6 ms·

What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

101 points by reubano 3y ago

rudasn 3y ago
(2014)
- ugjka 3y ago
  And it is still expensive today
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    Note that this blog post says it’s too cheap (see “ill-considered price decrease” and the post behind the link).
    - ugjka 3y ago
      I pay ~6€ for 1TB of storage on Hetzner managed Nextcloud instance, that is 0,005859375€ per GB. Obviously, that is not a back up solution or a back up solution for the "PARANOID tm", but come on, 0.25$ per GB is a ripoff
      - pakitan 3y ago
        At that pricing, if you need to backup less than 25GB compressed data, Hetzner is more expensive than the "ripoff".
        ugjka 3y ago
        Good thinking there pal, but you are missing the point. If I wanted to store 25GB i could probably find a spot that'd do it for free (Mega, Google Drive etc)
        throwaway290 3y ago
        If you need free space to store something this is so not for you buddy... Just go register 10 google accounts to spread your stuff around and you never need to pay for storage;) some people like to be a customer not a product
        ugjka 3y ago
        my point it is overpriced no matter how you look at it
        throwaway290 3y ago
        No, it's overpriced if you compare it to worse solutions which is how the market is supposed to work
        ugjka 3y ago
        So I should pay 125€/mo(plus transfer fees) instead of 6€/mo for my 500GB?
        throwaway290 3y ago
        No. I already said it's probably not for you. If you need lowest price per GB and don't care about anything else including your time or customer support then nothing beats a bunch of google accs with free drive tier. No price is better than zero But for me tarsnap is convenient as extra offsite backup for valuable stuff. Price per GB is not the only factor and different people have different priorities.
        vizzah 3y ago
        Yes, it's seriously overpriced and storage costs hasn't decreased on Tarsnap for ages. That is the reason I am currently migrating off Tarsnap after using it for over ten years.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. It might be rational even, but I’d expect the actual utility does have a negative term for I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also you) if you do this. (Cf recent discussion on customer “support” chatbots.) > let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? Again, screw that noise. I can’t really motivate this well, but to a first approximation I (a) dislike seeing pricing disconnected from costs; (b) cannot resist the urge to minmax thus cannot help disliking people who make it more difficult than it absolutely needs to be. Note that this does not contradict TFA’s conclusions, unlike the previous point, and another argument in it is actually very close to (b); it’s this specific argument for the conclusion that I’m disagreeing with. > You know how every ToS ever has the “You are not allowed to use $SERVICE for illegal purposes” despite there being no convenient way to enforce that in computer code? Yes I do, and I feel basically the same way about that as I do about stupid laws everybody tacitly agrees not to enforce: it erodes the whole edifice of a law/bureaucracy-based Enlightenment society. If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.
- abofh 3y ago
  Every saas does this, really. You want sso or an audit trail? 10x costs! Doesn't matter that they didn't need to add code and that it's even less for the vendor to manage, you have self selected as an Enterprise, pay Enterprise pricing.
- dools 3y ago
  So go through life hating people who do this and being poor because you don’t.
- edanm 3y ago
  > So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place. If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service. Do you also expect people to go into their office and tell their boss "actually, I don't need such a high salary, go ahead and lower it"? > That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes? > If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me. That seems both unworkable and kind of ridiculous. You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone. Even if it's a minor violation that isn't worth it to sue over, or a violation that they decide is ok for them in that context. Why would that be better than the alternative?
peteforde 3y ago
It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade. I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Advice is worth what you paid for it and even if you solicit advice you are not required to take it, especially if taking that advice implies you have to do stuff that runs counter to your nature and views. Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.
  - peteforde 3y ago
    All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one. The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial. Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum. This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on a life of its own beyond where I'm having fun with it and it is just useful to others I will have to make a very hard choice: transform it into an actual business or to hobble it in such a way that it won't take off (or possibly even to shut it down). Which of those two it will be I can't tell you but in the meantime I've done what I could do to ensure that no matter what I choose users of the service will have perfect data portability with a local installation. Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shubhamjain 3y ago
I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some things Patrick points out are indeed low-hanging fruits, but I believe it's a conscious decision to completely ignore all the "optimisation" aspects. Tarsnap doesn't even have any tracker on its homepage. Tarsnap has had the same basic pricing structure for the past ten years. It does one thing and does it well. I hate the pursuit of growth and everything that comes as a result: bloat, shiny landing pages, a/b testing, conversation rate optimisation. Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman. > “Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!” > “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen. > “After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.” > “With all due respect sir, but that’s exactly what we are doing now. So what’s the point wasting twenty-five years?” asked the Mexicans.
- dools 3y ago
  Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all
  - nullcipher 3y ago
    neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
    - thayne 3y ago
      > which is fine I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.
wofo 3y ago
Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  I would characterise rsync.net as aiming at a similar market segment. Both of them have a big "by geeks, for geeks" vibe (rsync.net even has a page designed to be sent to your boss if you're recommending it at work), in fact in some ways rsync.net is even more barebones: they don't even provide their own backup utility, it's basically just an SSH login to a ZFS volume. But it is a lot cheaper, it has some unique features like supporting raw ZFS send, and it has the alert-if-your-backup-stops-running feature that tarsnap apparently lacks, as well as the generally friendlier billing approach you mention.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    rsync.net is more expensive than something like backblaze though, which makes me wonder why someone would use it other than for the geek factor. The OP alluded to tarsnap being the best, but didn't really explain why that is. Rsync too sounds like it'd be fun to use, but it's 3x the price of backblaze b2 and has a minimum order size of ~$10/month
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      For me I use it because of their ZFS send support. It's just way easier with the system I have to use that as opposed to any other option. The cost difference is worth that for my situation (a decent but not huge amount of data and limited time to spend on managing it). (There are also some potential advantages in that it is just an online file store which you can pull from and validate at any time, as opposed to having a specific process for a restore). Also the cost on their website is a starting point, you may find they can go cheaper if it matters to you (and e.g. if you are willing to use a different payment schedule).
andyjohnson0 3y ago
I've read this before, and I still think it is pretty remarkable for its clarity and the amount of useful, actionable judgement that it contains. A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's an interesting question because Patrick has gained a ton of experience since then, selling BCC, then doing Appointment Reminder, Starfighter and quite a few years of working for Stripe. Surely that would have resulted in additional insights. He's still active here so maybe he'll chime in.
  - justin_oaks 3y ago
    I was going to ask if any significant changes were made to Tarsnap based on Patrick's previous advice. A cursory inspection of the website indicates "No". Pricing is the same, the messaging is still aimed at geeks, the website design is similar. If anyone knows of changes that were made, please share.
    - antonjs 3y ago
      To be honest it looks like reync.net read the article and took it's advice instead. They have a CEO page, though based on the first time the way back machine saw it it might be that patio11 took inspiration from them. [0] [0] https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html
itmediaseo 3y ago
[flagged]
itmediaseo 3y ago
[flagged]
isawczuk 3y ago
This is the problem with outside consultants. They completely miss the point. Tarsnap is perfect tool for geek2geek backup. If you position yourself in a new category you get crushed by big companies with lots of money, marketing teams, etc. Not only that, you will become miserable because you compromise yourself for money. Not everyone wants to build multimillion company.
pushcx 3y ago
Billing is why tarsnap was too unreliable for prod usage for me. You deposit funds with a credit card, a difficult-to-predict usage calculation occurs based on how many deduplicated blocks of new data and how many API calls you will use in the next few weeks and months, and then eventually, at an essentially random time, you get an email from tarsnap guessing you have about a week of funds left and warning that your data will be deleted a week after that happens. Then a human with admin backup credentials and the org’s credit card in hand must log into the tarsnap website to add funds, resetting the time bomb for another few weeks or months. Tarsnap is technically impressive and was reliable software, but the billing system requires an unpredictable manual process requiring two credentials held separately in most orgs. Colin has told me in private email that customer deletion is a manual step not taken lightly, but I didn’t feel that one unscheduled manual process was fixed by epicycling on another one. I migrated away several prod installs to pay more for predictable and automated billing. Even with usage billing that’s not easy to predict, the date of next intervention is printed on the back of the credit card. (Though really, it does cost less - the engineer time it takes to manually add funds costs significantly more than a picodollar.)
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  I'm a sysadmin, but not the one who pays bills at my job. It drives me crazy when a service doesn't have separate technical and billing contacts. And it wastes my time when I get emails about billing renewals. And the billing person at my company doesn't see the email unless I forward it.
triska 3y ago
Interesting previous discussion from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)
RGamma 3y ago
[flagged]
idlewords 3y ago
Looking forward to Colin's rebuttal, "What I would do if I ran Bingo Card Generator for a while and then quit"
- sokoloff 3y ago
  He already holds the best HN rebuttal of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That one never gets old. I swear I still chuckle at it so many years later.
Aeolun 3y ago
There was a time when I enjoyed the tone of these posts, but re-reading them years after I'm kind of annoyed by them. I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.
akkartik 3y ago
I nodded along when I first read this, but ten years later I have two, more complex, reactions. Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous. Here's an alternative framing. Incorporated businesses don't prevent catastrophe, they just make sure there's nobody to blame when things go catastrophically wrong (e.g. https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emergency-room https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones. A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP. --- Reaction #2: the Opticon page he glowingly links to no longer works. They probably switched hosting providers at some point, and that didn't affect their ability to do business even if it caused them to forget some of their past. Backups as "ability to continue to operate in the present" are a very different thing from backups as "providing the future access to the past." It's absolutely true that any company will see more profit in the former over the latter. That seems like a weakness of capitalism more than one of Tarsnap.
jpgvm 3y ago
This is basically a masterpiece in missing the point of Tarsnap IMO. IMO Tarsnap is about being the perfect lifestyle business for an extremely technical engineer, it's something I aspire to build one day also. Billing? Just the most simple model possible. Sales? Nah. Marketing? Nah. Fancy website even? Nah. Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.
jms703 3y ago
Tarsnap is not an ideal business model for me because that company and their service can fail to exist tomorrow. Get your own backup software and storage provider. Store your encrypted blobs wherever you want.
manicennui 3y ago
Basically make it attractive for acquisition by some large shitty company who will shut it down.
- projectileboy 3y ago
  Indeed. Acquisitions are often great for the founders, sometimes ok for shareholders, and usually a disaster for employees and customers.

101 points by reubano 3y ago

rudasn 3y ago

(2014)

ugjka 3y ago
And it is still expensive today
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Note that this blog post says it’s too cheap (see “ill-considered price decrease” and the post behind the link).
  - ugjka 3y ago
    I pay ~6€ for 1TB of storage on Hetzner managed Nextcloud instance, that is 0,005859375€ per GB. Obviously, that is not a back up solution or a back up solution for the "PARANOID tm", but come on, 0.25$ per GB is a ripoff
    - pakitan 3y ago
      At that pricing, if you need to backup less than 25GB compressed data, Hetzner is more expensive than the "ripoff".
      - ugjka 3y ago
        Good thinking there pal, but you are missing the point. If I wanted to store 25GB i could probably find a spot that'd do it for free (Mega, Google Drive etc)
        throwaway290 3y ago
        If you need free space to store something this is so not for you buddy... Just go register 10 google accounts to spread your stuff around and you never need to pay for storage;) some people like to be a customer not a product
        ugjka 3y ago
        my point it is overpriced no matter how you look at it
        throwaway290 3y ago
        No, it's overpriced if you compare it to worse solutions which is how the market is supposed to work
        ugjka 3y ago
        So I should pay 125€/mo(plus transfer fees) instead of 6€/mo for my 500GB?
        throwaway290 3y ago
        No. I already said it's probably not for you. If you need lowest price per GB and don't care about anything else including your time or customer support then nothing beats a bunch of google accs with free drive tier. No price is better than zero But for me tarsnap is convenient as extra offsite backup for valuable stuff. Price per GB is not the only factor and different people have different priorities.
        vizzah 3y ago
        Yes, it's seriously overpriced and storage costs hasn't decreased on Tarsnap for ages. That is the reason I am currently migrating off Tarsnap after using it for over ten years.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. It might be rational even, but I’d expect the actual utility does have a negative term for I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also you) if you do this. (Cf recent discussion on customer “support” chatbots.) > let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? Again, screw that noise. I can’t really motivate this well, but to a first approximation I (a) dislike seeing pricing disconnected from costs; (b) cannot resist the urge to minmax thus cannot help disliking people who make it more difficult than it absolutely needs to be. Note that this does not contradict TFA’s conclusions, unlike the previous point, and another argument in it is actually very close to (b); it’s this specific argument for the conclusion that I’m disagreeing with. > You know how every ToS ever has the “You are not allowed to use $SERVICE for illegal purposes” despite there being no convenient way to enforce that in computer code? Yes I do, and I feel basically the same way about that as I do about stupid laws everybody tacitly agrees not to enforce: it erodes the whole edifice of a law/bureaucracy-based Enlightenment society. If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.

abofh 3y ago
Every saas does this, really. You want sso or an audit trail? 10x costs! Doesn't matter that they didn't need to add code and that it's even less for the vendor to manage, you have self selected as an Enterprise, pay Enterprise pricing.
dools 3y ago
So go through life hating people who do this and being poor because you don’t.
edanm 3y ago
> So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place. If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service. Do you also expect people to go into their office and tell their boss "actually, I don't need such a high salary, go ahead and lower it"? > That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes? > If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me. That seems both unworkable and kind of ridiculous. You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone. Even if it's a minor violation that isn't worth it to sue over, or a violation that they decide is ok for them in that context. Why would that be better than the alternative?

peteforde 3y ago

It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade. I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.

jacquesm 3y ago
Advice is worth what you paid for it and even if you solicit advice you are not required to take it, especially if taking that advice implies you have to do stuff that runs counter to your nature and views. Patrick's advice is very good: for Patrick. But for Colin it was more of an exercise in how you could run Tarsnap, not how he should run Tarsnap. Meanwhile, Tarsnap is still in business many years later, has happy customers and as far as I know happy people running it.
- peteforde 3y ago
  All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one. The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostile and antisocial. Many of the founders and teams I've mentored over the years have experienced me spending a large amount of time and effort explaining the importance of clearly stating why a thing exists and why you should use it; how it works and how it will not create additional unknown risks; what tools it is intended to replace... as the barest civil minimum. This is just my opinion, but it's a hill I'd die on if necessary.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on a life of its own beyond where I'm having fun with it and it is just useful to others I will have to make a very hard choice: transform it into an actual business or to hobble it in such a way that it won't take off (or possibly even to shut it down). Which of those two it will be I can't tell you but in the meantime I've done what I could do to ensure that no matter what I choose users of the service will have perfect data portability with a local installation. Founders that are in the funding cycle would obviously benefit from Patrick's advice they are going to increase their chances at commercial success that way. But if commercial success isn't your #1 goal there are other viable paths based on your priorities in life. And that's a hill that I'd die on if necessary because I don't believe that everything has to be run as a marketing driven profit maximization engine. The OSS world upholds that tradition pretty good and I'm fully supportive of it, there are many paths to a happy life and not all of them run through a wallet.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shubhamjain 3y ago

I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some things Patrick points out are indeed low-hanging fruits, but I believe it's a conscious decision to completely ignore all the "optimisation" aspects. Tarsnap doesn't even have any tracker on its homepage. Tarsnap has had the same basic pricing structure for the past ten years. It does one thing and does it well. I hate the pursuit of growth and everything that comes as a result: bloat, shiny landing pages, a/b testing, conversation rate optimisation. Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman. > “Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!” > “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen. > “After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.” > “With all due respect sir, but that’s exactly what we are doing now. So what’s the point wasting twenty-five years?” asked the Mexicans.

dools 3y ago
Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all
- nullcipher 3y ago
  neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
  - thayne 3y ago
    > which is fine I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.

wofo 3y ago

Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.

rcxdude 3y ago
I would characterise rsync.net as aiming at a similar market segment. Both of them have a big "by geeks, for geeks" vibe (rsync.net even has a page designed to be sent to your boss if you're recommending it at work), in fact in some ways rsync.net is even more barebones: they don't even provide their own backup utility, it's basically just an SSH login to a ZFS volume. But it is a lot cheaper, it has some unique features like supporting raw ZFS send, and it has the alert-if-your-backup-stops-running feature that tarsnap apparently lacks, as well as the generally friendlier billing approach you mention.
- bogwog 3y ago
  rsync.net is more expensive than something like backblaze though, which makes me wonder why someone would use it other than for the geek factor. The OP alluded to tarsnap being the best, but didn't really explain why that is. Rsync too sounds like it'd be fun to use, but it's 3x the price of backblaze b2 and has a minimum order size of ~$10/month
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    For me I use it because of their ZFS send support. It's just way easier with the system I have to use that as opposed to any other option. The cost difference is worth that for my situation (a decent but not huge amount of data and limited time to spend on managing it). (There are also some potential advantages in that it is just an online file store which you can pull from and validate at any time, as opposed to having a specific process for a restore). Also the cost on their website is a starting point, you may find they can go cheaper if it matters to you (and e.g. if you are willing to use a different payment schedule).

andyjohnson0 3y ago

I've read this before, and I still think it is pretty remarkable for its clarity and the amount of useful, actionable judgement that it contains. A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?

jacquesm 3y ago
That's an interesting question because Patrick has gained a ton of experience since then, selling BCC, then doing Appointment Reminder, Starfighter and quite a few years of working for Stripe. Surely that would have resulted in additional insights. He's still active here so maybe he'll chime in.
- justin_oaks 3y ago
  I was going to ask if any significant changes were made to Tarsnap based on Patrick's previous advice. A cursory inspection of the website indicates "No". Pricing is the same, the messaging is still aimed at geeks, the website design is similar. If anyone knows of changes that were made, please share.
  - antonjs 3y ago
    To be honest it looks like reync.net read the article and took it's advice instead. They have a CEO page, though based on the first time the way back machine saw it it might be that patio11 took inspiration from them. [0] [0] https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html

itmediaseo 3y ago

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itmediaseo 3y ago

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isawczuk 3y ago

This is the problem with outside consultants. They completely miss the point. Tarsnap is perfect tool for geek2geek backup. If you position yourself in a new category you get crushed by big companies with lots of money, marketing teams, etc. Not only that, you will become miserable because you compromise yourself for money. Not everyone wants to build multimillion company.

pushcx 3y ago

Billing is why tarsnap was too unreliable for prod usage for me. You deposit funds with a credit card, a difficult-to-predict usage calculation occurs based on how many deduplicated blocks of new data and how many API calls you will use in the next few weeks and months, and then eventually, at an essentially random time, you get an email from tarsnap guessing you have about a week of funds left and warning that your data will be deleted a week after that happens. Then a human with admin backup credentials and the org’s credit card in hand must log into the tarsnap website to add funds, resetting the time bomb for another few weeks or months. Tarsnap is technically impressive and was reliable software, but the billing system requires an unpredictable manual process requiring two credentials held separately in most orgs. Colin has told me in private email that customer deletion is a manual step not taken lightly, but I didn’t feel that one unscheduled manual process was fixed by epicycling on another one. I migrated away several prod installs to pay more for predictable and automated billing. Even with usage billing that’s not easy to predict, the date of next intervention is printed on the back of the credit card. (Though really, it does cost less - the engineer time it takes to manually add funds costs significantly more than a picodollar.)

justin_oaks 3y ago
I'm a sysadmin, but not the one who pays bills at my job. It drives me crazy when a service doesn't have separate technical and billing contacts. And it wastes my time when I get emails about billing renewals. And the billing person at my company doesn't see the email unless I forward it.

triska 3y ago

Interesting previous discussion from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 (311 comments)

RGamma 3y ago

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idlewords 3y ago

Looking forward to Colin's rebuttal, "What I would do if I ran Bingo Card Generator for a while and then quit"

sokoloff 3y ago
He already holds the best HN rebuttal of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That one never gets old. I swear I still chuckle at it so many years later.

Aeolun 3y ago

There was a time when I enjoyed the tone of these posts, but re-reading them years after I'm kind of annoyed by them. I might agree with about half of the points in them, but it still grates somehow.

akkartik 3y ago

I nodded along when I first read this, but ten years later I have two, more complex, reactions. Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous. Here's an alternative framing. Incorporated businesses don't prevent catastrophe, they just make sure there's nobody to blame when things go catastrophically wrong (e.g. https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emergency-room https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones. A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP. --- Reaction #2: the Opticon page he glowingly links to no longer works. They probably switched hosting providers at some point, and that didn't affect their ability to do business even if it caused them to forget some of their past. Backups as "ability to continue to operate in the present" are a very different thing from backups as "providing the future access to the past." It's absolutely true that any company will see more profit in the former over the latter. That seems like a weakness of capitalism more than one of Tarsnap.

jpgvm 3y ago

This is basically a masterpiece in missing the point of Tarsnap IMO. IMO Tarsnap is about being the perfect lifestyle business for an extremely technical engineer, it's something I aspire to build one day also. Billing? Just the most simple model possible. Sales? Nah. Marketing? Nah. Fancy website even? Nah. Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.

jms703 3y ago

Tarsnap is not an ideal business model for me because that company and their service can fail to exist tomorrow. Get your own backup software and storage provider. Store your encrypted blobs wherever you want.

manicennui 3y ago

Basically make it attractive for acquisition by some large shitty company who will shut it down.

projectileboy 3y ago
Indeed. Acquisitions are often great for the founders, sometimes ok for shareholders, and usually a disaster for employees and customers.