4 ms·

As 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 co

by arsome 6y ago

As 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 ago
Oh 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      Lots of little ones would scale. And lots of jobs. It worked before...
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  > 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. I don't doubt your happiness, but I confess that I'm having trouble reconciling "running it more like a utility" with charging 25¢/GB per month for storage. That is just staggeringly high. What I'm paying $6/month for with Arq would be over $160/month if I were using Tarsnap, and I'm getting end-to-end encryption, deduplication, and versioned file backups. What advantages does Tarsnap bring to the table that justify such a tremendous cost?
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    The whole point of a backup service is that most of the time you don't need it at all, but when you do need it you really need it. From that perspective, it's like paying for insurance. I'm not a tarsnap customer, but I think what you're paying for is a service built by a literal obsessive genius that will 100% work when the chips are down.
fletchowns 6y ago
Unfortunately restic was a no go for me due to not being compatible with B2 keys that only have the permissions readFiles,writeFiles,listBuckets,listFiles (no deleteFiles). I don't want the attacker to be able to delete any backups if the manage to get to the B2 keys. I believe this is the ticket that would add support for this to restic: https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2 https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2
- pricechild 6y ago
  You can work around this by sticking rclone in the middle which does support soft delete: https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/ https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/ In short, give rclone your keys, (small ~/.rclone config file) tell restic to use an rclone backend and add an extra argument when running restic. (See the blog link above, all explained) There's an open issue for this which doesn't seem to have moved: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 - it does have a couple of PRs linked on there which implement proper soft-delete.
  - fletchowns 6y ago
    Nice blog post! That's exactly what I needed earlier last year when I was looking at this stuff :) Looks pretty straightforward. I am surprised it is not more of a priority to get merged though, it is so essential.
SamReidHughes 6y ago
Tarsnap seems to have become a multi-man operation. https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  The other committer is his brother.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Does it matter?
    - xchaotic 6y ago
      Looks like the brother just does the merges? (which are mostly automatic) so IMO best it matters because it's still mostly a one man, or at least a one family operation - i.e not very resilient to random acts of nature (which backups are supposed to protect from)
      - SamReidHughes 6y ago
        Having them be two brothers makes for a lower business continuity risk than having it be a business owner + 1 random employee.
    - tomnipotent 6y ago
      Yes. Having family help out on a 1-man show is an entirely different beast than hiring a full-time employee with wages, taxes, and healthcare. One of these two is a life-long trusted human that you've shared numerous life experiences with, the other is not.
varispeed 6y ago
When a business becomes serious? Do you need to hire several workers to look legitimate? If that's still not enough, do you need to make yourself a slave of VC? Only problem I can see is that one man operation is susceptible to the run over by a bus scenario. However that is still better than a woke VC asking the "owner" to cancel some users.
- 5560675260 6y ago
  I would seriously prefer a service like this to be run by a two man team. Or at least have a guarantee that I'll get automatically notified if something happens to a sole operator.

by arsome 6y ago

jclulow 6y ago

Oh 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 ago
I 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 ago
    Lots of little ones would scale. And lots of jobs. It worked before...
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
> 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. I don't doubt your happiness, but I confess that I'm having trouble reconciling "running it more like a utility" with charging 25¢/GB per month for storage. That is just staggeringly high. What I'm paying $6/month for with Arq would be over $160/month if I were using Tarsnap, and I'm getting end-to-end encryption, deduplication, and versioned file backups. What advantages does Tarsnap bring to the table that justify such a tremendous cost?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  The whole point of a backup service is that most of the time you don't need it at all, but when you do need it you really need it. From that perspective, it's like paying for insurance. I'm not a tarsnap customer, but I think what you're paying for is a service built by a literal obsessive genius that will 100% work when the chips are down.

fletchowns 6y ago

Unfortunately restic was a no go for me due to not being compatible with B2 keys that only have the permissions readFiles,writeFiles,listBuckets,listFiles (no deleteFiles). I don't want the attacker to be able to delete any backups if the manage to get to the B2 keys. I believe this is the ticket that would add support for this to restic: https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2 https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2

pricechild 6y ago
You can work around this by sticking rclone in the middle which does support soft delete: https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/ https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/ In short, give rclone your keys, (small ~/.rclone config file) tell restic to use an rclone backend and add an extra argument when running restic. (See the blog link above, all explained) There's an open issue for this which doesn't seem to have moved: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 - it does have a couple of PRs linked on there which implement proper soft-delete.
- fletchowns 6y ago
  Nice blog post! That's exactly what I needed earlier last year when I was looking at this stuff :) Looks pretty straightforward. I am surprised it is not more of a priority to get merged though, it is so essential.

SamReidHughes 6y ago

Tarsnap seems to have become a multi-man operation. https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master

tomnipotent 6y ago
The other committer is his brother.
- eitland 6y ago
  Does it matter?
  - xchaotic 6y ago
    Looks like the brother just does the merges? (which are mostly automatic) so IMO best it matters because it's still mostly a one man, or at least a one family operation - i.e not very resilient to random acts of nature (which backups are supposed to protect from)
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      Having them be two brothers makes for a lower business continuity risk than having it be a business owner + 1 random employee.
  - tomnipotent 6y ago
    Yes. Having family help out on a 1-man show is an entirely different beast than hiring a full-time employee with wages, taxes, and healthcare. One of these two is a life-long trusted human that you've shared numerous life experiences with, the other is not.

varispeed 6y ago

When a business becomes serious? Do you need to hire several workers to look legitimate? If that's still not enough, do you need to make yourself a slave of VC? Only problem I can see is that one man operation is susceptible to the run over by a bus scenario. However that is still better than a woke VC asking the "owner" to cancel some users.

5560675260 6y ago
I would seriously prefer a service like this to be run by a two man team. Or at least have a guarantee that I'll get automatically notified if something happens to a sole operator.