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I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noo

I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.

msh 10y ago
Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.
- zie 10y ago
  It really isn't. I mean it looks expensive, until you take into account all the dedup and everything it does to reduce the cost. I put in $10 dollars a few years ago, I still have almost a $4 balance ($3.91).
  - riobard 10y ago
    How much data are you storing?
    - zie 10y ago
      not much obviously, I am only storing critical data in tarsnap. Like others have said, if you are storing large GB's or TB's of data, rsync.net or something may be a better solution.
  - SCdF 10y ago
    It depends on what you're backing up. If you're generating a lot of unique non-dedupable assets (eg you're a photographer who keeps their raws) it quickly becomes very expensive. Don't get me wrong, I love tarsnap and used to use it, but for a lot of workloads it does not compete on price.
  - msh 10y ago
    Well I guess it depends on what you store. I am backing up 1.5 terabyte of photos and videos which can't be compressed or dedup that much so in this case it would be more expensive that many other solutions.
- frankzinger 10y ago
  To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive): $ tarsnap --print-stats Total size Compressed size All archives 1418275826434 1212480481405 (unique data) 5342739088 2957847871 Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression. Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to those of equivalent services, but it seems pretty reasonably-priced to me.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Right, all providers are cheap if you barely use any storage.
    - frankzinger 10y ago
      Yeah, I am surprised at how cheap Backblaze is, according to one of the comments here. I will say though that what I've read about tarsnap's security and my experience with it as a user makes me reluctant to want to switch. I guess I might look into it once I need to store more data. I have had some really bad experiences with other backup systems so having something which I am quite sure is very secure and which works reliably is great. The slow restore times somebody else mentioned might be a problem though. I've only had to restore small archives/files.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    1.3 TB deduplicating & compressing down to 2.75 GB seems way too good to be true. Is there something weird about your data that leads to this level of compression?
    - frankzinger 10y ago
      Yeah, apart from 1.6GB of documents that are mostly PDF, it's all text (mostly code). And I back up multiple times a day so there's a lot of duplicate data.
Negitivefrags 10y ago
The main issue with Tarsnap we had is it's very slow to restore if you have big backups. Very slow. Big in this case is in the order of a TB or so. We had an incident were we needed to restore some data from backups recently, and it took literally days to get the files we needed back. We were not downloading the entire backup, we just wanted to restore a small subset of files. We migrated away after that.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on which part of the restore process was slow (downloading the files themselves or something else)?
mike-cardwell 10y ago
Duplicity does everything that Tarsnap does, but it's free software and you can point it at whatever storage you want, including your own disks (optionally over an SSH connection), or Amazon S3. It's really easy to set up too: https://www.grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Backups_for_Linux https://www.grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant...
oliwarner 10y ago
Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m. I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.
  - JohnTHaller 10y ago
    Did you post a writeup of this somewhere online you can link to?
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      I wrote a draft of it but didn't publish because it just felt like a rage post. I found it difficult to separate the objective events from the frustration of data loss. That said, there probably would be value as a lot of people blindly recommend Backblaze but haven't experienced edge cases like this.
  - oliwarner 10y ago
    I feel for you —losing backup data isn't too bad but not knowing about it is— but I could afford to keep almost 40 separate copies on Backblaze for the same price as one on Tarsnap. I could keep one on B2 and one on S3 and one on Glacier... And still have saved $480 each year over one copy on Tarsnap. It's too expensive.

I'm surprised that no one mentioned Tarsnap yet, it's run by a well known HNer (cperciva): http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ It's not exactly noob friendly though.

msh 10y ago

Well it's quite expensive compared to other solutions.

zie 10y ago
It really isn't. I mean it looks expensive, until you take into account all the dedup and everything it does to reduce the cost. I put in $10 dollars a few years ago, I still have almost a $4 balance ($3.91).
- riobard 10y ago
  How much data are you storing?
  - zie 10y ago
    not much obviously, I am only storing critical data in tarsnap. Like others have said, if you are storing large GB's or TB's of data, rsync.net or something may be a better solution.
- SCdF 10y ago
  It depends on what you're backing up. If you're generating a lot of unique non-dedupable assets (eg you're a photographer who keeps their raws) it quickly becomes very expensive. Don't get me wrong, I love tarsnap and used to use it, but for a lot of workloads it does not compete on price.
- msh 10y ago
  Well I guess it depends on what you store. I am backing up 1.5 terabyte of photos and videos which can't be compressed or dedup that much so in this case it would be more expensive that many other solutions.
frankzinger 10y ago
To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive): $ tarsnap --print-stats Total size Compressed size All archives 1418275826434 1212480481405 (unique data) 5342739088 2957847871 Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression. Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to those of equivalent services, but it seems pretty reasonably-priced to me.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Right, all providers are cheap if you barely use any storage.
  - frankzinger 10y ago
    Yeah, I am surprised at how cheap Backblaze is, according to one of the comments here. I will say though that what I've read about tarsnap's security and my experience with it as a user makes me reluctant to want to switch. I guess I might look into it once I need to store more data. I have had some really bad experiences with other backup systems so having something which I am quite sure is very secure and which works reliably is great. The slow restore times somebody else mentioned might be a problem though. I've only had to restore small archives/files.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  1.3 TB deduplicating & compressing down to 2.75 GB seems way too good to be true. Is there something weird about your data that leads to this level of compression?
  - frankzinger 10y ago
    Yeah, apart from 1.6GB of documents that are mostly PDF, it's all text (mostly code). And I back up multiple times a day so there's a lot of duplicate data.

Negitivefrags 10y ago

The main issue with Tarsnap we had is it's very slow to restore if you have big backups. Very slow. Big in this case is in the order of a TB or so. We had an incident were we needed to restore some data from backups recently, and it took literally days to get the files we needed back. We were not downloading the entire backup, we just wanted to restore a small subset of files. We migrated away after that.

tedmiston 10y ago
Can you elaborate on which part of the restore process was slow (downloading the files themselves or something else)?

mike-cardwell 10y ago

Duplicity does everything that Tarsnap does, but it's free software and you can point it at whatever storage you want, including your own disks (optionally over an SSH connection), or Amazon S3. It's really easy to set up too: https://www.grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Backups_for_Linux https://www.grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant...

oliwarner 10y ago

Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m. I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.

tedmiston 10y ago
I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.
- JohnTHaller 10y ago
  Did you post a writeup of this somewhere online you can link to?
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I wrote a draft of it but didn't publish because it just felt like a rage post. I found it difficult to separate the objective events from the frustration of data loss. That said, there probably would be value as a lot of people blindly recommend Backblaze but haven't experienced edge cases like this.
- oliwarner 10y ago
  I feel for you —losing backup data isn't too bad but not knowing about it is— but I could afford to keep almost 40 separate copies on Backblaze for the same price as one on Tarsnap. I could keep one on B2 and one on S3 and one on Glacier... And still have saved $480 each year over one copy on Tarsnap. It's too expensive.