Live data from Hacker News

Tarsnap outage postmortem

mail.tarsnap.com

61–70 of 338 posts

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What use is SLA? If a service goes down for too long, are you really going to hire a lawyer sue it over SLA or just... use another backup?

It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service. For example, my team has people across the world for HW bringup, so we can't allow our code hosting or CI to be down for more than a few hours. Of course, backups have different uptime requirements, but as for everything, it's a tradeoff between features, of which an SLA is one. Tarsnap's features are granularity of cost, reliability…

> It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service.

Meeeeh, my ISP cut of around 100+ fiber connections in my town and spend three weeks fixing it. My neighbor have business line, there's an SLA on those that among other things, require them if reestablish his connection within 3 - 5 hours. It took them over 500 hours, so that SLA is useless for anything but forcing compensations.

The problem is that the SLA should give an indication of available resources, but in reality it's mostly a contractual thing for most companies, they'll pay the "fine" or refund a customer if they fail to hit their SLA and that's about it. Tarsnap most likely have better availability than many midsize competitors simply because it's just one person who really cares about it. Doesn't help if he's hit by a bus though.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#62
post #59

Tarsnap is undoubtedly expensive, but it also donates to various efforts! Neglecting the pricing, does Tarsnap have any advantage over Restic? Restic also deduplicates, using little data.

The deduping in restic is just on the edge of acceptable for me, making me think I'd have trouble with a lot more data. Basically the one a month "prune" operation takes about 36h (to B2) . I feel I could be tuning something but also it works and I don't want to touch it.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#63
post #29

Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.

It's insane. Not sure how anyone can accept such a rip off pricing. Tarsnap : $0.25 / GB storage, $0.25 / GB bandwidth cost rsync.net : $0.015 / GB storage, no bandwidth cost s3 : $0.023 / GB storage, some complicated bandwidth pricing If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed?

If you are primarily cost-driven, you missed one:

Backblaze: $0.005 / GB storage, $0.01 / GB download.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#64
post #59

Tarsnap is undoubtedly expensive, but it also donates to various efforts! Neglecting the pricing, does Tarsnap have any advantage over Restic? Restic also deduplicates, using little data.

How do you compare the two, price-wise? With Restic, you have to provide your own storage.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#65
post #62
post #59

Tarsnap is undoubtedly expensive, but it also donates to various efforts! Neglecting the pricing, does Tarsnap have any advantage over Restic? Restic also deduplicates, using little data.

The deduping in restic is just on the edge of acceptable for me, making me think I'd have trouble with a lot more data. Basically the one a month "prune" operation takes about 36h (to B2) . I feel I could be tuning something but also it works and I don't want to touch it.

Curious how much you backup, which version of restic you're running and why you think the deduplication is borderline unacceptable. There were several major (orders of magnitudes) improvements made to pruning within the past ~1 year, that's why I'm interested.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#66
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the obvious question is "why would I use this instead of something else over S3" (ex. rclone), to which I think the answer is ease of use (don't need to deal with AWS yourself, encryption/deduplication/compression handled for you, nice interface), which isn't everything to everyone but is certainly useful.

Learning to use some backup tool that does same things sounds way better than paying 10 times more for the storage cost that lasts. There's also a service like rsync.net where you can just rsync to the destination and they do the versioning and so on for less than 10th of the cost of tarsnap.

Eh, cost/benefit; some people are backing up 100MB of documents and don't care, some people are backing up terabytes of media and have the time.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#67

Not to be that guy, but it’s unreadable either zoomed in or in reader mode either horizontal or landscape on iOS. Colin, could the website be updated to the 2010s? :P

It's off-the-shelf MHonArc[1]. If implementing a decent mailing list archive were a prerequisite to launching a business, no business would ever be launched.

[1]: https://www.mhonarc.org/

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#69
post #29

Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.

It's insane. Not sure how anyone can accept such a rip off pricing. Tarsnap : $0.25 / GB storage, $0.25 / GB bandwidth cost rsync.net : $0.015 / GB storage, no bandwidth cost s3 : $0.023 / GB storage, some complicated bandwidth pricing If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed?

How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that.

Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that.

That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, not of Tarsnap.

But I still firmly disagree with the "Colin's just exploiting the uninformed" angle.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service. For example, my team has people across the world for HW bringup, so we can't allow our code hosting or CI to be down for more than a few hours. Of course, backups have different uptime requirements, but as for everything, it's a tradeoff between features, of which an SLA is one. Tarsnap's features are granularity of cost, reliability…

Then SLO (service level objectives) should be enough.

huh, never heard of SLO before.
Post reply on HN