through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar
it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution
if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you
but if you need to backup you photo
I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.
Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.
If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.
Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.
The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.
Things that are not cozy:
1) There's no way to monitor your monthly spend per host/credit left on the account/etc. apart of logging into your account in a browser and manually keeping a spreadsheet. There's no web API to do it. You get an email warning when you have about 7 days of credit left. That's it.
2) Nothing is "a precious few megabytes" anymore. What seems like a negligible monthly spend at first can quickly grow up on you and soon you're spending highly non-trivial amounts. Which you might not notice due to 1) unless you are diligent in your accounting.
3) tarsnap restores are slow. Really really slow. A full restore can take days if you have non-trivial amounts of data (and make sure you have enough credit in your account to pay for that server-to-client bandwidth!) My understanding is that throughput is directly related to your latency to the AWS datacenter where tarsnap is hosted. Outside of north America you can be looking at nearly dial-up speeds even on a gigabit link.
Again, a problem that can surprise you at the most inconvenient time. Incremental backups in a daily cronjob tend to transfer very small amounts of data, so you won't notice the slowness until you try to do a full restore. And you generally don't test that very often because you pay for server-to-client transfers.
There are some workarounds for 3) and there's a FAQ about it, but look at the mailing list and you'll see that it's something that surprises people again and again.
Amazon has Pre-Pay in a semi-open beta.
CloudFront has 1TB/month free- knocking a large chunk of a restore's cost. (Note- you should have either encrypted your stuff yourself and/or S3 authorization/access control still works over CF)
At what seems to be <$2/mo per TB ($1/TB glacier Deep archive + 9cent/gb for metadata on S3 frequent access), no other solution comes close. The big issue is the lump cost of a restore. Which, is quickly worn down by being > $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.
Tarsnap, in contrast, has an explicit first-class ability to prevent a compromised client from damaging old backups.
It’s pretty simple to enable versioning and object lock on your S3 bucket, but it is another step if you’re using restic. Sure, if you just want all of that taken care of for you, you can use tarsnap, but you’re paying a 5x+ premium for it.
The other nice thing about restic is that since it’s just the client-side interface, it allows others to provide managed storage. Borgbase.com is a storage backend that is supported by Restic that supports append-only backups, and is cheaper than tarsnap.
restic, and my own computers and storage, and the occasional rented device (VPS or similar, typically)
i find that the hassle of setting up my stuff is still preferable than having to worry about managing bills, subscriptions, and third parties just changing their policies
Restic + rclone is a very nice combo. Works really well.
Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.
> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage: Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month) Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)
I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?
Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies
It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.
I use Backblaze B2 myself for most of my general purpose backup needs. It's actually $6/month, I believe.
Tarsnap fills but one niche in my overall system. It's a very important niche for which I haven't found any other providers who do anything similar (keyfiles, prepaid, borderline anonymous etc), but it's not where I store the vast majority of my stuff.
One use case: I don't like the idea of having any accounts at all which I log into without the aid of a password manager. That creates a bootstrapping problem - how am I supposed to log into Google Drive to get my Google Drive password? A prepaid keyfile-based model is one particularly robust way of solving this. You stick your e.g. 100 kB password database in there, print out and shred the keyfile, stick the printout in a fireproof safe, and be virtually certain that whatever you put in Tarsnap has been untouched however many years you come back to it later. Print it on archival paper with some silica gel packets and it might survive for millennia in your weird subterranean vampire family castle.
"The business won't survive that long." I'm not so sure. Its ongoing costs appear minimal, and it generates eye watering amounts of float. $5 paid today is >$200 fifty years from now when compounded at 8% real interest. That very fact makes it much more likely that Tarsnap actually will survive for those 50 years, which should make us more likely to trust it, which... You see where this is going. This is one of those things where aggressively pricing too close to the bare metal costs might actually be a bad thing to a very important subset of users. One might even make the argument that, if the margins are as good as I'm supposing they are, then depending on the goals of the founder, Tarsnap is more likely to outlive S3 than S3 Tarsnap.
But again: Primarily a hobby.
The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).
In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).
Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.
Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.
A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)
I'm backing up about 8TiB of data nightly using BorgBackup[0] + InterServer[1] and pay $240/yr.
This gives me differential encrypted rotating backups that are 100% mine and do not lock me into any specific storage vendor.
snowe2010•4h ago
margalabargala•3h ago
bccdee•2h ago
Storing one terabyte of data in tarsnap costs $250 per month.