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Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

tarsnap.com

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Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#11

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Osmium wrote: post #4
cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Always wanted to try Tarsnap for personal use, but I can only budget if the cost was comparable to Dropbox/Microsoft OneDrive/Google Drive/iCloud/Amazon Drive which are all ~$10/TB/mo, but instead Tarsnap seems about an order of magnitude more expensive? Or is the product just not aimed at me? I currently use Arq[1] for backups (which has its own encryption[2] with a user choice of cloud backend), but Tarsnap has suc…

Tarsnap stores in S3, which is the primary cost driver. For the extra expense, you get multi-region durability up to I think it's six nines.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#12

Post by no_protocol »

I see some comments here from people wondering why anyone would use this or searching for use cases. I'll share mine.

I use tarsnap to keep daily backups of a web server with a handful of sites. I send over their content, configuration, and database backups. This isn't $$$-critical stuff so I just make a once-daily database backup and I'm fine with that. Every few months I verify one of the backups to make sure everything is still working, but it is extremely hands-off. I just don't have to think about it.

It is currently costing me about 3 cents per day. I could probably reduce that a bit with some pruning. It was 2 cents per day for a while.

Here is my most recent billing statement:

  2016-01-26 Balance                   43.152827492555316729
    Client->Server Bandwidth   8.2MB    0.002069643750000000
    Server->Client Bandwidth  41.2kB    0.000010296000000000
    Daily storage             3.35GB    0.027041509164110040
  2016-01-27 Balance                   43.123706043641206689
So far I have used a total of $7 of my $50 deposit. Let's hope Colin keeps the service running at least until I've worked through that. Might be a few more years, though. Here are my statistics:

  $ tarsnap --list-archives | wc -l
  496
  $ tarsnap --print-stats --humanize-numbers
                                         Total size  Compressed size
  All archives                               200 GB            86 GB
    (unique data)                            8.4 GB           3.3 GB
It appears I have been using it for about 496 days. I can access any specific day's snapshot and download it if I need. The 3.3GB here is the same as the 3.3GB for daily storage on my billing statement. I'm guessing that is also very close to the total amount of Client->Server traffic I have generated in my account's lifetime. Probably within a few percent? Not sure if I can quickly verify though.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#13

Post by Gracana »

nodesocket wrote: post #8

Colin is probably one of the best minds in encryption that I know of. He wrote Scrypt[1] as well. My gripe has always been that while Tarsnap is a product that is clearly built for developers, it does not have to look and feel like the 90's and use obscure and non-intuitive billing (picodollar). The web interface and landing site need some designer/UX love for sure, but at the same time I think Colin is happy and sat…

I like that it works like tar and that the website works perfectly in lynx, which are two things that make my life easier when I'm dealing with a catastrophe.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#14

Post by nodesocket »

cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Colin,

Any interest or thoughts about adding Google Cloud Storage as an option vs AWS S3?

S3 (us-east-1) runs $0.023 per GB. Google Cloud Storage in a single region runs slightly less at $0.02 per GB.

Howerver, bandwidth may be the biggest cost factor for you not storage.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#15

Post by cperciva »

Gracana wrote: post #13
nodesocket wrote: post #8

Colin is probably one of the best minds in encryption that I know of. He wrote Scrypt[1] as well. My gripe has always been that while Tarsnap is a product that is clearly built for developers, it does not have to look and feel like the 90's and use obscure and non-intuitive billing (picodollar). The web interface and landing site need some designer/UX love for sure, but at the same time I think Colin is happy and sat…

I like that it works like tar and that the website works perfectly in lynx, which are two things that make my life easier when I'm dealing with a catastrophe.

Funny story about lynx: We were recently making some fixes to improve the website on mobile devices and the question came up "how should the site behave if the screen is too narrow to keep the navigation on the left side of the site?"

My immediate reply: "You see how the site behaves in lynx? It should behave like that."

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#16

Post by nodesocket »

no_protocol wrote: post #12

I see some comments here from people wondering why anyone would use this or searching for use cases. I'll share mine. I use tarsnap to keep daily backups of a web server with a handful of sites. I send over their content, configuration, and database backups. This isn't $$$-critical stuff so I just make a once-daily database backup and I'm fine with that. Every few months I verify one of the backups to make sure every…

2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter? We are talking about less than a Starbucks for a full month of backups. Sorry, but developers who literally optimize cents over their time and effort is a pet peeve of mine.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#17

Post by cperciva »

nodesocket wrote: post #14
cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Colin, Any interest or thoughts about adding Google Cloud Storage as an option vs AWS S3? S3 (us-east-1) runs $0.023 per GB. Google Cloud Storage in a single region runs slightly less at $0.02 per GB. Howerver, bandwidth may be the biggest cost factor for you not storage.

The price difference between S3 and Google Cloud Storage isn't enough to make a meaningful difference, particularly since I'd need to set up server code in Google Cloud to manage it.

Bandwidth isn't a huge cost; but the server which keeps track of where all the bits are in S3 and shuffles them around is surprisingly expensive.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#19

Post by no_protocol »

nodesocket wrote: post #16
no_protocol wrote: post #12

I see some comments here from people wondering why anyone would use this or searching for use cases. I'll share mine. I use tarsnap to keep daily backups of a web server with a handful of sites. I send over their content, configuration, and database backups. This isn't $$$-critical stuff so I just make a once-daily database backup and I'm fine with that. Every few months I verify one of the backups to make sure every…

2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter? We are talking about less than a Starbucks for a full month of backups. Sorry, but developers who literally optimize cents over their time and effort is a pet peeve of mine.

Of course not. I'm mainly trying to show that it is incredibly cost-effective for this particular use case.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#20

Post by cperciva »

nodesocket wrote: post #16
no_protocol wrote: post #12

I see some comments here from people wondering why anyone would use this or searching for use cases. I'll share mine. I use tarsnap to keep daily backups of a web server with a handful of sites. I send over their content, configuration, and database backups. This isn't $$$-critical stuff so I just make a once-daily database backup and I'm fine with that. Every few months I verify one of the backups to make sure every…

2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter? We are talking about less than a Starbucks for a full month of backups. Sorry, but developers who literally optimize cents over their time and effort is a pet peeve of mine.

2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter?

It doesn't matter right now, but if you're building a company which you hope to scale up, it's good to have costs which won't get too big when said scaling happens -- because when your company explodes overnight, you're going to be too busy keeping everything else running to spend time reworking your backup strategy.

(Also: If you don't have backups now because you're "not big enough to have data worth protecting", you're going to be too busy to start doing backups when you suddenly do have data worth protecting.)

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