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Tarsnap is cozy

til.andrew-quinn.me

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Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#11

Post by manbash »

amar0c wrote: post #8

It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays. Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS

Do they charge for actual bandwidth as well? Seems like it. From tarsnap.com:

> 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)

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#13

Post by pessimizer »

homebrewer wrote: post #9
dathinab wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc. 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…

A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap, you can use any of its numerous competitors that are also maintained by professionals, whose whole business is also running a backup service. Say rsync.net or borgbase, which are at least 10× cheaper than tarsnap last time I compared them, and can be used with restic or borg which are much faster at restoring even relatively small amounts data (forget…

> A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap

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.

https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#14

Post by muppetman »

I used tarsnap for years, but as my data got bigger and I really wanted to have multipe offsite backups with different providers, I moved to restic. I loved tarsnap - it's a great product. But restic feels very similar but you can backup to your local HD, a remote HD, or "the cloud" and everything is the same CLI commands.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#15

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

chevalier_1222 wrote: post #6

why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?

Tarsnap's model is an ideal fit for a very small subset of the data I'm interested in safeguarding for the future. https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/ goes into it in a lot more detail.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#16

Post by luizfelberti »

I also switched away from Tarsnap because I needed to restore my personal PDF collection of like 20GB once and my throughput was like 100Kb/s, maybe less. It has been a problem for at least a decade, with no fix in sight.

I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#17

Post by privatelypublic »

avian wrote: post #4

I've been using tarsnap for years and am in the process of migrating away from 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…

Sounds like it's just a worse Glacier setup then?

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 $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#19

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

xnx wrote: post #3

50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.

It depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up.

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.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#20

Post by ghostly_s »

amar0c wrote: post #8

It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays. Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS

Yeah that pricing is crazy for something without any of the security that comes with using a BigCo. I've bounced off it in the past as soon as I got to their cutesy pricing model but I just played with the calculator linked here to model my needs -- three thousand USD a year for 1Tb of cold storage??
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