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What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap
- blrgeek 13y agoI just signed up for an account and put in $10 so I can be grandfathered in once Colin upgrades the pricing, and marketing :) I would much rather prefer a robust commercial entity behind my service providers (+ the super credible technical capability of Colin), than Colin alone.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> the intersection of Catholic teaching on social justice and SaaS pricing grids, Maybe it's just me, but I would read the _hell_ out of that blog post.
- grannyg00se 13y agoOr...How I would run an online backup service completely unrelated to Tarsnap, with different goals, different priorities, and different ideals.
- noir_lord 13y agoYep, I think this is basically the problem with this post, it's Dropbox with an open source client and maybe that is what he doesn't want it to be.
- patio11 13y agoIf you think Tarsnap is Dropbox with an open source client (but marketed differently), a) you do not understand the engineering reality of Tarsnap (or you have a very... curious understanding of Dropbox) and b) Colin, please note that your marketing is creating fans who think that Tarsnap is Dropbox with an open source client.
- genwin 13y agoHow about Dropbox + TrueCrypt, except easier to automate and much cheaper beyond Dropbox's free tier, in exchange for taking the risk on a one-person business?
- vertex-four 13y agoYou realise that Dropbox isn't a backup system, right?
- genwin 13y agoI have a backup file there, so can confirm it does work for that purpose.
- wglb 13y agoUm, no. Delete that file on one device, it is gone from all that share it.
- genwin 13y agoPut only a backup copy (not the source file) into Dropbox or Tarsnap. Don't delete the file on either system. Same boat. Scripts can copy out from the Dropbox to both negate your issue and proliferate backup copies to many physical locations.
- dennisgorelik 13y agoDropbox preserves history of the file even after file was deleted. Especially with Packrat feature. https://www.dropbox.com/help/11/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/11/en
- genwin 13y agoDidn't know, thanks! Also didn't know that (from Dropbox help) "Your files are stored using 256-bit AES encryption". You have to trust them with the keys though.
- noir_lord 13y agoI meant the product described in the blog post not tarsnap as it currently is. I'm quite aware of what tarsnap is.
- scott_s 13y agoI think Patrick's comment still applies if you think he described "Dropbox with an open source client." Since it's still tarsnap, it still retains all of the security benefits of tarsnap. Saying "open source client" does not capture that.
- pseut 13y agoThings tarsnap would need to be anything like dropbox: * Mobile support * Windows support * A web interface * Any way of using it other than CLI TFA left all that stuff in place. "tarsnap the software" does not change at all.
- Zikes 13y agoHonestly, he's put so much thought and effort into it already and seems to care a lot about it, I wonder why he doesn't just launch a competing service. Edit: Whoa, lots of downvotes. I guess it is a bit odd to ask a person who just said "What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap" if they have any literal interest in running Tarsnap. Silly me.
- untothebreach 13y agopart of the allure of Tarsnap is cperciva's security and engineering expertise. While patio11 is brilliant, that is the one part of the "business" he wouldn't be to compete with.
- dublinben 13y agoCouldn't he just run a marketing site that passes user data directly through to Tarsnap, but charges a 1000% markup for the flashy website?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- phillmv 13y agoThe whole point is that cperciva has a unique competitive advantage in operating tarsnap in that he's a remarkably good at that problem set. patio11's whole point is that he loves both tarsnap and cperciva and thinks literally everyone in this equation would be better served if cperciva made more money and by making the tarsnap user experience more sensitive to the needs of businesses who want to rely on it.
- patio11 13y agoBecause being on the hook for people's backups is not my idea of a fun time, because I'd be directly competing with an Internet buddy who I'd rather see successful, because I have no particular comparative advantage in backups that I don't have in a host of better product categories, because I already run three businesses and enjoy sleeping occasionally, because running services is in fact a heck of a lot harder than posting about them, etc etc.
- rsync 13y agoAs someone who knows a little something about this business, and who has been excited and enthusiastic about tarsnap from day one, I hope Colin pays no attention to what you have written and continues to provide his service (note, I didn't say "run his business") just as he has. I want to live in a world where tarsnap is sold for picodollars.
- phillmv 13y agoWell, I hope he changes the "auto deleted if you don't check your email for 14 days" and just charges my credit card accordingly. Operating on pre-payment is kind of nutty.
- zaidf 13y agoWhat happens when the CC fails? What happens when the CC fails and the customer is non-responsive? Ultimately Colin has to make a call of whether he deletes the files or not after some point of non-communication from the customer.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoHe will eventually have to wipe my data. However, as it is quite valuable to me, I want this to happen after actual attempts to contact me, including many emails and actual phonecalls. And at the very least no earlier than many months after payments stop. I'm okay with paying more for the service to get this.
- e12e 13y agoSo, why doesn't anyone set up a payment service dedicated to topping up tarsnap accounts? If this is something people want, and colin doesn't care to implement it -- just pay someone else 1.5 the price with the added (mutual) guarantee that you won't run out of funds (possibly with a max, and/or complicated rules for when payment should cease) ? Sounds like easy money all around, and colin won't have to deal with the support fallout (nor get paid to deal with it, which is ok).
- Gigablah 13y agoHis advice re: paid articles/guides is basically what DigitalOcean is doing at a larger scale, and with great success.
- dewey 13y agoI'm still reading and just looking at the screenshots and I have to say I very much prefer the Tarsnap design not the cheap template one which doesn't really look very trustworthy to me and is probably more suited for an online pharmacy.
- TeeWEE 13y agoCoudn't agree more. The current design of tarsnap is much better. It shows that tarsnap is serious about technology and security.
- malyk 13y agoFor geeks. Not for business people who have to make the decision to pay for it. Of course, you don't make the change if you don't want to become the B2B mega secure backup business that patrick is pitching. But if you do want to grow into that then you have to re-brand into something a clueless supervisor is going to be able to authorize. That won't happen often with the current design. If Colin doesn't want to make a big B2B business, which I'm sure we all believe to be true, then you can keep the old design and be happy. But if he wants to have a "real" business, then he should absolutely go with a standard bootstap theme. edit: four to for. duh
- jfarmer 13y agoOut of curiosity, what's the biggest P&L you've had responsibility for in your career?
- lucb1e 13y agoI don't think that's out of curiosity.
- jfarmer 13y agoIt is. I'm curious because I'm interested in someone who has managed a large P&L but nevertheless thinks Tarsnap is the way to go for their org. I am also curious because I believe most of the comments here on HN amount to not liking this article because it doesn't appeal to them as a customer without regard to what it means for Tarsnap as a business.
- netcan 13y agoThis is the way to do criticism on the internet.
- w1ntermute 13y agoI'm reminded of this post by lionhearted: http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patrick-mckenzie http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patri...
- coolsunglasses 13y agoFor any that don't know better, Patrick has since made a lot more than $60k a year since he started consulting and running Appointment Reminder.
- tptacek 13y agoThat would be a more apt comparison if this blog post hadn't been part of an ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of which HN is aware of.
- enko 13y ago> an ongoing conversation Patrick and I had been having with Colin, not all of which HN is aware of The knowledge that there's missing context, which was provided in some sort of back room inside-baseball hn-elites secret discussion to which I was not a party and will never be granted access, kind of makes me wish the article had never been posted in the first place. "Here's my article - which you'll never understand, because you weren't there, because you're not cool enough". Great.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoOh FFS, there's enough good info in the article to just think about that, without getting all butt-hurt about in-groups and out-groups.
- kruipen 13y agoWhat patio11 doesn't get, is that part of the reason why HN crowd considers tarsnap "the best backup software" is exactly because Colin Percival is what patio11 calls "bad at business" (and what I would call "motivated not only by money"). BTW, that is the same reason for the backlash over Oculus acquisition: people are upset that it will no longer be run by "bad at business" engineers like John Carmack, but instead by "very good at business" Mark Zuckerberg.
- mildtrepidation 13y agoThe presumption here is palpable. There do exist factors other than the financial -- whole categories of them -- that people take into account when making value judgments like this. Maybe some people view the Oculus acquisition through that myopic lens, but many do not, and your generalizations do your point of view no justice while simultaneously misrepresenting many of theirs.
- grannyg00se 13y agoExactly. What patio11 calls "Geek to Geek" business and suggests Colin move away from. Any new user who sees the suggested standard three tier pricing scheme is going to immediately recognize a traditional business. And there goes the entire g2g market. Which I suppose patio11 doesn't care about given that he's suggesting a move away from that. But without g2g, Colin is going to be competing in a huge market with a bunch of other players. He's also likely to enjoy his business a whole lot less.
- jason_tko 13y agoRight, because geeks never buy services from traditional businesses. Oh, wait. >>Colin is going to be competing in a huge market with a bunch of other players. He's also likely to enjoy his business a whole lot less. Also painfully incorrect. When you have a unique selling proposition, it's easy to compete in a huge market with a bunch of other players. It's also enjoyable.
- grannyg00se 13y ago
- stevekemp 13y agoWhile the main post was interesting enough, and has already garnered responses, I'm genuinely amazed that people pay for that level of "cron monitoring". Looking around I see at least three services ("probyapp.com", "deadmanssnitch.com", and "cronwat.ch" - the latter of which has an expired SSL certificate). FWIW one of the main reasons I've never used tarsnap is the pricing and the picodollars, it never felt "real" enough, although obviously it is completely transparent.
- grannyg00se 13y agoIt's in gigabytes right on the home page conveniently converted. How does $0.25 / GB - month feel less real than....anything else?
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- bernardom 13y ago> This page would literally be 1/5th the size of this blog post or less and take less than an hour to write, and would probably double Tarsnap’s sales by itself. cperciva: Pretty please try this first and measure the effect? Would be super interesting!
- aresant 13y agoThe negative reaction to Patrick's design template is so meta. It completely proves his point the power of "wrong" design. Everybody forgot all the brilliant things Patrick said because they didn't like the design. And that's his point! Send a non-technical guy who's ass is truly on the line to Tarsnap and, sorry, he's going to have a negative "blink" gut reaction. If you've ever built a SAAS to any scale, you'll know that is true. Sad. But 100% accurate. Stripe's original UX to me was a better example of where Tarsnap could go (vs. even the current stripe site): https://web.archive.org/web/20111007130738/https://stripe.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20111007130738/https://stripe.co... Headline, button, 5 relevant "benefits" Then a link to start, documentation, and get help. Almost exactly what Patrick illustrates before he loses us with a rushed design.
- andrewcooke 13y agoso what? my impression is that colin is happy with things as they are. why should he change his business, which makes him happy, because someone else thinks it should be different? the aim of life is to be happy, not to meet someone else's expectations.
- patio11 13y agoI'm intentionally value-agnostic about whatever makes Colin happy in the post. As long as operating businesses suboptimally is not in fact his terminal value, there exists a transition between Tarsnap and Tarsnap' which makes him even happier. Everybody wins, especially Colin, which strikes me as a happy outcome because I like seeing when geeks are suitably rewarded for creating substantial improvements to the world, which Colin has done. If running Tarsnap as a free public utility is the light he wants to bring to the world, the outlined Tarsnap' is better at that than his Tarsnap is. Charge businesses more, invest in better UX, subsidize non-business users straight to "free." If he wants to lay on a beach sipping iced cocoa, this is more beach and more cocoa. If he wants more time with his family and less time in the inbox, this is a trivial modification away from that. ("Make money, buy your way out of inbox.")
- andrewcooke 13y agomaybe he needs someone else to show him how to be happy. shrug. in my experience, people telling me how to live my life tend to be a pain in the arse. but maybe i am projecting.
- kryptiskt 13y agoThe biggest fault with this is the assumption that the geek market isn't big enough to do serious business in. I wouldn't alienate existing customers by an enterprisey makeover. Even when it comes to B2B, it is better for a service like this to get into enterprise via their geeks than try to appeal to their suits, because Tarsnap's strengths mean nothing to a suit.
- pseut 13y agoUnless I skimmed over part of the post, tarsnap is still run by crontab on a unix/linux box. So, still pretty geeky. And the idea that "affordable encrypted backup" can't be understood by "a suit" is silly.
- solutionyogi 13y agoHow about serving both geek market and B2B market? As Patrick noted, Tarsnap Basic will still exist for all geeks to pay pico dollars by usage. I do consulting for hedge funds in NYC. Most of them use an accounting system called 'Advent Geneva'. This particular software solution has a Unix component where the actual accounting data lives. My clients would like to back up this database securely and reliably. Security is extremely important as for a given hedge fund, their trades and positions are extremely sensitive information. Tarsnap is exactly the backup solution these clients would want to use. As a consultant, I don't think I will ever be able to sell Tarsnap in its existing form to these clients. Keeping aside pricing, these clients would want an SLA (and other legal stuff mentioned in the article) for the backup service. These clients are more than willing to pay costs associated with this higher level of service and will benefit tremendously from using Tarsnap. I do not know any backup solution which is better than Tarsnap and it's unfair that businesses will have to use less-than-ideal technical solutions ONLY BECAUSE Colin doesn't want to adjust 'business side' of his product offering.
- smacktoward 13y agoOr just sell the same product through two different channels. Call it "Tarsnap" and make it work via a CLI and low-fi Web site for the geeks who appreciate such things, and call it "Super Secure Backup Pro XP" (or whatever name appeals to normals) with a GUI and a lickable Web site for the non-geek population. Underneath it can all be the same product, just packaged differently depending on who the potential customer is.
- tokenadult 13y agoPatrick notes in detail that the post is written with Colin's approval. I am not a customer of any of Patrick's services, nor am I a customer of Colin's, although perhaps I should be a customer of both. The most telling part of the post is right here, beginning with a quotation from the Tarsnap FAQ: " >Q: What happens when my account runs out of money? " >A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored. "Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails. "Guess how I found out about this?" That says it all.
- steveklabnik 13y agoI am a customer of Colin's, though I almost had a very similar scenario happen. Luckily, my understanding of crypto caught it, and Colin is quick to answer emails, so I'm good to go (for the most part...) Here was my deal: I stupidly told my computer to upgrade libc, and only after apt completely failed and wrecked the machine to the point of `ls` not working did I realize that I had some personal data that wasn't backed up. Of course. My plan was thus: use an Ubuntu LiveUSB, upload a copy of /home/steve to Tarsnap, then install Ubuntu, and be on my way. As I was compiling Tarsnap, I realized that my mental model of machines on Tarsnap was probably wrong: it's not that I have a Tarsnap account, with access given to a set of keys. It's that each key has its own backup. So what I _almost_ did was upload an encrypted backup of all my stuff, then wipe the drive and the key, never (hopefully!) to see my data again. :( Even when you're technical and know about this stuff, you can screw it up, because you're still human.
- soneca 13y agoI think that is the point for improving UI and how the service is served. The more geekie you are the less help you need for the easy stuff, but more tragic is the result when you eventually crash. Just like the best (arguably, maybe I should say boldest) drivers are the ones who get killed on car accidents. When you are too confortable on driving at 80Mph is when you are closest to die. And it is when you need more help, more user-friendly interface, more insurance to keep you safe from your own mistakes. Keeping all of UI difficult just to please the geekies will actually harm some of them pretty bad eventually. Also I find interesting how a lot of people is forcing to Colin a very romanticized idea of a "not for the money" entrepreneur that just want to keep things in this raw state. Sounds to me that Patrick is closer to Colin than anyway creating this image of him.
- avenger123 13y agoFirst of all Epic post from patio11. Lots of great advice that can be used by others. I think the main thing is that all the things that Patrick is mentioning is overhead that Colin likely doesn't want. He's running this as a lifestyle business and not a company that wants to make millions. I agree that certain changes can be made that allow better value for users (the auto-payment ability being very important) but all these things add overhead that Colin doesn't seem to want. Each change has a multiplier of time, and extra stress. Heck, he doesn't want to waste his time on fixing his logo to be sharper. I find Colin's approach refreshing. It's rare to see someone (especially one so gifted intellectually) be so in tune with what they want out of life. Having freedom to do what he wants, enough money to enjoy life and save for retirement and providing an important contribution to the world is what Tarsnap provides. I'm sure Colin will make changes to make it more useful but I think it will be in the context of what's the best for the users and not what's the best for his pocket.
- a3_nm 13y agoThe article seems to derive its consequences from the unwritten assumption that the goal of tarsnap is to earn as much money as possible, or to attract as many customers as possible, or at least to attract those users who would benefit from tarsnap. Maybe this isn't cperciva's goal? Maybe he is just running the service as he wants it to be?
- girvo 13y agoMaybe we as geeks would be even better served if Colin was taking the money he's currently leaving on the table from business that aren't us geeks directly, but we have technical input in? Because currently he's missing out on those customers, and I know for a fact (I tried) that where I work would use tarsnap if Colin implemented what was shown here, they'd give him $500 a month, and us geeks continue using it with pico dollars (that doesn't go away!) and Colin gets more money and time to improve the service. Seems good to me.
- Brian-Puccio 13y ago> Unlimited storage, up to 500 GB of media > ... > Unlimited storage, up to 1 TB of media No. That's not unlimited.
- tjr 13y agoI stumbled over that initially too, but the subsequent paragraphs explain: unlimited storage of data except for media files, and limited storage for media files, trusting the user to be honest about it. The intent is to focus on storing things other than photos / videos / music.
- lucb1e 13y agoOh thanks, now I finally understand that too. Had the same thought as you and the post you're replying to.
- dmix 13y agoIf Tarsnap added recurring billing and (much) better documentation with examples, I think Colin would do just fine. He doesn't need to rethink his marketing, there's enough geeks to keep him fed.
- peferron 13y agoLacking good counter-arguments to the article, I'll just vote with my wallet and sign up for the current tarsnap today. To be fair, I had been contemplating it for a while, but this just pushed me over the edge. I feel manipulated. :D
- lucb1e 13y agoI'll follow you, although I actually deposited money like half a year ago but have yet to start testing it :P
- vizzah 13y agoWhat a silly silly post. Not everything in the world must be "enterprised" and "commercialized". You seem to be on an absolutely different planet to the idea and ideology of Tarsnap. Your re-design template is so awful (and so bland, so tasteless $25 template), comparing to the original one, which is unique, light and with a thought-out UI. Colin is happy to provide a useful service and there is a target market for this service (i.e. - other geeks). It is not his intention to bring the service to the "next level", because running (and dedicating even more time) to this service is not what he wants to do to make a living.
- Snail_Commando 13y agoYou may be surprised to learn that Colin asked him to write this post.
- vizzah 13y agoFrom what I can see, the author offered Colin "advice" in a form of a consultation as a public blog post. A simple conversion from "unsolicited" advice.
- pdonis 13y agoNo, he wrote an article that Colin specifically asked him to write: https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/451262554069663744 https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/451262554069663744
- baddox 13y agoI think Patrick is being far too gracious in his "great software, bad business" dichotomy. The data deletion policy is all software, and is ridiculously, laughably bad. I wasn't aware of this "feature" before, and I don't currently have any need for Tarsnap's service, but I don't think there is any way I would choose to use that service or any other software product from the same guy/team. Maybe the underlying cryptography is rock-solid, but that's completely irrelevant if my backups are going to be deleted while I'm on vacation.
- thaumaturgy 13y agoI've gotta agree with just about everything Patrick said there, despite being inclined more towards Colin's way of doing things. For the last several years I've been running a business whose primary purpose, really, is charity: providing high quality technical services to people and businesses who couldn't otherwise afford them. It sounds like a noble cause, but it sucks balls. You're not serving your customers' needs if you end up in the hospital for any of a hundred different reasons that can happen to anyone at any time, and there's nobody that can manage the service for you while you're out. (Look: you obviously think that having a backup plan for data is important; why do you not think that having a business backup plan is also important?) You're not serving your customers' needs if you can't afford to ensure the integrity of your own infrastructure. No business lasts forever; what happens if Amazon, two years from now, starts making policy decisions that cripple your business? Steve Jobs died just over two years ago and most people agree by now that Apple has become a different company. Bezos is not immortal, and there's a board of directors that would very much like to be making a lot more money from Amazon. You're not serving your customers' needs by maintaining an unnecessarily high barrier to doing business with you. I do web and mail hosting for a number of customers. Having backups is really important to me. But I'm also busy and underpaid and my hair's always on fire and my bank account never has quite enough money in it, so tarsnap for me has never looked better than my current backup system (BackupPC on a machine I have physical access to in a secure location). Excel modeling to attempt to estimate my monthly costs for a service is obnoxious. You're not serving your customers' needs by being unable to fix problems that they are actively complaining about because you're the only engineer in your business capable of addressing them. Colin's current way of doing business is actively interfering with his goals -- assuming those goals are anything more than, "provide a cool backup service as a hobby". You don't have to become a disciple of SV startup culture. There's a fantastically large middle-ground that allows for changing the business just a little bit without sacrificing its soul. The amazing thing here is that both Colin and Patrick are amazing engineers: Colin as a software engineer, but Patrick as a business engineer. A business is an abstraction that can -- and should -- be engineered. That means understanding the scope and requirements of the problem being solved and then coming up with a system that meets them. Colin, for godssake, take Patrick's advice just as seriously as somebody should take your advice on cryptography.
- 13y ago
- eridius 13y agoHow much of this could be done by building a new business that internally uses tarsnap? The business provides these service plans and completely abstracts the client away from the fact that it uses tarsnap under the hood. The primary risks I can see: 1. Colin gets hit by a bus and Tarsnap disappears. There's not much that this new company could do to protect itself from this problem, short of convincing Colin to implement a failsafe that, upon his verified death, hands full control of Tarsnap (including any relevant private keys and passwords) over to someone who can continue the service (and that someone could easily be the founder of this new company). 2. Technical support that this company could provide would be limited based on the level of support that Colin would provide to this company. Again, perhaps this company could draw up an agreement with Colin for priority support, paying some large amount of money per month for the privilege. 3. There's probably other issues I'm missing, perhaps this company can't make the same guarantees tarsnap itself could (e.g. ability to be HIPAA-compliant) due to not being in control of the technical aspects. But otherwise, it could certainly provide all the metered pricing guarantees, including guaranteeing backups don't get deleted after a 7 day shot clock. And they may be able to make other guarantees (e.g. priority support) depending on what they can convince Colin to deal with; I'm sure that it's easier to have a single special customer that gets special treatment than it is to offer priority support (and other guarantees) to arbitrary customers. --- On another note, I disagree with the author that metered pricing should be removed entirely (although he seems to have already conceded that he will never win that argument). Tiered pricing for businesses is great, but there's still a need for cheaper pricing for various reasons. Perhaps I'm an employee at a company that's testing Tarsnap to ensure it meets the company's needs before making the case for the company to buy a service plan. I may not have the authority to purchase a $50/mo plan, but I certainly would have no qualms about paying $1 out of my own pocket to test the service for two weeks. Or maybe I'm an independent developer who's bootstrapping a business. I'm still in development mode so I have no customers and therefore no income. Being able to pay $2/mo for the backups I need is a lot more appealing than paying $50/mo. When I finally launch my product and gain users, then I can consider switching to the $50/mo plan for the guarantees it offers (e.g. predictable pricing).
- anon4 13y agoWhat I love about the concept of metered pricing is how direct it is. You pay exactly for the resources in use. No strange statistics, heuristics and assumptions have been applied to your data, whatever it is, that's what you're using and that's that. You can then look at your month-to-month usage and do the statistics yourself. I do like the proposals in the article, but I wouldn't make the metered pricing that invisible. I'd call it Elastic Tarsnap, put it in the same table before Tarsnap Professional, give it a faded background and put the language with the picodollar pricing on it. This will communicate that that's the intended product for the truly paranoid power user who needs their personal data backed up. Maybe even put that exact sentence under it "Backups for truly paranoid power users (or unix geeks)". Because it's not just corporations that have specific needs, we unix geeks have specific needs too.
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- mercurialshark 13y agoI agree with most everything he says except, I really love "Online backups for the truly paranoid." It resonates with me on a primal level and professionals want security that is above and beyond utterly reliable.
- nekopa 13y agoSomeone mentioned charging a 1000% markup for a flashy marketing site, but couldn't it be more like a heroku/aws type deal? Use tarsnap as the backend, but add a more user friendly interface to it. And be up front about it, don't pretend you're doing something you're not. Colin could keep doing what he likes, and basically someone else will be handling the marketing side of things, and interface development, customer support etc...
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoIs there some reason that a guy who made a bingo card creator has any real authority here? That probably sounds harsh, but I don't really understand why he feels he is in a position to criticize a very good product.
- tikhonj 13y agoThis sort of comment really annoys me. First of all, the post is full of constructive, actionable advice. Does the advice seem good? Then that's all that matters! The post stands by itself even without knowing who patio11 is. Personal attacks like this literally add nothing while at the same time actively stifling future discussions. You should never have a personal attack unless there is a very good, concrete reason for it to be relevant and you're still polite about it. Anything else is simply both rude and unconstructive. Second of all, he's somebody who both has a successful business in a vaguely similar niche and used to be a successful consultant optimizing others businesses. That is, he was a professional doing exactly this sort of criticism! And people were paying him for it. Because it's extremely useful.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoNothing about my post is a personal attack. I legitimately have no idea what business he has talking about tarsnap this way. I clicked his "about" link and it said he made bingo card creator software. He has a ton of HN karma, so I expected downvotes, but I'm still puzzled as to why he would make this post. You're saying he's had success in something similar to online backups? What was it?
- pbiggar 13y agoThat is exactly the point. Judge on his words, not on who he is. FWIW, he is probably the most well-known CRO expert there has ever been. He has exactly the authority needed to write this post. [edit: "CRO expert" is too strong, as noted below. I was thinking something "SaaSy". Basically, in this community, he is the expert in some forms of SaaS marketing/pricing.]
- Nanzikambe 13y agoInteresting article. I'd actually not heard of Tarsnap before, one question (to those who use it), why would a geek use it over: tar -cf - / --exclude='/proc/*' --exclude='/dev/*' [..] | \ xz -z | \ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -salt | \ > /mnt/your/networked/google/drive/backup.$(hostname -a).$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").aes.tar.xz I spent a while going through https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ and I didn't find any flexibility tarsnap offers over it. To make it work unattended, it's trivial to generate a unique key per backup for openssl (use a tmpfs) and then gpg encrypt the key and email it to sys admins or whatever mailing list before killing the tmpfs. I could understand the appeal to less tech savvy users if there were a gui, or it featured cross platform support beyond those supported by tar, <insert compression tool>, openssl/aespipe/gpg/<insert encryption tool>, or the storage was super cheap. So what's the value proposition here?
- tomp 13y agoData deduplication, incremental backups.
- Nanzikambe 13y agoHeh apologies, my fault for trying to be clever, the mechanism I actually use is incremental and deduplicated. I substituted it for tar to simplify. I actually use ZFS (filesystem), so my backup flow is closer to: TSTAMP="backup-$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")" zfs snapshot -r $TSTAMP zfs send $TSTAMP | \ xz -z | \ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -salt | \ > /mnt/your/networked/google/drive/backup.$(hostname -a).$TSTAMP.aes.tar.xz The underyling ZFS filesystem is deduplicated at filesystem level, and snapshots are incremental. THere're a few other minor differences (the dest is another ZFS host which syncs to Google drive, and I nuke the local snapshot after send because RAID 1+0 space is more expensive than RAID1 .. )
- foobarqux 13y agoI would like to do something similar with BTRFS. How are your snapshots incremental? In BTRFS you would need to specify a base snapshot. What is the restore process? You init a zfs file systems and then zfs receive the backups in chronological order? How are the dependencies between snapshots managed?
- nmolo 13y agoAnyone want to help me make TaaS? (Tarsnap as a Service)
- Evgeniuz 13y agoIsn't Tarsnap already a service?
- edanm 13y agoThis is getting a lot of negative reactions. If this causes cperciva not to listen to this post, it will be a Big Tragedy. A lot of people here are ~saying "maybe cperciva isn't motivated by money". OK. I get that. Here's the thing - I honestly believe that Tarsnap is the best backup solution. I believe this because I hang around HN, I'm a technologist, and I trust tptacek and patio11, among others, when they say it. I am right on the edge of someone who would actually use Tarsnap - I'm a geek, but I also run a business, the money it would cost me is less than peanuts (if I could figure out how much it would cost me, that is - see the article). I'm probably not going to use Tarsnap because of a few missing but critical features that patio11 mentioned, like auto-recharging money (do I really need another bullet on my todo list, or to worry about my backups disappearing?). But there's a whole world of people out there. People who could really, really use Tarsnap. People who have my user data on their systems, and who I wish would use a service as good as Tarsnap. These people will never, ever use Tarsnap, because of all the reasons patio11 mentioned, and because they will never hear of it or know that it's better than everything else. What I said above has nothing to do with moral philosophy. It is a fact about the world that, if cperciva doesn't play the "marketing game" (or the "make your software useable by normal people" game), less people will use Tarsnap. And the world will be worse off. Is this a tragedy? Sure. cperciva doesn't owe the world or anyone in it anything. It isn't a moral absolute that giving cperciva more resources, to make Tarsnap that much better, is the right thing to happen. But I hate to see a whole forum full of people who actually think that what cperciva is doing is somehow more "noble" and less "greedy" because he doesn't care about money. * * I have no problem with cperciva acting however he wants in this regard, and absolutely do not mean any disrespect. I honestly don't think cperciva owes anyone anything. But I do think that it's an empirical fact that the world will be worse off for less people having used a good backup solution, and I honestly believe that living ina world with more people using Tarsnap, and incidentally cperciva having more money, is a better world. If you really want - donate all that money to GiveWell, and the world will be even better off.
- psykovsky 13y agoI wonder what would happen if someone built what was described in the post and used tarsnap as the backend... Is that even possible? ;)
- smw 13y agoThis is pure brilliance. And probably a massive windfall for Colin if he acts on it. I loved leaving the existing service as a poorly publicized option, as it keeps the hn-crowd-early-adopter-technical-consultants using the service, and thus recommending it to the $500/mo businesses.
- rakoo 13y agoAs a geek, this sounds quite lucrative yet boring. I'd be torn. Also, the proposed design looks ugly and absolutely standard, whereas the current one has this touch that makes it stand out. As a geek, though.
- mcherm 13y agoInstead of a critique of how Tarsnap is run, this sounds like a business proposal for a company that would offer B2B services using Tarsnap as a back-end. They could do things like offering a flat $100 rate for what is probably $2.60 of services and then roll around in the money. Or donate some of it to Tarsnap so it will keep running. Hmm... in many ways, it's actually not a bad idea. Especially if you partnered with Tarsnap so you could effectively do referrals to each other: send the geeks to bare-bones Tarsnap and they'd send the PHBs to you.
- arohner 13y agoYes. I'd pay money for an OSX UI to backup my laptop.
- dewey 13y agoWhy not just use Arq + S3/Glacier then? http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
- jamie_ca 13y agoOSX UI to backup your laptop, encrypted, to AWS: www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ I don't know tarsnap well enough to compare encryption models with Arq or anything, but I'm not invested enough to dig into it either. Arq works for me as a customer, and I'm not really in the tarsnap market.
- smw 13y agoI see Patrick's point being that Colin did the hard technical work to create the service, he should probably take the huge profits for himself. But sure, it does sound like there's room for what you describe -- even more so if Colin doesn't jump on it.
- twic 13y agoSo set the business up, make LONG_MAX dollars, then offer to hand it over to Colin lock, stock, and barrel if he will admit that it was a good idea all along. If Colin does not accept, start giving the profits to the OpenBSD foundation.
- flavor8 13y ago> "Colin is in no danger of selling Tarsnap to people with multiple terabyte databases — there’s only a few dozen of those organizations in the world and they would not even bring up Tarsnap to joke about it." ...is not actually true. There are likely thousands of companies with multi TB databases, many of which are small shops who need a backup solution. S3 is one option of course...
- wglb 13y agoA company I know of and do business with produces software for firms in which a terabyte is considered a small installation. Many firms use this software.
- GBond 13y agoThere is this hole-in-the-wall looking place in NYC chinatown that serves Chinese comfort food meal. It closes real late and remains affordable while serving great meals. It is frequented by Michelin star rated restaurant chefs (of all cuisines) for the after dinners hours mostly through word-of-mouth. Now I'm certain that the owner of the place knows he can charge more and rebrand to the mass audience. But I'd like to think it is a point of pride that his successful peers enjoy his services and that trumps any desire to change from the status quo. He is happy being Chef2Chef and I'm glad Colin is happy being Geek2Geek.
- rewind 13y agoFantastic analogy. Nicely done.
- wmorein 13y agoSo what is the place?
- GBond 13y agoGreat NY Noodle Town
- bambax 13y agoA businessman is on vacation on an island; walking on the beach, he comes across a middle-aged man sitting next to a very small rusty boat. - What do you do? - Right now I'm not doing anything; sometimes I fish. - So you're a fisherman? - If you want to call it that. - Why aren't you fishing now? - As I'm sure you'd put it, I have reached my daily quota. - What's your quota? - One fish a day. At most. Some days I don't catch any. - One. Fish. A. Day?? You can't make a living with one fish per day! Where do you even go to sell just one fish??!? - I don't sell it. I eat it. The businessman stays silent for a while, watching the man watching the sea. Then he says - Listen, I'm a businessman. Don't you want to hear some advice about how to grow your business? - Shoot. - First, you should make it your goal to catch as much fish as possible, every day. There must be a market somewhere on this island where you could sell it? - There is. 2 miles from here. - Okay, great. You catch a lot of fish, you walk to the market, you sell the fish, keeping some for your own consumption if you wish. - And then? - And then, with the money you buy a net. A net will let you catch so much more fish at once. - And then? - And then you catch more fish, you sell more fish, you make more money. With the money, you can buy a better boat. - Better in what sense? - Bigger, nicer -- better looking! And with that boat you'll be able to catch even more fish. - Oh. And then what? - Then you make even more money, and you can save it. - Save it? - After your expenses are paid, you keep the extra money; after a while you'll have lots of money. - And what do I do with that money? - Once you have enough money, you'll be able to retire! You won't have to work anymore! Now it's time for the fisherman to think. He stares at his feet for a while and says - But I'm not working right now.
- sexmonad 13y agoMy favorite thing about tarsnap is how damn reliable and trustworthy Colin is. If I see tarsnap start to move towards whatever fad all the other SaaS platforms are following today, I'll probably assume that they're trying to be the next Dropbox. That might be the right decision for tarsnap, but I'd move my backups.
- prutschman 13y agoThere's one part of this that I really don't understand. > here exist geeks who run servers with hobby projects, but they don’t have serious backup needs. Have they taken minimum sane steps with regards to their hobby projects like spending hours to investigate backup strategies, incorporating to limit their liability, purchasing insurance, hiring professionals to advise them on their backup strategies, etc? No? Then their revealed preference is that they don’t care all that much if they lose all their hobby data. I understand how investigating backup strategies and hiring professionals for advice help with the goal of protecting my data. I do not understand how insurance and, particularly, incorporating to limit liability help protect my hobby data. Both of those things make sense if I'm engaged in business activity requiring me to protect data in order to make money. How do they help me if I'm engaged in an activity that requires me to have continued access to the data for its own sake?
- smw 13y agoI think his point was simply that, for the most part, the only reason you'd pay $500 a month for backup is if you value your data much more than if it's a personal or hobby thing. Many businesses do. Making it easy for them to buy the product will probably be lucrative.
- prutschman 13y agoI understood the point he was aiming at. My quibble was with how he was making it. He demonstrates elsewhere at least some sensitivity to the difference between making money doing X as a value and just doing X as the value. Here, though, he very nearly says that, by revealed preference, if you're not monetizing your activity you don't actually care about it.
- acabal 13y agoHit the nail on the head with the pricing model. I really want a backup solution like Tarsnap that encrypts my data client-side and has an OSS client. I'm even fine with it being a Unixy command-line tool. But I have almost 1TB--a lifetime, so far--of pictures and music that I want backed up. I have literally no idea how much that would cost with Tarsnap, and it could be as high as hundreds per month. There's no way to find out until the bill comes. So I'm just not going to bother. If cperciva wants to keep metered pricing, maybe offering a free 3-day trial or something so users can get an idea of how much their particular backup situation would cost before committing would be a good idea.
- e12e 13y agoIf you have ~1TB of free space, just create a regular tar archive of your data and compress it -- maybe factor in another 10% for dedup (as seen anecdotally by others with large image collections -- this assumes you have raw images+jpegs -- for just jpegs, maybe nothing). Should be (bounded by) 500 USD first month (storage and upload), and 250 USD/Month after that (and ~250 USD to restore). I'm not sure what's difficult with these calculations? The dedup (as I understand it) is mostly relevant for incremental backups "adding up" -- so that you can (mostly) run weekly backups without worrying too much about storage cost ballooning out of control. Note: I'm not affiliated with tarsnap, nor am I a customer -- partly because I'm in a similar position: The data (emails etc) that I can afford to backup in a similar fashion to tarsnap (I use backupninja as a front-end for duplicity) is almost trivial to backup -- the rest (photos, media) I cannot currently afford to backup to the cloud (nor do I have the upstream bandwidth for it).
- beagle3 13y agoI am not sure how tarsnap dedups, but you could use apenwarr's amazing "bup" to create a dedupped, compressed backup and get a good idea of the size. But at those prices ... An external, USB powered, 5400RPM 1TB drive can be bought for $60 last I checked. An online backup service is nice to have, but for $250/month, you could buy a new 1TB disk every week, format it with TrueCrypt, copy your stuff to it, and email it to a random acquaintance/family member (or a known wrong address in Hawaii, so it comes back to you with "wrong address" a few weeks later). It's not as convenient as tarsnap, but way more resilient, not to mention that downloading 1TB back is going to take more than mailing the disk back to you -- or in most cases, taking a return flight to retrieve the disk yourself.
- lpgauth 13y agoHaven't read the TOS... but there might be an opportunity here to build a "user friendly" backup service on top of Tarsnap. Basically turning Tarsnap into a platform. If I had more free time...
- lawncheer 13y agoI do not understand the negative reactions. What about reframing the marketing/messaging changes the underlying tech involved? How is creating a complimentary B2B site, going to make the G2G one any less valid? I'm not understanding why there is a recurring theme in this thread that having awesome underlying tech is somehow mutually exclusive from running a great business as well.
- pbiggar 13y agoOne of the problems with HN is that the only people who come out to comment are those against the article. There is a large contingent of "fuck you, pay me" people on HN too - where are they when there's are article like this they could support!
- nemothekid 13y agoWow, this was a very interesting read and if forget all the minor changes like the site design his argument cracks open an argument against the way Tarsnap is run. Forget all silicon valley, photo sharing, selling coffee to 20-somethings startups, it seems to me Tarsnap is running inside its own Silicon Valley bubble. The argument here is Tarsnap is a great product but the way its being sold actively discriminates those who would be best served by their offering, but are not run by unix wizards, and I think we should all care about this issue as well. If it means a company like Target is easily convinced to use a solution like Tarsnap, instead of a competitors, or worse, rolling their own - I think we would be all much better off. With a great tool like Tarsnap, no matter how its priced, or how its sold, or what CSS is loaded - it should be clear that it provides a great value add and most people are better off with Tarsnap's solution in an enterprise setting. We shouldn't forget its incredibly easy to say "Well things are great now" when they are only great for you.
- njharman 13y agoInstead of talking about how you would run it, actually build and run it. If your "fork" addresses the needs of an under served market, congrats you've just hit step 3. Profit! Otherwise talk is cheap. More so, talk about how someone who has actually done something successful is doing it wrong.
- tdoggette 13y agoYou've missed the context of this document.
- christiangenco 13y agoThis post just converted me to use Tarsnap for five servers worth of backups. I've encountered Tarsnap half a dozen times over the last ~two years, but I was always thrown off by something ("what is this?", "backblaze is easier to use", "that pricing model is way too high - I'd be paying over a thousand dollars a year", etc.). Patrick's post systematically affirmed that I have a clear and pressing need for this, that it's severely underpriced, and a clear path of implementation.
- jws 13y agoOver lunch I mentioned tarsnap's hit by bus plan to the honchos of a seven figure/year business that needs secure offsite backups. They had a good laugh and dismissed tarsnap completely. For my own needs I can't use it because I can't tolerate the casual backup obliteration policy. The message I got out of patio11's work was that there are show stopping issues that are not fundamental to excellence of the product. Lose them. Help more people. Bill me monthly. Don't obliterate the backups I'm counting on. You can have my business, my recommendations, and my thanks. (And by all means he should, get a person or a service to take care of all that billing nuisance. Don't let it bring him down. I contract people to collect the money I don't enjoy collecting. That person needs a job too.)
- christiangenco 13y agoPerhaps, then, there's much more room for services like this that are more established with a better UX at a higher price point.
- jcampbell1 13y agoIf you run a high margin SaaS business where much of the technology is open source, you are going to get cloned. Once you get cloned, you can be crushed by people much better at marketing and sales. If you stick to low margin / cost plus pricing, it effectively poisons the well for your competitors. The "poison the well" strategy has worked very well for Craigslist, and the Siracha hot sauce guy. I'd do everything patrick suggested, but stick to the cost plus pricing and not worry about extracting consumer surplus for the value you create. Once you have a $500/month enterprise plan that is popular, you are going to have competitors that offer more for $400/month, and VC's will be plowing them with money to hire salespeople to go after these $40,000 LTV customers. All the sudden, your product will no longer be the best solution for your own customers.
- ericd 13y agoIt doesn't poison the well as it stands, because someone could still take the OSS software, add a pretty layer with the business continuity guarantees and a bunch of salespeople, and charge $500/mo, and businesses would go with that one rather than that looks/acts like tarsnap. And that would be a rage inducing tragedy. To avoid that, I really hope Colin takes some/all of this advice.
- steveklabnik 13y agoTarnsap is not actually open source, so you could not do that.
- ericd 13y agoI meant to edit, you're right - I was corrected by someone else that it's only the thin client that's open source.
- steveklabnik 13y agoEven that is not. You may look at the source, but not redistribute it.
- jordanlev 13y agoCould anyone explain in more detail this tidbit from the article: > Did you want to backup your MySQL database? Did you backup the actual data files rather than a mysqldump? Sucks to be you... What are the dangers of backing up the data files instead of a mysqldump?
- patio11 13y agoBriefly: that's a great way to get a backup which is not actually an accurate and consistent representation of your database, unless everything about both your setup and the exact state of MySQL's memory and your write usage over the interval of your backup operation breaks in your favor. For more detail, see the part about "Copying Table Files" in the backup chapter of the manual.
- jordanlev 13y agoMakes sense -- thanks. I had a scary moment when I thought we were backing up our databases as data files... fortunately someone smarter than me set that up and in fact our backups are mysqldump's. Phew!
- chrismsnz 13y agoThey're big binary blobs. If the tables aren't locked while you're backing up, you're going to end up with inconsistent data. There are tools like xtrabackup that allow you to extract a live copy of the files, but sometimes take some hand loving to get working on another system. A good solution I found when wanting to copy those particular files instead of a dump/restore was to utilise the snapshotting features of LVM. e.g. 1. lock tables 2. take snapshot 3. unlock tables 4. mount snapshot and copy data from it Then the system continues to work and you have a consistent copy to back up.
- noelherrick 13y agoWhenever I read Patrick, I'm reminded I have bad thinking about how to price something. My idea of a fair price is = COST_TO_MAKE x 2 or something like that. In reality, it's VALUE / 2. Meaning, if a backup service provides $100 worth of value (reduction in risk), I should be ok with paying $50 for it. I shouldn't reject a backup service because I know that it costs $1 and they're charging me $100. Consumers are pretty price sensitive, and business that sell directly to consumers must cater to this. This is why Patrick is always advocating that you start a business that sells to other businesses. A business doesn't mind paying for something as long as the cost is below the value it gets them. Isn't that the basics of business? Buy low, sell high? Buy a service that provides $X value as long as the cost is < $X? I first can across this difference when I was a newbie DBA. We needed to upgrade our SQL Server cluster to the latest edition. I reviewed the differences between the various editions, and decided we could use some of the features in Enterprise vs. Standard. I did a little estimation, and showed how much time we could save between the DBAs and the developers if we got Enterprise. It was nowhere near the difference in the license costs, but I passed my findings onto the IT manager and the CEO. The CEO said buy Enterprise. I was stunned, and thought it was a bad decision. The reality was that we got so much value out of SQL Server, it didn't matter that we paid more than what was absolutely necessary. Developers have the consumer pricing mindset as well. They complain about IntelliJ, Xamarin, or Visual Studio licensing, or worry about SQL Server costs. Even if an IDE provides you with a 1% performance gain, I'm pretty sure that's worth it for most companies. Who cares if a language/framework/database/server is free if reduces your output by even 5%. That's just bad business. You can claim a license fee on your taxes, but you can't claim an opportunity cost. Consumer tight-fistedness for consumers can also be a bad thing. I live in a relatively cheap area of the US. When I travel, I'm shocked at the prices. In order to feel comfortable, I have to ask myself not Is this a good price? but Would I rather pay $15 for a pina colada or go without? Often the answer is, Yes, I'd rather sip a coconutty concoction on the beach in Hawaii than have an extra $15 when I get home.
- NoodleIncident 13y agoIt's not wrong to think of stuff in terms of whether it's worth the price, though. See: the Mr. Money Mustache school of thought, in which every dollar you don't spend is a dollar closer to not ever having to work again.
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- ChuckMcM 13y agoI'm curious if tarsnap has an API for enquiring on your balance and support for Stripe payments. Seems I could add a line to my crontab that would query it and send it more money if it needed it.
- mfincham 13y agoI have several objections to this, but one of the largest is that while the current Tarsnap site looks eminently trustable, the suggested replacement screams I WAS MADE FROM A TEMPLATE. THIS SITE IS A SCAM.
- ThinkBeat 13y agoThis is sort of like: "I am a business consultant, here is how other businesses do things. Do this" There is no problem in the way the service is priced. Its about the same way cloud services charge. How much are you going to spend on a big AWS installation, including bandwidth, storage and compute? You dont know? Well knowing that to a penny is hard. Well boo hoo. I was going to go on vacation and I dont wanna read email when I am on a 21 day sabbatical. What happens if there is not enough money on the credit card you are charging your other cloud services too? You get email, and if you go over they stop running your stuff.. Go over even more and eventually they will just delete your stuff. That is not just your backup that is your entire platform. I dont see the problem here. The use case is, I sign up for tarsnap, I put some money in the account and then I dont want to ever think about it again. Do you do think with other cloud platforms? Dont you want to keep an eye on what it costs? Wouldnt that be prudent? The same with tarsnap. You star using it, keep an eye on what it costs. Then after a while you should be able to create a projection of how much its going to cost. That to me seems like a good thing to do if you run a "serious" business.
- porker 13y agoI agree with patio11's post... except for his derogatory comments about PAYG pricing. As someone with a few side projects and start-ups, all of which are at the proof of concept/mildly profitable stage, it matters to me that there's a way to get started for less than $50/month. $50/month * 10 SaaS platforms = my profits. His approach makes sense if the aim is to extract the most value from businesses; but what about nurturing new companies?
- pbreit 13y agoI think Patrick is usually right on the money but I have at least 2 gripes with this post: 1) $50/month is WAY too much for the opening tier. Maybe $50/year. $50/month may sound OK to someone who already has a business generating meaningful revenue. But $50/month would be a show-stopper for most bootstrappers (which I imagine is a core audience). Especially when compared to something like Digital Ocean's $5/month. 2) The site design proposal looks pretty horrid. No doubt the current web site is also lousy, I think he could stick with something that still "speaks" to geeks. That "new" site design looks like one of these terrible templates which I think actually could send the wrong message.
- mnx 13y agoI don't want to sound like a douche, but what is good about tarsnap as it is? (besides the price)? Is the encryption or deduplication somehow unique? Or isn't the only unique element exactly what the author of this post proposes to eradicate?
- petemc_ 13y agoI wonder how long it will be before someone creates a 2048 interface to tarsnap.
- msteinert 13y ago> I trust us, but I trust Colin more, so I wish there was a simple “In case of emergency, get Colin on the phone and have him securely transfer a copy of the key files backed to me” option in case disaster strikes. If Colin has your private keys then he could be compelled to reveal the contents of your data to a third party. This seems to run counter to the design goals of the system. Otherwise I found the posting to be enlightening. I learned quite a bit from reading it!
- rglullis 13y agoSigh... why does everything needs to be focused on the "Enterprise", the "suits with the checks"? I want to get to this post-scarcity world everyone keeps talking about, but we will never get there if we treat every product as something that must extract "consumer surplus" and be "defensible from competition". I feel like we should strive to destroy the enterprise, not enable it. I am sure that Patrick's approach would be more profitable, but how many people would be put off by this "professional-oriented" position? Yeah, I'm the guy who would rather go through the trouble of installing/maintaining my own GitLab server than paying a dime to Github/Bitbucket. It doesn't make sense economically? I don't give a shit. I feel like there must be something in this life that I should be able to do by myself. I will give as much time needed to someone who needs help to install/setup Ubuntu on their laptops, but to hell with them if they ask for help to setup their printer on Windows or Mac. Also, I know that Colin gave the go-ahead to write this piece, but reading the thing it amazed me how it works only as a way to push Patrick's agenda, but none of Colin's. The template that it took only 20 minutes to put together? Put it on a git repo and make it public domain, let other people build upon it. Tell people that those who are genuinely focused on tarsnap success that they can contribute, and even educate other users. This piece works only to show that Patrick can tell people what they should do, but there is nothing Patrick has done to actively improve things.
- jason_tko 13y agoWhat better way to destroy the enterprise, as you put it, than taking their money. And it's less about 'catering to the enterprise', and more about doing business on your own terms. >>Yeah, I'm the guy who would rather go through the trouble of installing/maintaining my own GitLab server than paying a dime to Github/Bitbucket. Then please note you're not really suited to participate in a discussion about optimally pricing SaaS to businesses. It will be painful for you, and the people involved. >>it amazed me how it works only as a way to push Patrick's agenda, but none of Colin's. Patrick and Colin are friends. Patrick wrote this post to help a friend. Patrick's agenda is Colin's success. >>there is nothing Patrick has done to actively improve things Patrick has spent hours thinking about and distilling his thinking into a blog post, designed to help Colin. Patrick is regularly paid Large Sums of Money for his experience and capability in this exact, specific area. What should Patrick have done? Fly from Japan to where Colin lives, push him aside, and implement all the work he suggested, against Colin's will?
- jebblue 13y agoI use rsync, tar thrashes the disk when the majority of the files in the backup set don't change.
- deathanatos 13y ago> Even without compression and data duplication, very few people have a good understanding of how much data they have at any given time, because machines measure data in bytes but people measure data in abstractions. I have to beg to differ, as I know this value for where I work. Sure, don't know it to a byte, but I know enough digits * price per GiB/month = reasonable estimate of cost. (And I know the before and after compression.) Of course, his real point is: > different bytes have sharply different values associated with them This is true. However, I don't think that I should be charged by the value of my byte, ever. This is something I despise ISPs for, in that they forbid you to run servers, because what? those bytes have a different flavor? Same thing here: some bytes are more valuable that others, but I want to be charged by the level of service you're giving me per byte. If you're giving my really-valuable bytes and my not-so-valuable bytes the same service, I expect the same price. If there's a service difference, show me that, and show me the difference in cost for you to provide a different level of service. Of course, I think he gets this, because if you read he suggested tiers of service, they not only scale up the available storage, but also other things, like "Custom legal / compliance documentation". Different service -> different price.
- corford 13y agoA very close approximation to patio11's vision of what tarsnap should be already exists: http://www.rsync.net http://www.rsync.net. I use them with duplicity instead of tarsnap for exactly the reasons patio11 went in to. All the same benefits as tarsnap: de-dup, guaranteed privacy, OSS, headed by a bona fide geek (http://blog.kozubik.com/ http://blog.kozubik.com/), fair pricing. Plus: multi user sub accounts, 7 days of free server side snapshots of your entire backup space and geo redundancy. Plus business benefits: SAS 70 / PCI / SOX / HIPAA compliant, a company that's been going for over a decade and isn't reliant on one person or supplier etc.
- atmosx 13y agoCool, Patrick takes over, I stop using tarsnap. I am a minority, I get that and I'm fine with it, but that's the way I feel. Side-Note: I don't feel okay about the way this turned out for Colin. He is a member of our community, I'm reading his comments here, he is active. Everyone here, judging his business model, with some people being extremely harsh IMHO, feels like an on-line reality or something. I don't like it.
- jamesrom 13y agoWhile I do not disagree that some problems this article tries to solve are problems, I completely disagree with the way this article tries to solve them. Oh, and that redesign is way worse than the current design.
- hyp0 13y agoA simple solution is to build a service atop tarsnap - just as it builds atop AWS. The purpose of a small business isn't always to make money, or to provide the best possible service - it can be to create your own job, that you love, that is the perfect job for you. DHH talks about this. There's a Reader's Digest story about a guy fishing all day, and an entrepreur tells him he should hire people, increase prices, do marketing etc. Why? So he can retire, and spend all day fishing! But that's what he does now... That said, there's some good ideas about how to get money out of customers in the article, if that's your priority.
- asavi 13y ago> many users have hundreds of archives adding up to several terabytes, but pay less than $10/month. $0.25 / GB-month x 1000gb = $250 / 1TB-month
- pronoiac 13y agoDeduplication is a marvellous thing.
- dwwoelfel 13y agoFrom the tarsnap mailing list: I'm currently suffering from a deluge of emails (turns out that a blog post from Patrick McKenzie saying that I shouldn't have cut prices results in even more people signing up for Tarsnap than the price cut did, and most of my email comes from new users) http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00895.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00895.html
- DomreiRoam 13y agoI like the article but I think I like the current website. its austerity tells me that the value is in the engineering, that the product roadmap is not dictated by marketing people. I have a little distrust feeling when I land on a fancy website for a technical product. Something tells me that the company behind the product had been acquired and soon the product will cease to be good. Maybe we can redesign the site but not to much. :)
- saurik 13y agoAm I the only person who sees flat "$X/mo" prices and rapidly adjusts their trust in the provider downwards? It simply doesn't make any sense to me that my backup provider (or my bandwidth provider, or my transaction processor, or my Internet company) is providing me "unlimited anything" for any flat amount of money: the pricing is clearly not related to my cost, so either there is some massive flexible margin (which I should now be trying to strongly negotiate against) or their business is based on something I don't understand (or worse, that they don't understand), neither of which makes me want to trust them with anything seriously important. I want my provider to make money, but I also want to understand their business enough to know whether I'm a customer that is making them money or one that they are likely to want to drop in the near future. To be clear: I am not complaining about things being expensive (I like paying for things!), and agree that Tarsnap sounds like they aren't charging enough for the value that they could provide me, but I want their business model to be transparent (again, so I know they are making money off of me, so I know how to and whether to negotiate, and so I feel comfortable they won't shut down their service in a few months when they realize their customer's needs changed and suddenly they aren't making money anymore), and putting up the standard three price tiers hides all of that from me in a way that makes me nervous. It also isn't like most of the really basic services people buy for their businesses are priced like that already: I pay for power by the kilowatt, phone calls by the minute, and bandwidth (for my servers) by the gigabyte. Sometimes the base rate is thrown in (I get 5TB of transfer included with a virtual unmanaged server, for example, not that I'm using many of those anymore), but very few services I pay for have a fixed flat rate like this. I thereby am having a difficult time appreciating the argument that it would be easier to get a company to pay $100/mo than $5+/-$2 (although maybe the idea is that these numbers are both simply "too small to think much about", which would be an argument I could appreciate). Most services similar to Colin's are priced by usage, not in fixed tiers. To put this in perspective: I seriously have over fifty thousand dollars a month of service costs for my business that I pay based on some variable cost that Patrick is claiming I am somehow not going to be able to calculate and would keep me from using these providers. In addition to the things already mentioned, I pay by the hour for computers (EC2), by the message for e-mail delivery, by both the amount and number for credit card charges (the bulk of my costs), by the sheet of paper and drop of ink for printing, by the gallon or mile for travel, and again by the gigabyte for content delivery (which is somewhat different than the variable bandwidth I'm spending for my servers). Almost all of the costs of my business are paid for on some variable cost basis, and this is not strange :(. I can actually go further: my "right hand man" is paid by the hour, so a good percentage of my human resource costs are variable as well. This is somewhat strange, sure, but when I was a consultant I was amazed at just how many companies seemed to be entirely staffed by consultants... we'd go to the business and find out that the don't even seem to have employees anymore, they now just are contracting work out to three different consulting firms. Again: billing for time and materials doesn't seem to cause companies to go running for the hills, and at this point most of my friends are consultants, they all bill this way, and they all have so much work they are quite picky about their clients. The legal and accounting firms I work with are even more examples of this (and ones where I've spent immense amounts of money over the years). So, I just can't get behind this idea that pricing by the byte is somehow a fundamental flaw in Tarsnap's business. Maybe it should be 10x more expensive than it is: I can easily see the idea that the price of the service is not commensurate to the value. Maybe it should have some lower tiers with fixed pricing for entry-level usage: but then then top-level tier should be open-ended, "talk to a sales associate", and negotiated on the gigabyte (again: this is how most services I've seen that are targeting businesses are operated; they don't have unlimited tiers, they have limited tiers and then "pay by the X" at the high-end). Maybe it should also have a way to price differentiate different kinds of customers: SLA, support, and purchase orders, all make perfect sense to me. But I just don't understand why billing by the month should be considered better than billing by usage.
- jacquesm 13y agoA few years ago there was a post here that told Patrick how he should run his business. That was a classless act and it made me pretty mad. At least Patrick had the good grace to first enquire if a post like this would really be welcome and he proceeded with Colin's permission (see twitter status linked elsewhere in this thread). Now I hold both Colin and Patrick in high regard, so I'll try to be as balanced as I can in my response here. Patrick has a number of valid points but as far as I know Colin is well aware of almost every one of them. Just like other people shouldn't be telling Patrick how to run his business Patrick would do well to recognize that Colin and he have different drives and factors not easily digested into a blog post (however well intentioned) that equate to optimizing conversion or maximizing the number of dollars taken out. None of this could not have said in an email to Colin, and as such it serves as a way for Patrick to show publicly how good he is at fixing problems that are related to marketing and conversion, it does very little for Colin other than to make it very public that he's not running his business in a way that caters to most enterprise types. And that's possibly a good thing, depending on what your assumptions are on what motivates Colin. I'm going to send my own $0.02 on what Patrick wrote to Colin in an email rather than to post it here for all the world to see, Both Patrick and Colin are good men and I'd rather see stuff like this happen in private. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and even writing a solicited blog post is not always the best solution to the problem at hand.
- epaga 13y agoJust to chime in if colin is reading these, the 7-day deletion period is pretty much what is stopping me from joining up to have an extra backup in addition to dropbox. Fully agree with Patrick on that point.
- buro9 13y agoI would stop using the product if that was the pricing model. I originally used Tarsnap for a small amount of really important personal data. Data I already have encrypted, and backed up. But data I felt strongly about having a trusted off-site backup for. It's small data, my billing account shows me I spend around $0.20 per month on this. Without having been able to try Tarsnap, use it, come to trust it... I would never have had my business sign-up for it and I would continue with home-baked solutions for disaster recovery. For a startup, being able to translate that utility pricing model to the backups we initially made meant this was extremely affordable and increased with usage (and theoretically our revenue). I wouldn't have dropped $50 or $100 per month and so would have delayed, avoided and built our own system that was nothing as good as Tarsnap but fulfilled the basic requirement. Later I'd be in the realm of thinking Tarsnap was reasonably priced, but would I change everything? Probably, but only when it was overdue. The proposed pricing model introduces a big cliff to climb. I wouldn't climb that cliff until it was long overdue. It is precisely because the pricing scales with our use that I could try it personally, and for the startup, without fear of a surprise. Perhaps I'm no longer your market.
- jorangreef 13y agoAgreed. I would switch to Tarsnap and use it to backup several TB of data but the marginal price is still an order of magnitude too much. Tarsnap would be ideal if it were only a few cents more expensive than S3.
- buro9 13y agoApparently it's not the done thing (and will get downvoted) to state that I won't use a $50 per month service when my personal current fee and level of usage is $0.20 per month. A 250x price rise isn't going to keep me though. And my point was that it was the experience of the personal usage of Tarsnap that sold me on the business use. Because I knew it would start small and low cost, and scale with our needs just as a pure utility would. Somehow, pointing this out deserves down votes.
- atmosx 13y agoJust made a script that reads picodollars and displays OSX notifications[1]. I like desktop notifications but for me emails work too. Almost everything the OP asks can be easily automated because of tarsnap's simplicity, from the website to the client. [1] https://github.com/atmosx/argos https://github.com/atmosx/argos