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You wrote about deplatforming-- heads up that DigitalOcean does deplatform people. I have direct firsthand knowledge of DigitalOcean deplatforming a security di
by jph 6y ago
You wrote about deplatforming-- heads up that DigitalOcean does deplatform people. I have direct firsthand knowledge of DigitalOcean deplatforming a security disclosure professional reporting a root breach bug.
For your secure backups, I can suggest Tarsnap by Colin Percival, who's a security expert and a frequent contributor on Hacker News. I don't get anything for recommending Tarsnap; I'm just a customer. https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoDamn! Thanks for the info. I don't get these companies. That person should be thanked and not deplatformed.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoThis is really awesome! I will definitely try this out. Thanks again.
- ev1 6y agoDO will also use "machine learning" and "AI" to shut down your machines or terminate your account if your usage pattern is disliked.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoHas this been happening already? I have been using this script for about 4 months now, and I had no problems yet. I do syncing once a day.
- freedomben 6y agoOh yes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169
- Osiris 6y agoDid they ever post the post mortem? It doesn't sound like they changed policies that automatically block flags accounts.
- Hallucinaut 6y agoYes, it's in that thread a few days later albeit not easy to find. https://blog.digitalocean.com/an-update-on-last-weeks-customer-shutdown-incident/ https://blog.digitalocean.com/an-update-on-last-weeks-custom...
- christophilus 6y agoThey flagged my account and pulled 100% of my servers with no mitigation for 12 hours until I convinced them I was legitimate. DO still handles that incredibly poorly, which is the reason we no longer host anything critical there.
- PenguinCoder 6y agoWhat or who do you suggest instead ?AWS?
- christophilus 6y agoVultr. They’ve been fantastic.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoWell, this is a discouraging news. Where have you moved your critical operation?
- Shoop 6y agoFor clarity, is "They" DO or tarsnap?
- coryrc 6y agotarsnap doesn't rent servers
- stevenhuang 6y agoTarsnap uses AWS S3
- josephg 6y agoAlso both tarsnap and S3 have no idea what content they’re storing on your behalf. (Everything is encrypted at rest). So for tarsnap, deplatforming should never be an issue.
- freedomben 6y agoI had a terrible, terrifying experience with DO where they hard locked my account for days (and it would have been weeks if I hadn't made a huge stink) because of a misunderstanding. They ban/lock first, ask questions later, and that's not cool and I can't have my (and my customer's) important infrastructure treated that way. I now use Linode for most of my stuff, and once they have cloud firewalls available in Dallas I'll be moving the rest of infrastructure over as I can. I really need to write up my story into a blog post I can link to, but until then, I put a recap here a few days ago for anyone interested in the details. Mine wasn't as bad as some people's, but pretty scary personally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> They ban/lock first, ask questions later Given the sheer volume of dodgy packets that originate from DO network space, I find this surprising.
- ev1 6y agoThis is the most offensive part to me, I can't even sign up or use DO without having my privacy invaded and sold (they load multiple fingerprinters from different third party vendors that also then share this data) yet they still don't have a handle on abuse. I get so much rubbish from DO space, nonstop port scanning at absurd volumes (sometimes totaling 6 digit+ pps), from customers that haven't been removed in years. massscan/zmap from people with a fake opt out page (that I shouldn't need to be opting out of), etc.
- csnover 6y agoI guess I’m not terribly surprised. It fits a narrative, not of being overly protective, but of run-of-the-mill incompetence. Someone once used a DigitalOcean droplet to run an aggressive layer 7 denial of service attack against a service I host. I notified DO via their web form, didn’t get a reply for three days, then got told to email to their abuse@ email address instead. Dutifully, I mailed abuse@ and included the relevant server logs, gzipped, as an attachment. I got a reply that they won’t open any attachments, please copy and paste the logs directly into the email. As an outsider, it seems to me as if they have few people with the appropriate technical background staffing their abuse department, so legitimate reports are left uninvestigated due to dumb technicalities like not being willing/able to open attachments, and bogus reports are accepted without thought or understanding as to the appropriate course of action.
- azinman2 6y agoMy issue with tarsnap vs Dropbox is entirely workflow. Right now I can treat my Dropbox effectively as an external drive that happens to live on my file system by making everything selectively synced. If I want something backed up, I just drag it into that folder. But once it’s backed up I can turn on selective sync and free up my disk space. Backup of personal data is often a 1-way endeavor — here’s a dump of photos I scanned that I don’t need to look at anytime soon. But with tarsnap I can’t do that, nor can I then have the ease of browsing to the file and just opening it while it transparently downloads on demand.
- TheSmiddy 6y agoIf you're transfering data to a backup service and then deleting it locally that's not backup, that's just cloud storage.
- azinman2 6y agoIt’s the best of both worlds. I can selectively move things off and seamlessly have them move back.
- ajmadesc 6y agoHow do you make them sync?
- azinman2 6y agoWhich “them”?
- 0x426577617265 6y ago> I don't get anything for recommending Tarsnap; I'm just a customer. https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ From their site: "The Tarsnap service is built on top of the solid platform provided by Amazon Web Services."
- markdown 6y ago> DigitalOcean does deplatform people... I can suggest Tarsnap Tarsnap runs on Amazon.
- qmmmur 6y agoThis seems insanely expensive compared to Restic combined with backblaze
- Saris 6y agoAm I reading that right, that 1TB of storage used would be $256 per month + bandwidth costs?
- autoditype 6y agoI just did the same calculation and I that looks right
- Saris 6y agoI redid it multiple times to be sure too, that's basically 50 times more expensive than other backup options, crazy!
- AnonC 6y agoYou should read HN posts from the past where @patio recommended that tarsnap should raise prices even more.
- LordAtlas 6y agoWait, their pricing is $0.25 per GB per month, so $250 per month for 1 TB? What the heck?
- cowsandmilk 6y agoThe price is after tarsnap deduces and compresses, which it is quite good at and costs for 1 TB of real world data are much lower. https://www.tarsnap.com/deduplication-examples https://www.tarsnap.com/deduplication-examples
- arsome 6y agoAs tarsnap is run by a single person, it seems hard to suggest it to serious businesses due to the inherent risks there as well as the extremely high storage costs and difficult cleanup procedures compared to competing tools. I tend to prefer solutions like restic + B2 for their price and support, where you at least have a larger company behind the storage backend, you could even directly use it with S3 and it'd still be cheaper than Tarsnap. Decent write up on the cryptography in restic here: https://blog.filippo.io/restic-cryptography/ https://blog.filippo.io/restic-cryptography/ Some tarsnap issues detailed here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
- jclulow 6y agoOh my word, that article on tarsnap is a frightful bore. I was a tarsnap customer and I thought it was great. If Colin is happy running it more like a utility than a rapacious VC-backed hyper-growth racket, I'm not sure why that is bad. The only reason I stopped being a customer was because another rapacious racket of a business, Comcast, introduced miniscule but enforced data caps in my area, so online backups aren't attractive anymore and I've gone back to external drives and offsite rotation. When I cancelled, Colin sent me a personal e-mail to make sure it was alright to delete my backups. It was probably the best exchange I've ever had with a service provider.
- imagica 6y agoI wish things turn around and smaller shops make a comeback. Big is not always better, in fact the service is almost always an afterthought.
- hyperdimension 6y ago"But that won't scale!"
- imagica 6y agoLots of little ones would scale. And lots of jobs. It worked before...
- Barrin92 6y agowhat's the advantage of tarsnap over say, doing an encrypted backup with borg to my gdrive folder? I've never heard of Google random deleting encrypted blobs from people's storage and it's way cheaper
- mherrmann 6y agoI used to use Tarsnap and am still stuck with it in several projects. I wish I weren't. Restoring backups takes ages. If you need to restore a production server in an emergency, and the whole server remains down for an hour because that's how long Tarsnap takes to restore some tens of Gigabytes, then you will very quickly look for alternatives. I raised this issue with Colin, Tarsnap's creator, multiple times. And the answer has always been "maybe some day". I now simply encrypt backups myself and store them in an S3 or Linode bucket. Much faster. For personal backups, I love restic syncing to Backblaze, where I back up 1.4 TB or so for $5 per month.
- mythz 6y ago$0.25 /GB is pretty expensive. I'm using Hetzner Storage Box [1] which has tonnes of connectivity options where 1TB is only 9.40€ (works out at 0.0094€ /GB) [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
- MrDresden 6y agoI've never heard about Hetzner before, but those are some good prices. Have they been around for long, and you know of any external public audit that has been done on them?
- wongarsu 6y agoHetzner has been around since 1997 (as you will be able to tell from some of their UI).
- TimWolla 6y agoHetzner is (one of) the largest German dedicated server providers. They are DIN ISO/IEC 27001 certified: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/zertifizierung https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/zertifizierung. Of course if you only store encrypted data you don't really need this auditing.
- mythz 6y agoYeah I've been with them for 8 years as they're the best value hosting provider [1] I've found, which I use for all my memory or computational heavy workloads as they come at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost on AWS. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver
- AnonC 6y agoYes, Tarsnap is really quite expensive if you have data that doesn’t get deduplicated well.
- AnonC 6y agoI would actually compare DigitalOcean to a Facebook or a Google or an Instagram. You’re banned or blocked and cannot reach a human to find out why or what can be done. DO support is just a bunch of auto mailers sending the same template emails, in my experience.
- varispeed 6y agoThat's why so far best idea is to go bare metal with couple of different providers and sync data to multiple servers. In case one provider decides to cancel you, you can still have your data in another place. You can also have a copy at your own server. To have access to all machines as if they were on a local network, you can use tinc-vpn or for convenience ZeroTier.
- patrec 6y agoColin Percival is obviously a smart and very skilled guy but I am mystified why people on HN keep recommending tarsnap, it seems a terrible product for almost any imaginable audience. If I'm a normal end user, I will probably get a vastly easier to use product at about 1-10% of the price from Backblaze. And if I'm a serious business that can easily afford the > 10x premium and engineering to configure the backup I probably wouldn't want to entrust it to some company with what looks to be a bus factor of one and the apparent technical limitation that a restore might cost me a few DAYS of unanticipated downtime [1]. I mean, sure, if you are some unix nerd wanting to backup your dotfiles and a few small documents (or repos) for maybe around ~$50/year, why not go with some artisanal backup service for HN street cred (and a laudable open source donation policy)? But what other good use cases are there? Am I missing something obvious? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621093
- JoachimSchipper 6y agoE.g. relative to the author's script, tarsnap get you automatic deduplication across backups... which, if you're like me and basically generate more and more data, allows you to store lots of historic backups at basically no overhead over just storing today's data. Also, good encryption and security; e.g. Tarsnap is trusted by Stripe (https://www.tarsnap.com/testimonials.html https://www.tarsnap.com/testimonials.html). Tarsnap does have real downsides - restores can indeed be slow, bare per-GB cost is high, and "like tar" is not a user interface that everyone will like - but there are definitely upsides, too.