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Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

blobbackup.com

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Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#41

Post by mekster »

rsync wrote: post #15

We (rsync.net) will test this out immediately - we're always happy to see tools like this that support plain old SFTP. If, for any reason, you'd like a free test account, just email info@rsync.net. Thank you for building this!

Do you have any recommendations on backup tools?

I figured borg is stable and does the job but others, including restic have problems like memory usage concerns and I'm just a single person shop and don't have any huge assets to backup and already seeing restic/duplicacy choke consuming GBs of memory.

What are the tools that are performant and stable?

I'd like to at least use another implementation besides borg in case a bug corrupts the data.

Encryption, retention policies, incremental backup without periodical full backup and acceptable performance (that people don't fill GitHub issues with performance problems) are requirements and deduplication is a plus.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#42

Post by bimbashrestha »

undebuggable wrote: post #24

How are you dealing with low storage scenarios? e.g. HDD 256 GB, 50GB of free space available, total backup data for compressing and encrypting 100GB.

Well generally speaking, backups will use about 37-40% of the original size. BlobBackup uses variable length and fixed length block level dedupe and zstandard compression. So you can optimize by adjusting block sizes, changing compressing levels, etc to get things to fit on smaller storage.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#43

Post by bimbashrestha »

mekster wrote: post #38
aim4min wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this comparison between borg and restic, and it seems like most of these apply. ( https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/ ) seems like blogbackup and restic are very similar. Wish there were more docs though.

borg has been around for a while and I hear it's stable. They also have change logs that mention any corrupting bugs, which is getting quite rare for only on few occasions. I'm migrating from restic to borg. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html The downside of borg is that the target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3 and some other targets but there are online services that accept sftp. O…

Yeah the main difference between borg (and their GUI vorta) and a lot of the other options (BlobBackup included) is the non sftp storage support.

I would have used restic directly as a backend for BlobBackup had it not been for the awful prune operation. Downloads a ton of data everytime, prone to errors, and has to repack blobs. Compression would be nice too but they have nice dedupe so it would have been workable without.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#44

Post by bimbashrestha »

me_bx wrote: post #28

The solution looks interesting, good work. Website does not inspire trust as there is no mention at all about who the seller is. Terms of use, privacy policy are also relevant, especially in this context where software gets access to all of customer's data...

Yeah more info would be great.

First time software seller here so I'm a little slow on some things but rest assured, I'm gonna have a privacy policy soon. The EULA is there when you download the software.

BlobBackup doesn't store any user data anywhere other than the user's computer and their backup storage though (and this is encrypted).

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#45

Post by bimbashrestha »

zigzag312 wrote: post #22
bimbashrestha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's generally faster to backup [1], way faster to restore [1], backups use less space [1], has a native app for each OS and usability (subjective I know but give the two a shot yourself) is better imo. [1] Benchmark on open data set. https://blobbackup.com/10_gb_benchmark.php

How does it scale to larger datasets (TBs of data)? For example, Duplicati is much slower with large datasets compared to small/medium datasets, because of it's database. Once, the database grows too large (eg. multiple GBs), it becomes too slow to be usable. Which version of Duplicati was used in this benchmark?

Operations are streaming and there is no local database. So memory consumption and config data storage are very tiny by design.

The largest backup a user has reported using this with has been 5 tb and it ran without a hitch.

I'm pretty sure it was the latest duplicati for the benchmark. Maybe the second latest. I forget.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#46

Post by bimbashrestha »

rkagerer wrote: post #17

On Windows does it use VSS to snapshot the volume and backup open (locked) files?

That's a heavily requested feature that's in the works. I was focusing on platform independent features in the beginning but this will come eventually.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#47

Post by bimbashrestha »

ValentineC wrote: post #39
bimbashrestha wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe I'm confused about your question haha. Do you simply mean is it possible to restore backups to local? Or a reverse backup operation from cloud to local?

Not the parent, but if you're ever looking for features to implement: I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and one reason I've been unhappy with any sort of cloud backup solution is that they're usually too slow for laptops, unless I leave them awake while I'm sleeping. An ideal backup solution for me would be laptop > NAS (or desktop) > cloud. A backup over the local network should be magnitudes faster,…

Well you could configure BlobBackup to do something kinda like that.

I know some users run backups to their NAS every 6 hours and then run a weekly backup of their NAS to the cloud using whatever NAS software it came with (alternatively you could sync it through your laptop).

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#49

Post by Terretta »

mekster wrote: post #38
aim4min wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this comparison between borg and restic, and it seems like most of these apply. ( https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/ ) seems like blogbackup and restic are very similar. Wish there were more docs though.

borg has been around for a while and I hear it's stable. They also have change logs that mention any corrupting bugs, which is getting quite rare for only on few occasions. I'm migrating from restic to borg. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html The downside of borg is that the target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3 and some other targets but there are online services that accept sftp. O…

> target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3...

This used to be (as in, from 2008 to 2018) difficult, one of my past companies made a good deal of money by offering an sftp gateway to S3. But AWS continues to do a great job commoditizing their complements, and tackled SFTP back in 2018 when they launched...

“... AWS Transfer for SFTP, a fully-managed, highly-available SFTP service. You simply create a server, set up user accounts, and associate the server with one or more Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. You have fine-grained control over user identity, permissions, and keys. You can create users within Transfer for SFTP, or you can make use of an existing identity provider. You can also use IAM policies to control the level of access granted to each user. You can also make use of your existing DNS name and SSH public keys, making it easy for you to migrate to Transfer for SFTP. Your customers and your partners will continue to connect and to make transfers as usual, with no changes to their existing workflows.”

“You have full access to the underlying S3 buckets and you can make use of many different S3 features including lifecycle policies, multiple storage classes, several options for server-side encryption, versioning, and so forth.”

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-sftp-f...

Because this did not exist for a decade, it seems most folks don’t know it exists today.

Re: Show HN: Minimalist App for Backups to Any Storage

#50

Post by mekster »

Terretta wrote: post #49
mekster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

borg has been around for a while and I hear it's stable. They also have change logs that mention any corrupting bugs, which is getting quite rare for only on few occasions. I'm migrating from restic to borg. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changes.html The downside of borg is that the target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3 and some other targets but there are online services that accept sftp. O…

> target is only sftp and not directly to any of S3... This used to be (as in, from 2008 to 2018) difficult, one of my past companies made a good deal of money by offering an sftp gateway to S3. But AWS continues to do a great job commoditizing their complements, and tackled SFTP back in 2018 when they launched... “ ... AWS Transfer for SFTP, a fully-managed, highly-available SFTP service. You simply create a server,…

Maybe you don't care if you're a larger company but the pricing is insanely higher than competitors.

Just to turn SFTP on at AWS, you need to pay $0.3/h ($216/mo) and it even costs to upload not just for download at $0.04/GB. If you upload 100GB/day, that's also about $120/mo and if you're storing about 1TB you're paying like $350/mo for such little storage you get.

Who wants to pay for upload? At this point, why don't you just run EBS backed EC2 yourself?

With that kind of pricing, you'd get like 15TB of space at rsync.net and it doesn't leech users for bandwidth and on every parameters as AWS does. (If you use the borg discount, you get 40TB+ at $0.008/GB!)

And at what benefit does it bring for the price difference? I see no point in using it. Maybe people don't care to mention than not knowing it.

https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing/

https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

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