3 ms·

tarsnap is solid but has two major weakspots — it’s not price competitive, at least for the b2c product retailed from the site, and it is very slow.

gus_massa 5y ago
Is tarsnap too expensive now? For years we had a running discussion here, where patio11 writes a nice article called something like: fake patio11> "10 reasons why tarsnap must raise the price and stop using funny units" And a week later cperciva writes another article called something like: fake cperviva> "Nah. Amazon reduced the storage price 10%, so I'm reducing the price of tarsnap in 1 picodollar/byte"
- rsync 5y ago
  I want to live in a world where tarsnap exists and is priced in picodollars. I would be sad if either of those ceased.
- pkd 5y ago
  Tarsnap is not expensive at all for its target audience: folks with highly compressible data. For any data that's not very compressible, it's super costly. Example, if you are into photography it's not uncommon to generate hundreds of GBs of files _per year_. Only in 2020, I generated over 200GB of photographs. Putting that on Tarsnap would cost me about $60/month. In 5 years time, I could be paying upto $4000/yr. Tiered services like B2 would cost an order of magnitude less.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  Tarsnap works out as ~6$/GB/year for me. That’s for a mostly managed backup service. The only thing missing is snapshot pruning which is slow and a bit of pain due to the way tarsnap’s cache works. Restore is on par with restoring from tape — reliable but slow, but who can really complain about how fast disaster recovery is? Raw managed storage with rsync.net is 0.18$/GB/year. Do it all yourself, with the associated peril and time sink that entails, and the disks will cost you 0.04$/GB/replica. Tarsnap has its place and I’m still a happy customer, but it’s one small part of a wider strategy that includes bulk storage elsewhere — rsync.net with borgbackup and plain rsync, on premises ZFS dumpsters, and offsite drives used like they are tapes.
  - major--neither 5y ago
    on https://rsync.net/pricing.html https://rsync.net/pricing.html it says 2.5 cents per GB per month. so 0.33$/GB/year. i have 700G so it would cost me ~ $230/year (and you have to buy a min of 400G) microsoft onedrive is $70 for 1TB and you don't pay for bandwidth. can use rclone. you get some other goodies too (office) which i don't use but i'd imagine it's a nice to have for some people.
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      Is the Microsoft OneDrive is $70 for 1TB a good option for the truly paranoid, or Microsoft will share the content in case they get a court order or some with a tank in their front door?
      - major--neither 5y ago
        use restic.

gus_massa 5y ago

Is tarsnap too expensive now? For years we had a running discussion here, where patio11 writes a nice article called something like: fake patio11> "10 reasons why tarsnap must raise the price and stop using funny units" And a week later cperciva writes another article called something like: fake cperviva> "Nah. Amazon reduced the storage price 10%, so I'm reducing the price of tarsnap in 1 picodollar/byte"

rsync 5y ago
I want to live in a world where tarsnap exists and is priced in picodollars. I would be sad if either of those ceased.
pkd 5y ago
Tarsnap is not expensive at all for its target audience: folks with highly compressible data. For any data that's not very compressible, it's super costly. Example, if you are into photography it's not uncommon to generate hundreds of GBs of files _per year_. Only in 2020, I generated over 200GB of photographs. Putting that on Tarsnap would cost me about $60/month. In 5 years time, I could be paying upto $4000/yr. Tiered services like B2 would cost an order of magnitude less.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Tarsnap works out as ~6$/GB/year for me. That’s for a mostly managed backup service. The only thing missing is snapshot pruning which is slow and a bit of pain due to the way tarsnap’s cache works. Restore is on par with restoring from tape — reliable but slow, but who can really complain about how fast disaster recovery is? Raw managed storage with rsync.net is 0.18$/GB/year. Do it all yourself, with the associated peril and time sink that entails, and the disks will cost you 0.04$/GB/replica. Tarsnap has its place and I’m still a happy customer, but it’s one small part of a wider strategy that includes bulk storage elsewhere — rsync.net with borgbackup and plain rsync, on premises ZFS dumpsters, and offsite drives used like they are tapes.
- major--neither 5y ago
  on https://rsync.net/pricing.html https://rsync.net/pricing.html it says 2.5 cents per GB per month. so 0.33$/GB/year. i have 700G so it would cost me ~ $230/year (and you have to buy a min of 400G) microsoft onedrive is $70 for 1TB and you don't pay for bandwidth. can use rclone. you get some other goodies too (office) which i don't use but i'd imagine it's a nice to have for some people.
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    Is the Microsoft OneDrive is $70 for 1TB a good option for the truly paranoid, or Microsoft will share the content in case they get a court order or some with a tank in their front door?
    - major--neither 5y ago
      use restic.