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It'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, n

It'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 ago
in that case I'm curious about all the downvotes for asking a reasonable question
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  Well 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 ago
    I didn't mean for it to sound like the first one but I understand ;)
  - mekster 3y ago
    If 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.
      - RockRobotRock 3y ago
        I definitely could have worded it better, but it's a little crazy how different the discourse is seen when the subject of a discussion is something well-liked by HN vs hated.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    There’s also the fact that he has quite publicly been repeatedly nagged to raise his prices by another “HN darling” and he has been resistant to it. It’s actually quite an interesting read that covers a lot of the things brought up in this discussion: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
    - nottorp 3y ago
      But basically what he suggests is turning Tarsnap into yet another SaaS offering I wouldn't give a second glance to. The screenhot of his proposal for the new entry page says... nothing. Which is probably okay if you want to pivot from a geek-ish service to one that geeks don't use, of course. Does the owner want that?
    - ilyt 3y ago
      To be fair, any backup service should probably best have model of "pay per length of backup stored". If I want to store my 100GB of data now, and I want to have it stored for a year, I want to pay for that year's worth of storage of 100GB of data now and not worry about any money or account problems for that bit of data.
  - JacobAldridge 3y ago
    For anyone not familiar with the (now 16 year old) comment that Colin is perhaps best remembered here for - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 He’s brought far more value to the community than that, of course.
pritambarhate 3y ago
There is also cost development and ongoing support. You haven't factored that in your 10 times the storage cost calculation.
- mekster 3y ago
  Sounds like a very poor excuse when competitors are way cheaper.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    You don’t really need an excuse when people are paying regardless.
- vasco 3y ago
  The 10x doesn't seem like it's enough to pay for more than a single EC2 server though.
baz00 3y ago
This is why I use s3 sync, versioning and lifecycles for mine on a Standard-IA bucket. My 120Gb costs $1.80 a month. No way would I pay tarsnap prices. The 120Gb is the contents of my OneDrive and local repository trees. This is everything I've ever done that I want to keep and is approximately 115Gb of photos and not a lot else!
deleted 3y ago
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gnfargbl 3y ago
If you are primarily cost-driven, you missed one: Backblaze: $0.005 / GB storage, $0.01 / GB download.
- ilyt 3y ago
  You can send your backups to backblaze and S3 and it still would be cheaper
LukeShu 3y ago
How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that. Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that. That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, not of Tarsnap. But I still firmly disagree with the "Colin's just exploiting the uninformed" angle.
- patrec 3y ago
  Completely ignoring costs, can you name a single use case for which tarsnap would be better than Borg or restic on rsync.net?
  - i_have_an_idea 3y ago
    As a consultant on a DR project, you can increase your billables by 10x due to the extremely slow backup restore speeds.
  - doolallylah 3y ago
    Backing up anything Windows with more granularity than top level directories? Ugh. Try picking a choosing specific file types or file extensions from filesystems holding thousands of files. I ended up having to cobble together some god-awful pre-process powershell with multiple pipes just because restic fails to be able to grep using Windows reliably. :(
    - tredre3 3y ago
      > restic fails to be able to grep using Windows reliably That is news to me. I backup almost a million files spread across 4 Windows devices, with heavy use of --files-from and --iexclude and it seems to work. What am I missing? I agree that restic filtering options are pretty limited. Too limited, really. But what's there seems to work?
  - rssoconnor 3y ago
RockRobotRock 3y ago
>Easy money from the uninformed? I don't think so. Anyone who can use this software I'm sure knows what other options exist.
- mekster 3y ago
  Then I'd like to know what they think of the benefit of spending $25/mo for just 100GB.
wink 3y ago
I'm not here to defend it but I only use it as a secondary backup for my mail server (so basically append-only) and for a low amount of gigabytes it's fine and just works. No, I wouldn't want to write changing 100GB there.
thenickdude 3y ago
S3: Upload bandwidth is free, download is what I'd consider to be astronomical at $0.09/GB ($90/TB). Geez, that's really not improving the comparison with Tarsnap.
ilyt 3y ago
> If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed? That's pretty much any SaaS... look at the various log or metrics gathering solution, where you pay serious multipliers of what would cost to run same software on your own instance.
tptacek 3y ago
Yes. That's the thing about Tarsnap, a service with a TikZ diagram on its front page, built around a Unix utility, that meters in picodollars. It's meant to bilk money from uninformed mom-and-pop backup users.
- nemothekid 3y ago
  I'm having a hard time to believe that anyone remotely interested in Tarsnap's value prop is also an "uninformed mom-and-pop". This "uninformed mom-and-pop" is potentially compiling the client application from source, but can't do basic math to compare tarsnap's pricing to the top 20 or so competitors that rank above tarsnap in SEO?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    That was sarcasm. :)
    - nemothekid 3y ago
      Should have looked at the username, massive egg on face.
- idlewords 3y ago
  I tried Tarsnap briefly once and was charged billions of picodollars. It definitely preys on the ignorant.
AnonHP 3y ago
You can get a HN reader’s discount on rsync.net (email them to ask for it or search on HN), bringing the price down to $0.12 / GB, and everything else remains the same.
- rsync 3y ago
  The HN reader’s discount is lower than that these days (we probably "normalized"[1] parents account to reflect that). We also have .edu / student / nonprofit discounts. Email us. Finally, Debian and FreeBSD project members get free accounts. See the committers handbook, etc., for details. [1] Whenever we lower our prices, we increase quota on existing customers to "normalize" them to the new price/GB. If you do nothing, your rsync.net account just grows over time due to this.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

in that case I'm curious about all the downvotes for asking a reasonable question

crossroadsguy 3y ago
Well 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 ago
  I didn't mean for it to sound like the first one but I understand ;)
- mekster 3y ago
  If 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.
    - RockRobotRock 3y ago
      I definitely could have worded it better, but it's a little crazy how different the discourse is seen when the subject of a discussion is something well-liked by HN vs hated.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  There’s also the fact that he has quite publicly been repeatedly nagged to raise his prices by another “HN darling” and he has been resistant to it. It’s actually quite an interesting read that covers a lot of the things brought up in this discussion: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
  - nottorp 3y ago
    But basically what he suggests is turning Tarsnap into yet another SaaS offering I wouldn't give a second glance to. The screenhot of his proposal for the new entry page says... nothing. Which is probably okay if you want to pivot from a geek-ish service to one that geeks don't use, of course. Does the owner want that?
  - ilyt 3y ago
    To be fair, any backup service should probably best have model of "pay per length of backup stored". If I want to store my 100GB of data now, and I want to have it stored for a year, I want to pay for that year's worth of storage of 100GB of data now and not worry about any money or account problems for that bit of data.
- JacobAldridge 3y ago
  For anyone not familiar with the (now 16 year old) comment that Colin is perhaps best remembered here for - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 He’s brought far more value to the community than that, of course.

pritambarhate 3y ago

There is also cost development and ongoing support. You haven't factored that in your 10 times the storage cost calculation.

mekster 3y ago
Sounds like a very poor excuse when competitors are way cheaper.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  You don’t really need an excuse when people are paying regardless.
vasco 3y ago
The 10x doesn't seem like it's enough to pay for more than a single EC2 server though.

baz00 3y ago

This is why I use s3 sync, versioning and lifecycles for mine on a Standard-IA bucket. My 120Gb costs $1.80 a month. No way would I pay tarsnap prices. The 120Gb is the contents of my OneDrive and local repository trees. This is everything I've ever done that I want to keep and is approximately 115Gb of photos and not a lot else!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gnfargbl 3y ago

If you are primarily cost-driven, you missed one: Backblaze: $0.005 / GB storage, $0.01 / GB download.

ilyt 3y ago
You can send your backups to backblaze and S3 and it still would be cheaper

LukeShu 3y ago

How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that. Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that. That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, not of Tarsnap. But I still firmly disagree with the "Colin's just exploiting the uninformed" angle.

patrec 3y ago
Completely ignoring costs, can you name a single use case for which tarsnap would be better than Borg or restic on rsync.net?
- i_have_an_idea 3y ago
  As a consultant on a DR project, you can increase your billables by 10x due to the extremely slow backup restore speeds.
- doolallylah 3y ago
  Backing up anything Windows with more granularity than top level directories? Ugh. Try picking a choosing specific file types or file extensions from filesystems holding thousands of files. I ended up having to cobble together some god-awful pre-process powershell with multiple pipes just because restic fails to be able to grep using Windows reliably. :(
  - tredre3 3y ago
    > restic fails to be able to grep using Windows reliably That is news to me. I backup almost a million files spread across 4 Windows devices, with heavy use of --files-from and --iexclude and it seems to work. What am I missing? I agree that restic filtering options are pretty limited. Too limited, really. But what's there seems to work?
- rssoconnor 3y ago

RockRobotRock 3y ago

>Easy money from the uninformed? I don't think so. Anyone who can use this software I'm sure knows what other options exist.

mekster 3y ago
Then I'd like to know what they think of the benefit of spending $25/mo for just 100GB.

wink 3y ago

I'm not here to defend it but I only use it as a secondary backup for my mail server (so basically append-only) and for a low amount of gigabytes it's fine and just works. No, I wouldn't want to write changing 100GB there.

thenickdude 3y ago

S3: Upload bandwidth is free, download is what I'd consider to be astronomical at $0.09/GB ($90/TB). Geez, that's really not improving the comparison with Tarsnap.

ilyt 3y ago

> If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed? That's pretty much any SaaS... look at the various log or metrics gathering solution, where you pay serious multipliers of what would cost to run same software on your own instance.

tptacek 3y ago

Yes. That's the thing about Tarsnap, a service with a TikZ diagram on its front page, built around a Unix utility, that meters in picodollars. It's meant to bilk money from uninformed mom-and-pop backup users.

nemothekid 3y ago
I'm having a hard time to believe that anyone remotely interested in Tarsnap's value prop is also an "uninformed mom-and-pop". This "uninformed mom-and-pop" is potentially compiling the client application from source, but can't do basic math to compare tarsnap's pricing to the top 20 or so competitors that rank above tarsnap in SEO?
- tptacek 3y ago
  That was sarcasm. :)
  - nemothekid 3y ago
    Should have looked at the username, massive egg on face.
idlewords 3y ago
I tried Tarsnap briefly once and was charged billions of picodollars. It definitely preys on the ignorant.

AnonHP 3y ago

You can get a HN reader’s discount on rsync.net (email them to ask for it or search on HN), bringing the price down to $0.12 / GB, and everything else remains the same.

rsync 3y ago
The HN reader’s discount is lower than that these days (we probably "normalized"[1] parents account to reflect that). We also have .edu / student / nonprofit discounts. Email us. Finally, Debian and FreeBSD project members get free accounts. See the committers handbook, etc., for details. [1] Whenever we lower our prices, we increase quota on existing customers to "normalize" them to the new price/GB. If you do nothing, your rsync.net account just grows over time due to this.