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Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
by RockRobotRock 3y ago
Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
- GhostWhisperer 3y agoyes, people have been saying they should "charge more" for over a decade
- RockRobotRock 3y agoCan you not be snide and please help me understand? It seems 50 times more expensive than B2. I'm genuinely curious about the product.
- stigz 3y agoThe service is a layer on top of S3 if that helps answer things. https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#is-tarsnap-reliable https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#is-tarsnap-reliable
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoThen the obvious question is "why would I use this instead of something else over S3" (ex. rclone), to which I think the answer is ease of use (don't need to deal with AWS yourself, encryption/deduplication/compression handled for you, nice interface), which isn't everything to everyone but is certainly useful.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoThank you.
- alanfranz 3y agoYou need a remote service that keeps backup readonly. You’re not covering attack scenarios if you just use raw object storage from your client machine. I have written about this some time ago if you’re interested: https://www.franzoni.eu/ransomware-resistant-backups/ https://www.franzoni.eu/ransomware-resistant-backups/
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI'd classify that under "ease of use" - you can do it with S3 yourself (your post is a pretty good explanation of the how, from a quick skim), or you can just use tarsnap and not worry about it.
- alanfranz 3y agoYou can see from my post that doing that _properly_ is quite convoluted and requires a good deal of technical skills. So it's not just ease of use. It's actual _functionality_ to me - getting from raw object storage to a fully working, attack-resistant backup strategy, is not trivial; hence, comparing tarsnap (or rsync.net, or borgbase, or whatever) to B2 or S3 makes little to no sense. You _could_ compare it to crashplan or backblaze personal backup if you like, but IIRC those don't work for *nix systems, only for Win and Mac.
- ilyt 3y agoHow tarsnap keeps backups readonly ? Just having service being a barrier is not enough
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- catiopatio 3y agoIt supports distinct authentication keys with read, write, and/or delete permissions for the same data protected by a given encryption key. Those restrictions are enforced by the service.
- ilyt 3y agoSo one bug and it is gone. Thought it used readonly features of S3/Glacier or something..
- mekster 3y agoLearning to use some backup tool that does same things sounds way better than paying 10 times more for the storage cost that lasts. There's also a service like rsync.net where you can just rsync to the destination and they do the versioning and so on for less than 10th of the cost of tarsnap.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoEh, cost/benefit; some people are backing up 100MB of documents and don't care, some people are backing up terabytes of media and have the time.
- GhostWhisperer 3y agoi'm being snide if the prices are considered high; i don't have to agree with that
- JimDabell 3y ago“What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap” goes into a lot of detail: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
- mst 3y agoRoughly: The number of hours of my time that would be required to get something with even theoretically equivalent features would be sufficient to make the cost - and opportunity cost - involved seem far more reasonable. Plus "written by cperciva and heavily battle tested by Serious Sysadmins" is a feature I couldn't recreate myself - notice that while there was an outage, part of the reason for it taking a while was a conscious choice to take a much longer path to resolution than bringing up the previous server in the name of paranoia. Paranoia about data corruption is a nice thing to have in a backup system and something I'm happily willing to trade-off uptime for. However: For backups of bulk data then, yes, it's going to be relatively expensive. I wouldn't put e.g. my media backups on tarsnap, but "use tarsnap for your git repositories and other high value data, and something else for the rest" is both perfectly doable and an approach I suspect cperciva himself would endorse.
- zetalyrae 3y agoYou don't need to build it yourself. You can use restic or rclone with S3/B2 and both support encryption.
- mst 3y agoI am aware there are existing tools that handle encryption. The tarsnap architecture still does more things. You're welcome to feel that you don't need those things, but that wasn't my point.
- ilyt 3y ago> notice that while there was an outage, part of the reason for it taking a while was a conscious choice to take a much longer path to resolution than bringing up the previous server in the name of paranoia. Paranoia about data corruption is a nice thing to have in a backup system and something I'm happily willing to trade-off uptime for. As Actual Serious Sysadmin that Actually Manages Big Systems for Living that screams more lack of preparation than anything else. Yes you should be careful but you should also have procedures in place and know the system well enough to trust it. And the fact is that the "boring" architecture of RDS DB instead of that S3 database abomination thing would just start right up if master DB server failed. It honestly looks like a trap many intelligent people fall into where they turn their cool-but-ulimately-flawed mental excercise into bedrock of the product. I don't want to use baby's-first-database on my production servers (I'm looking at you Lennart Poettering and journald) and I don't want my data/metadata stored on some experimental one.
- mekster 3y agoIt's insane. Not sure how anyone can accept such a rip off pricing. Tarsnap : $0.25 / GB storage, $0.25 / GB bandwidth cost rsync.net : $0.015 / GB storage, no bandwidth cost s3 : $0.023 / GB storage, some complicated bandwidth pricing If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed?
- RockRobotRock 3y agoin that case I'm curious about all the downvotes for asking a reasonable question
- crossroadsguy 3y agoWell while I use Tarsnap for a very small amount of data (due to pricing) and I quite like Tarsnap for my use-case scenario, your question might have been downvoted due to two reasons: - your comment was a very valid question but rather quip-like, offhanded, seemed off etc etc. I mean something like that… - Tarsnap is an hn darling If I have to pick one I think it’s the latter :)
- RockRobotRock 3y agoI didn't mean for it to sound like the first one but I understand ;)
- mekster 3y agoIf it's the latter, then reader quality is quite screwed up in here trying to make people endorse crazy pricing because he's some known guy around here.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago> because he's some known guy around here Oh dear. It’s an HN thing. I have had brushes with it only once or twice across various accounts across years but it’s very much an HN thing. Whenever you see an utterly useless quip (or sometimes even name calling or offensive words) being heavily upvoted you should know that some alpha HNer has arrived on the scene :) But to be honest I have never seen author Tarsnap engage in such privileged gentlemanly d-baggery. He is quite cool, as they say it. Anyway I just ignore it and move on. But again OP could have worded the question better. I mean no matter how good or bad you want to feel about it — it’s just a vc run anon forum and just another forum.
- silisili 3y agoDon't want to speak for Colin, but every time this is brought up, it's explained that Tarsnap uses very little data due to its design. Probably much less than rsyncing your data every hour to a cheaper provider.
- jpalomaki 3y agoSince pricing is purely based on storage used, it's very cost efficient for certain use cases. I've been using Tarsnap for 10+ years. There's some Linux stuff getting backed up, configs and such. It costs next to nothing for this kind of usage.
- gnfargbl 3y agoThe prices are absurdly high if your use-case is storage of large volumes of data that regularly change. It wouldn't be sensible to use Tarsnap for that, and you probably want to use one of the bulk backup services instead. Tarsnap makes a lot of sense when you benefit from the encryption and (especially) de-duplication features that it offers. For me, all of my most important personal and business data, from multiple decades, compresses-and-deduplicates down to around 6GiB. Considering the high value of the data I store in it, tarsnap's pricing actually feels absurdly low.
- patrec 3y ago> Tarsnap makes a lot of sense when you benefit from the encryption and (especially) de-duplication features that it offers. Can you provide more detail why you think so? I don't believe there is any use case in which tarsnap makes sense, other than maybe some Plan-C backup solution which you fall back on in the highly unlikely event that neither Plan-A nor Plan-B worked. Concretely, what benefits does tarsnap offer over restic or borg in combination with rsync.net, to make up for the substantial downsides (such as insanely slow restore, complete lack of wetware redundancy or being written in C[1])? [1] https://www.tarsnap.com/bounty-winners.html https://www.tarsnap.com/bounty-winners.html
- gnfargbl 3y agoMy post was specifically addressing the comments around cost.
- patrec 3y agoNo, you specifically claimed that "tarsnap makes a lot of sense" in certain situations. I think that's incorrect and that there are basically no situations where tarsnap makes sense as a primary or even secondary backup solution. Even when completely ignoring costs. This is a strong claim, so it should be easy to provide a counter-example if one exists.
- rssoconnor 3y agoI use tarsnap because the asymmetric crypto means I can give my cron job authorization to create backups, but it doesn't have authorization to read or delete(!) backups. This ability is critical to prevent a compromised system from having its data wiped and having all backups wiped as well. I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in any other system. But if someone has a tutorial, I am all ears.
- patrec 3y agoEverything about tarsnap is absurd. It's basically the world's most absurd backup service (insanely expensive, poor UX, bus factor of ~1, restoring moderate amounts of data appears to take days (!)[1]), brought about by an absurdly bad allocation of human capital (it's run by a double Putnam challenge winner, with several other impressive accomplishments), and as such, absurdly beloved by HN. [1] In case of an emergency, you will always be able to get back your data from tarsnap at a blazing rate of 50kB/s https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333 https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333.
- tinco 3y agoIf tarsnap has even a modicum of popularity, thanks to these prices it would be bringing in bank. If he's making bank, that means he's providing value (even if it's just to "uninformed"). And it seems this system mostly runs itself, so it's a side gig. It's probably a far more effective allocation than many other possible allocations of human capital. How many of the world's best and brightest are doing all sorts of busywork? At least Colin has some time to do whatever he wants to do while running tarsnap.
- electroly 3y ago> If tarsnap has even a modicum of popularity It won't, though, because of the points mentioned by the post you're replying to. It's been 15 years; tarsnap is as popular as it's going to get.
- Aachen 3y ago> If he's making bank, that means he's providing value I don't find that that logically follows from making bank. Not everyone who makes bank is a positive influence. Tarsnap does provide value, even if I think it's less than its cost: I'm just commenting on the general case that making money would mean you're providing good value
- recov 3y agohttp://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-life.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-l...
- AnonHP 3y agoIt’s meant for people who have a lot of duplicate data and store small files. Anyone who has data that cannot be deduplicated much would be paying tons of money. While on the price, patio11 (Patrick) has written an article about tarsnap’s issues more than nine years ago (April 2014). One of the suggestions was to raise prices, IIRC. It’s a long post, but you can read it [1] and the HN post [2] from that time. [1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953