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TIL Borgbase. The UI looks great for snapshot-oriented backups, and it's good to see them fund borgbackup development. rsync.net does not support append-only m

TIL Borgbase. The UI looks great for snapshot-oriented backups, and it's good to see them fund borgbackup development. rsync.net does not support append-only mode, despite advertising it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653 Unavailability is occasionally expected. Don't rely on a single provider to be your sole backup. Any one have any experience with Hetzner Storage Boxes for this?

exitheone 3y ago
Been using hetzner storage boxes for borg backup for >5 years. Works without issue for multiple TB of backups. Every maintenance downtime so far has been announced in advance.
- AnonHP 3y ago
  The main reason I’ve avoided Hetzner storage box is because they don’t accept loading money into the account as a prepaid credit for a longer period. It’s always a month-by-month payment. Ok, so they do allow it, but only through a bank transfer, which is either not easy or possible for those outside the EU. If they allowed this through credit/debit cards or PayPal or some other mechanism, I’d surely try it. Hetzner in general seems to be very conservative in handling (and avoiding) risks. I’d like to prepay for a year or longer for critical services so that in case something goes wrong (card expired, didn’t notice reminder emails, temporarily off the grid, temporarily incapacitated), things just don’t go poof.
  - wiredfool 3y ago
    I’ve got an auto credit card setup on one of my hetzner accounts.
lifeofguenter 3y ago
Hetzner Storage just lost a couple of snapshots a while ago… If you want “perfect architecture” and reliability/availability you just need to pay for it (aws/s3). Or make use of multiple providers.
- noAnswer 3y ago
  > If you want “perfect architecture” and reliability/availability you just need to pay for it (aws/s3). I find that really funny. AWS has outages regularly. Whole data centers who go dark. Remember the S3 outage because an admin fat-fingerly deleted a large number of servers? ...no, people forget very quickly because of the "No one was ever fired for using AWS" mantra.
ryan29 3y ago
Borgbase is pretty good. I’ve used it for 6 years. The usage graph on each repo is great. I redid my server this year and was accidentally backing up a stale snapshot every night for one of my repos. It would succeed, but without changes. The flat line for usage tipped me off. I’m not sure I would have noticed otherwise since it was a VM image that I could restore and boot, but it wasn’t super obvious it was full of stale data. This downtime isn’t ideal, but, if downtime is needed to preserve data integrity, I’ll take it over the risk of trying to maintain availability.
rvieira 3y ago
I've tried Borg but I settled with Kopia and a[0] cheap S3-like storage. Everything is automated and runs on a schedule, but when I need some ad-hoc restore, say, of a single snapshot or folder I can always use KopiaUI. Been quite happy with it. [0] - actually two providers, for redundancy, plus local physical storage
wiredfool 3y ago
I’ve had a couple of hetzner storage boxes- generally they’re ok. Though just this weekend there was some screwiness with sub accounts and ssh keys not working that did resolve itself after 24-48 hours. I didn’t notice anything communicated about it.
rsync 3y ago
"rsync.net does not support append-only mode, despite advertising it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653" This is correct - we believed we had a working recipe that properly sandboxed the 'rclone mount' and 'rclone serve' directives but we couldn't make it work in a way that allowed us to sleep at night. But now that is all changing... It appears that we can run rclone serve restic --stdio in a way that doesn't actually serve anything or create sockets, etc., and as soon as we finish our tests we will have it in place and people can lock their accounts with something like this: restrict,command="rclone serve restic --stdio --append-only backups/my-restic-repo" ssh-rsa ... ... in authorized_keys and achieve proper append-only mode at long last. Stand by ...
- btschaegg 3y ago
  As a customer, that is great to hear (well, read). I was reading about how a restore scenario with Borg would look like if "append only" really matters (so in a ransomware scenario), and what I've seen makes me rather uncomfortable [1]. I don't want to have to do that in a stressful situation. Is there a particular channel where you intend to post your findings? :) [1]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html#append-only-mode https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...

exitheone 3y ago

Been using hetzner storage boxes for borg backup for >5 years. Works without issue for multiple TB of backups. Every maintenance downtime so far has been announced in advance.

AnonHP 3y ago
The main reason I’ve avoided Hetzner storage box is because they don’t accept loading money into the account as a prepaid credit for a longer period. It’s always a month-by-month payment. Ok, so they do allow it, but only through a bank transfer, which is either not easy or possible for those outside the EU. If they allowed this through credit/debit cards or PayPal or some other mechanism, I’d surely try it. Hetzner in general seems to be very conservative in handling (and avoiding) risks. I’d like to prepay for a year or longer for critical services so that in case something goes wrong (card expired, didn’t notice reminder emails, temporarily off the grid, temporarily incapacitated), things just don’t go poof.
- wiredfool 3y ago
  I’ve got an auto credit card setup on one of my hetzner accounts.

lifeofguenter 3y ago

Hetzner Storage just lost a couple of snapshots a while ago… If you want “perfect architecture” and reliability/availability you just need to pay for it (aws/s3). Or make use of multiple providers.

noAnswer 3y ago
> If you want “perfect architecture” and reliability/availability you just need to pay for it (aws/s3). I find that really funny. AWS has outages regularly. Whole data centers who go dark. Remember the S3 outage because an admin fat-fingerly deleted a large number of servers? ...no, people forget very quickly because of the "No one was ever fired for using AWS" mantra.

ryan29 3y ago

Borgbase is pretty good. I’ve used it for 6 years. The usage graph on each repo is great. I redid my server this year and was accidentally backing up a stale snapshot every night for one of my repos. It would succeed, but without changes. The flat line for usage tipped me off. I’m not sure I would have noticed otherwise since it was a VM image that I could restore and boot, but it wasn’t super obvious it was full of stale data. This downtime isn’t ideal, but, if downtime is needed to preserve data integrity, I’ll take it over the risk of trying to maintain availability.

rvieira 3y ago

I've tried Borg but I settled with Kopia and a[0] cheap S3-like storage. Everything is automated and runs on a schedule, but when I need some ad-hoc restore, say, of a single snapshot or folder I can always use KopiaUI. Been quite happy with it. [0] - actually two providers, for redundancy, plus local physical storage

wiredfool 3y ago

I’ve had a couple of hetzner storage boxes- generally they’re ok. Though just this weekend there was some screwiness with sub accounts and ssh keys not working that did resolve itself after 24-48 hours. I didn’t notice anything communicated about it.

rsync 3y ago

"rsync.net does not support append-only mode, despite advertising it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32756653" This is correct - we believed we had a working recipe that properly sandboxed the 'rclone mount' and 'rclone serve' directives but we couldn't make it work in a way that allowed us to sleep at night. But now that is all changing... It appears that we can run rclone serve restic --stdio in a way that doesn't actually serve anything or create sockets, etc., and as soon as we finish our tests we will have it in place and people can lock their accounts with something like this: restrict,command="rclone serve restic --stdio --append-only backups/my-restic-repo" ssh-rsa ... ... in authorized_keys and achieve proper append-only mode at long last. Stand by ...

btschaegg 3y ago
As a customer, that is great to hear (well, read). I was reading about how a restore scenario with Borg would look like if "append only" really matters (so in a ransomware scenario), and what I've seen makes me rather uncomfortable [1]. I don't want to have to do that in a stressful situation. Is there a particular channel where you intend to post your findings? :) [1]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html#append-only-mode https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...