6 ms·

> sorry cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte! Oh, I would, but I guess you meant per byte. At current rates it's $3K monthly to k

by comboy 10y ago

> sorry cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte! Oh, I would, but I guess you meant per byte. At current rates it's $3K monthly to keep a backup of this HDD on tarsnap and that's not including bandwidth. That's six 10TB drives. I don't mean to discourage from tarsnap though. Cloud storage is unfortunately still pretty expensive, and most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data.

paulddraper 10y ago
True. Linux images can easily be redownloaded.
bigiain 10y ago
Even if he were paying me to use tarsnap I wouldn't use it for backing up 12TB. I'd consider a backup solution that takes 3+years to make a full backup (or 4 months for a restore) to be of negative value to me... (I wonder how many months I'd get away with uploading 300GB/month before my "unlimited" ADSL plan hit me with it's "acceptable use" disclaimers? Given that I'd be using 100% of my upload bandwidth to take this 3 year backup, I suspect the cost of 2 identical drives to make local backups would probably be cheaper than the network costs of sending it to tarsnap!)
kristofferR 10y ago
Why don't just use Arq (encrypted cloud backups for Win+MacOS, $49) and Amazon Cloud Storage (unlimited storage for $59 a year)? I've got terabytes backed up, no issues at all.
- bo1024 10y ago
  I tried an online backup service, Amazon Cloud storage, and saw upload speeds of about 0.7 Mbps (speedtests say my connection has 5-20 depending on the day). That would take over four months of continuous uploading to back up a single terabyte.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    Weird, it's working at max speed for me (8-11MB/s). I can upload several hundred gigabytes per day without any throttling or other issues, so I suspect your issues are with your ISP and not Amazon.
    - bo1024 10y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if you are right.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- vacri 10y ago
  > Amazon Cloud Storage sounded good, and got depressed from the Australia Tax. US$59, but AU$100. AU$100 - $10 = $90 (ish) as taxes are built into our prices, not added later 90 Australian play dollars = 69 American real dollars US$69 - $59 US price = Australia Tax of ~US$10, approx 16%.
  - manmal 10y ago
    You do realize that it's per year, and not per month? We are talking about $5/m here.
    - vacri 10y ago
      I didn't mean that it was unattainable, I just meant that it's sad how, yet again, we pay more for goods and services 'just because'.
      - kristofferR 10y ago
        Australia is a remote island, so the packets need to travel a long way. That's why digital services are more expensive.
      - Zancarius 10y ago
        This is definitely true. I'm always shocked by how much relatives over there pay. However, outside the Asian markets, Australia is a bit off the major trade routes to the rest of the world, so general product prices never surprise me much these days. Bandwidth costs too, although I think having a much lower population density also helps drive up those prices (sadly). In your case, even with the exchange rate as it is, price parity would be ~$80. If the taxes are ~$10 as you suggested, that means you're paying another what? $10 for essentially the same service? In a way, I'm surprised it's "only" that much more, but it's still terrible for Australian consumers.
- comboy 10y ago
  Because I had no idea about this Amazon unlimited Cloud Storage, thanks! Need to read the fine print though, home DB snapshots forever sounds really great. Plus there's not much to save space on their side if I encrypt them first. But even without it, I trust Amazon to keep my photos secure more than I trust CrashPlan which already have lost my data once (yes I think it's worth repeating, and no it was not PEBKAC, they admitted it and all they could do about it was "sorry"). edit: I wonder if Amazon goal with this was to get their hands on as many photos with their full metadata as possible (for training).
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    That might be their goal with Amazon Cloud Photos (unlimited photos, free with Prime), but it's obviously not the goal with Amazon Cloud Storage.
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    Interesting. Was this data loss of CrashPlan announced publicly? Did it affect more users? It's concerning to hear, since I know people using it for backups.
    - comboy 10y ago
      I'm not aware of it. But you know, in some other company (don't even know which) I remember a story where after the data loss the CEO contacted the user and tried to do whatever he can including sending hard drives to speed up uploading new copies. In my case it was 90GB, a whole single machine. The fact that they were pretty causal about it, is worrying. But I still use them for some use cases because they have unlimited storage with software for Linux, although I don't depend on them. Quote from the support ticket: "I have looked again for your data, but we are unable to locate the archive anywhere in our system. I am sincerely sorry that we have let you down as there is not a reason that I can find that this data should not be here. If there is anything that I can to for you, please do not hesitate to ask and I will do so."
- anc84 10y ago
  Have you successfully completed a full restore yet? If not, it is not a backup but just some data on someone else's computer.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    I've tested partial restores all the time, but not a full restore. Good idea, I'm testing it now. Will report back.
    - kristofferR 10y ago
      No issues :)
      - apetresc 10y ago
        You did a full restore of "terabytes" in <7 hours?
        kristofferR 10y ago
        No, the 3.4 terabytes were composed of hourly incremental backups of the home folder on my Macbook Air and my Hackintosh + some external drives with media content. I downloaded a full restore of the state of my Macbook Air as of roughly one month ago for testing. I don't have the storage space for a total restore (which would be tens of TBs I guess, since it's an incremental backup solution [unless you could restore all the files instead of all the backups]), but I've tested everything I care about. I actually just deleted most of the backups from Amazon (just to be nice), since I don't really need to have backups of everything that has ever touched my Downloads folders or web browser cache for example.
- tomaskafka 10y ago
  Arq is great, but: - no support for Backblaze B2 (cheapest cloud storage) - Arq + Dropbox on mac = hell - dropbox triggers Arq's full rescan every few minutes, even though I'm not backing up Dropbox folder
WalterGR 10y ago
most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data. I hate to pick nits... But my email alone is about 8 GB for the past 25 years. That doesn't include documents, photos, etc... I think we underestimate what Joe Average cares about.
- jerf 10y ago
  It is very unlikely that you care about all 8GB of that email equally. What you're paying for when you back it all up is the ability to not have to pick and choose, and especially to avoid choosing incorrectly and permanently whacking something you want to keep. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, 1GB is pretty tight. I suspect there's a lot of people who could come up with 1GB of photos they don't care to part with, and coming up with 1GB of valuable home videos is child's play, even assuming efficient encodings of the video rather than the rather flabby stuff that tends to come straight out of consumer cameras or phones. But I bet if most people had to fit the Family Jewels into 10GB, they could, just one more order of magnitude away. Of course HN will have a way-above-average number of people who have way-above-average video recordings and such. Or, perhaps more realistically, call it a single 32GB SD card. At the moment my "family jewels" clocks in at about 90GB, however, that is with no judgment whatsoever about what photos we keep and with a lot of the aforementioned "flabby" videos, not to mention, no judgment whatsoever about what videos we're keeping either.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  You have your email on your computer? That's not very average. It mostly comes down to how many photos you take, really.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    Depends who you ask and whether its business email or personal. Lots of businesses still use outlook or lotus notes and the email is stored on each client. And then some people like to use what they use at work. When I worked for Nationwide insurance (50 to 60 thousand people) we could keep as much email as we wanted locally, but no more than 100 mb on the server. This is a stupid policy, but it is a common policy.

by comboy 10y ago

paulddraper 10y ago

True. Linux images can easily be redownloaded.

bigiain 10y ago

Even if he were paying me to use tarsnap I wouldn't use it for backing up 12TB. I'd consider a backup solution that takes 3+years to make a full backup (or 4 months for a restore) to be of negative value to me... (I wonder how many months I'd get away with uploading 300GB/month before my "unlimited" ADSL plan hit me with it's "acceptable use" disclaimers? Given that I'd be using 100% of my upload bandwidth to take this 3 year backup, I suspect the cost of 2 identical drives to make local backups would probably be cheaper than the network costs of sending it to tarsnap!)

kristofferR 10y ago

Why don't just use Arq (encrypted cloud backups for Win+MacOS, $49) and Amazon Cloud Storage (unlimited storage for $59 a year)? I've got terabytes backed up, no issues at all.

bo1024 10y ago
I tried an online backup service, Amazon Cloud storage, and saw upload speeds of about 0.7 Mbps (speedtests say my connection has 5-20 depending on the day). That would take over four months of continuous uploading to back up a single terabyte.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  Weird, it's working at max speed for me (8-11MB/s). I can upload several hundred gigabytes per day without any throttling or other issues, so I suspect your issues are with your ISP and not Amazon.
  - bo1024 10y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if you are right.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
vacri 10y ago
> Amazon Cloud Storage sounded good, and got depressed from the Australia Tax. US$59, but AU$100. AU$100 - $10 = $90 (ish) as taxes are built into our prices, not added later 90 Australian play dollars = 69 American real dollars US$69 - $59 US price = Australia Tax of ~US$10, approx 16%.
- manmal 10y ago
  You do realize that it's per year, and not per month? We are talking about $5/m here.
  - vacri 10y ago
    I didn't mean that it was unattainable, I just meant that it's sad how, yet again, we pay more for goods and services 'just because'.
    - kristofferR 10y ago
      Australia is a remote island, so the packets need to travel a long way. That's why digital services are more expensive.
    - Zancarius 10y ago
      This is definitely true. I'm always shocked by how much relatives over there pay. However, outside the Asian markets, Australia is a bit off the major trade routes to the rest of the world, so general product prices never surprise me much these days. Bandwidth costs too, although I think having a much lower population density also helps drive up those prices (sadly). In your case, even with the exchange rate as it is, price parity would be ~$80. If the taxes are ~$10 as you suggested, that means you're paying another what? $10 for essentially the same service? In a way, I'm surprised it's "only" that much more, but it's still terrible for Australian consumers.
comboy 10y ago
Because I had no idea about this Amazon unlimited Cloud Storage, thanks! Need to read the fine print though, home DB snapshots forever sounds really great. Plus there's not much to save space on their side if I encrypt them first. But even without it, I trust Amazon to keep my photos secure more than I trust CrashPlan which already have lost my data once (yes I think it's worth repeating, and no it was not PEBKAC, they admitted it and all they could do about it was "sorry"). edit: I wonder if Amazon goal with this was to get their hands on as many photos with their full metadata as possible (for training).
- kristofferR 10y ago
  That might be their goal with Amazon Cloud Photos (unlimited photos, free with Prime), but it's obviously not the goal with Amazon Cloud Storage.
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  Interesting. Was this data loss of CrashPlan announced publicly? Did it affect more users? It's concerning to hear, since I know people using it for backups.
  - comboy 10y ago
    I'm not aware of it. But you know, in some other company (don't even know which) I remember a story where after the data loss the CEO contacted the user and tried to do whatever he can including sending hard drives to speed up uploading new copies. In my case it was 90GB, a whole single machine. The fact that they were pretty causal about it, is worrying. But I still use them for some use cases because they have unlimited storage with software for Linux, although I don't depend on them. Quote from the support ticket: "I have looked again for your data, but we are unable to locate the archive anywhere in our system. I am sincerely sorry that we have let you down as there is not a reason that I can find that this data should not be here. If there is anything that I can to for you, please do not hesitate to ask and I will do so."
anc84 10y ago
Have you successfully completed a full restore yet? If not, it is not a backup but just some data on someone else's computer.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  I've tested partial restores all the time, but not a full restore. Good idea, I'm testing it now. Will report back.
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    No issues :)
    - apetresc 10y ago
      You did a full restore of "terabytes" in <7 hours?
      - kristofferR 10y ago
        No, the 3.4 terabytes were composed of hourly incremental backups of the home folder on my Macbook Air and my Hackintosh + some external drives with media content. I downloaded a full restore of the state of my Macbook Air as of roughly one month ago for testing. I don't have the storage space for a total restore (which would be tens of TBs I guess, since it's an incremental backup solution [unless you could restore all the files instead of all the backups]), but I've tested everything I care about. I actually just deleted most of the backups from Amazon (just to be nice), since I don't really need to have backups of everything that has ever touched my Downloads folders or web browser cache for example.
tomaskafka 10y ago
Arq is great, but: - no support for Backblaze B2 (cheapest cloud storage) - Arq + Dropbox on mac = hell - dropbox triggers Arq's full rescan every few minutes, even though I'm not backing up Dropbox folder

WalterGR 10y ago

most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data. I hate to pick nits... But my email alone is about 8 GB for the past 25 years. That doesn't include documents, photos, etc... I think we underestimate what Joe Average cares about.

jerf 10y ago
It is very unlikely that you care about all 8GB of that email equally. What you're paying for when you back it all up is the ability to not have to pick and choose, and especially to avoid choosing incorrectly and permanently whacking something you want to keep. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, 1GB is pretty tight. I suspect there's a lot of people who could come up with 1GB of photos they don't care to part with, and coming up with 1GB of valuable home videos is child's play, even assuming efficient encodings of the video rather than the rather flabby stuff that tends to come straight out of consumer cameras or phones. But I bet if most people had to fit the Family Jewels into 10GB, they could, just one more order of magnitude away. Of course HN will have a way-above-average number of people who have way-above-average video recordings and such. Or, perhaps more realistically, call it a single 32GB SD card. At the moment my "family jewels" clocks in at about 90GB, however, that is with no judgment whatsoever about what photos we keep and with a lot of the aforementioned "flabby" videos, not to mention, no judgment whatsoever about what videos we're keeping either.
Dylan16807 10y ago
You have your email on your computer? That's not very average. It mostly comes down to how many photos you take, really.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Depends who you ask and whether its business email or personal. Lots of businesses still use outlook or lotus notes and the email is stored on each client. And then some people like to use what they use at work. When I worked for Nationwide insurance (50 to 60 thousand people) we could keep as much email as we wanted locally, but no more than 100 mb on the server. This is a stupid policy, but it is a common policy.