘shutdown two years ago’ machine data without issue. What problems did you have with them (or did others have)?
  - terinjokes 3y ago
    Backblaze has a policy of allowing backups of external disks, but the disks have to be connected at least once every 30 days, or they'll delete the backups. I understand they want to avoid abuse, but the lack of any grace period, or ability of support to ad an override, really soured the service for me.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Huh, I had to start paying them $2 more for my nonexistent PC I think, but otherwise was fine. I have only 1 TB of total storage on that PC though, so maybe that’s the reason.
    - andrioni 3y ago
      You can just pay extra for extended or infinite retention. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-version-history https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-ver...
      - seanthemon 3y ago
        I did this, it's come in use a few times..

throwaway290 3y ago

What use is SLA? If a service goes down for too long, are you really going to hire a lawyer sue it over SLA or just... use another backup?

abofh 3y ago
Not even then - most SLAs say that if it's breached, you pay less. Not that you get money back
AceJohnny2 3y ago
It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service. For example, my team has people across the world for HW bringup, so we can't allow our code hosting or CI to be down for more than a few hours. Of course, backups have different uptime requirements, but as for everything, it's a tradeoff between features, of which an SLA is one. Tarsnap's features are granularity of cost, reliability of storage, and encryption, but not 99.999% uptime.
- playingalong 3y ago
  Then SLO (service level objectives) should be enough.
  - AceJohnny2 3y ago
    huh, never heard of SLO before.
    - toong 3y ago
      and now also go google what SLI means ;-)
      - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
        Very roughly: SLI - Service Level Indicators - Metrics ie Latency of each request / response cycle SLO - Service Level Objective - What threshold we are aiming for - 10 ms from request to response averaged over 1 hour period. SLA - SL agreement - contract with custom yet what happens if we breach (credits given, put the CTO in stocks and throw eggs at him etc)

crossroadsguy 3y ago

You really shouldn’t if that’s a major concern for you and that is a valid concern. For the same reason I’ll never use PurelyMail otherwise it’s perfect. I know you didn’t ask me — but I don’t think Colin can answer differently other than saying that he is training a family member or friend to take over if needed. Here’s more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 this is also linked there http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html Very old threads but I am not sure much has changed there https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html Why would you use it instead of restic? Well, for pricing in pico dollars ;-) and for it has a functional GUI with tiny system footprint and that there really aren’t many such solutions out there.

k8sToGo 3y ago

If the data is super important you should be setting on two different providers anyways for backups.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
Honestly, whose data isn't "super important"?. All my data is super important. Even the crap I just throw on my Google drive. I want to keep it. What is this mythical unimportant data that people still want to back up?
- ilyt 3y ago
  The stuff I don't want to fuck around searching re-downloading from torrent for example.
- rocqua 3y ago
  My nginx config is not super important. My old reports written for study are not super important. My pirated movie copies are not super important. These are examples of data that I could easily live without. Where losing it would either be a matter of re-doing old work, or just forgetting about old and minor things.
- ivanhoe 3y ago
  Anything that you stashed just for convenience, but you could re-download or re-generate it if really needed, or simply live without it... frankly, like 90% of stuff on my disks fall in the category "I'll read/view it one day", which in reality I'll probably never have time or patience to open ever again.
  - nixpulvis 3y ago
    Strange, 90% of the things trapped in my flash memory are system files.
    - vntok 3y ago
      You should get another drive and reserve it to Data. The cost is negligible and it really makes everything much simpler. Optimizing your system or upgrading it just becomes a "trash boot drive and reinstall" operation, applied without a care in the world.

amluto 3y ago

tarsnap natively protects against inadvertent or malicious deletion or corruption — old tarsnap backups are immutablez The low-cost competitors (restic, borg, etc) seem to have this feature as an afterthought, and they make it surprisingly difficult. (FWIW, S3 can be somewhat straightforwardly configured so that old data is effectively immutable. Google Cloud Storage’s similarly named versioning feature appears to be far weaker.)

e1g 3y ago
Yep, S3 is reasonably easy to configure for immutability. I personally use restic to send (encrypted) blobs to https://www.borgbase.com https://www.borgbase.com which has append-only mode and monitoring to warn me if some backups didn't happen.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  borgbase is another “little” service that I use and like just like tarsnap and to some extent rsync.net. And they also have an excellent gui app Vorta (it’s FOSS; borgbase dev is the maintainer).

ivanhoe 3y ago

It's a pretty well-known fact for years that tarsnap is basically a one-man show, and yet Colin has managed to provide fantastic service so far. Sometimes having ppl who built the service also managing it is actually a big plus, compared to other services where you first have to fight through outsourced & underpaid support that's limited to template answers, only to finally get some "engineer" who got that job 2 months ago and is more clueless on their system than myself...

tomjakubowski 3y ago
Why the scare quotes? I would expect any well-experienced power user to know a complicated system better than a fresh engineer two months into working on it, with no previous experience on the system. Especially if the power user is an engineer themself.
andrewmunsell 3y ago
I hate to bring this up, but what about the bus factor? If Colin is physically unable to continue maintaining the service and something like this happens again, how will anyone be able to get their data out? It's not really a concern about the service Tarsnap provides today
- Alupis 3y ago
  There's an old Sys Admin saying (perhaps from Allan Jude of ScaleEngine) that goes something like "if your data doesn't exist in at least three places, it doesn't actually exist at all..." That is to say, if Tarsnap is the only place you've keeping sensitive/important data, then you're "not doing it right" as a backup. Things happen... your hard drive can die suddenly, and a data center bursts into flames all on the same day.
  - dryrun 3y ago
    I feel like ovh will never stop earing about this. This has been, frankly, a traumatic event for many sysadmins I believe, and one that was shared by many from the same source, which is quite different from the standard variation of "that time when I erased the production database" (looking at you gitlab, but also at myself!). I mean, at this point it's between a legend and a warning tale and I don't know what else to call it. A bad Wednesday probably.

88913527 3y ago

Even large organizations can have fairly regular availability issues. I appreciate the noted flaws of "single point of failure", but I also see orgs where 100s of people have access to the infrastructure, make a change, and then it breaks something. I wouldn't do business with an org just because they have many people, that won't mean they're operationally sound, at least not to my expectations.

twic 3y ago

> God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service Hence the toddler.

hunter2_ 3y ago
Are you suggesting that those who build enterprises don't have time for kids? Seems plausible, but is the difference in lifestyle so consistently prevalent as to be stereotypical? Elon has 10!
- molsongolden 3y ago
  Raising the toddler to have some help running the business.
  - saurik 3y ago
    Not just help: there is now a clear heir to take over if (the gods forbid) cperciva ever succumbs to illness or is defeated in battle.
  - cperciva 3y ago
    Might take a while. Tarsnap has never had an employee without a doctorate. She's a very bright girl but I'll be surprised if she gets her doctorate before 2040.
    - mdda 3y ago
      So you're the one in charge of the unix epoch rollover?
devonkim 3y ago
I am really confused by the communication thread and am interpreting that the toddler is somehow in charge of running the infrastructure as a joke. Yet I can’t see it as either a joke or serious. I’m a native English speaker but sometimes I swear I’m losing grasp on communication in the Internet age and am sincerely trying to understand this all.

Mawr 3y ago

Uptime isn't an important property of a backup solution, so I'm not sure where the expectation comes from?

vntok 3y ago
It sure should be up when you need it, exactly at the time you need it.