I suppose I should have known that this would end up at the top of Hacker News...
Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#22This line: I would have sent out an email to the mailing lists earlier; but since at each point I thought I was "one change away" from fixing the problems, I kept on delaying said email until it was clear that the problems were finally fixed" is such a common situation for most people, but I tend to see it with engineers especially. I find I struggle with it an incredible amount. In some ways, I guess it seems health…
I came here to write this comment essentially. Very much of the time I feel, "If I knew what the problem[s] [was|were] it'd be solved by now!" That's not exactly true of course but of course diagnosis is a large part of the total solution. This type of an answer that Colin gave above does not exactly win friends and influence people in most situations where you're part of a team or hierarchy. Can anyone share what th…
Just to be clear, when Tarsnap users wrote to me I told them everything I could. The "I think it will be fixed soon" delay in sending out an email to the lists affected only people who didn't notice or noticed but didn't ask about the issue.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#23Sorry if this is offtopic, but can anybody explain the value proposition of tarsnap to me? It seems like a nice service and all, but the pricing is an order of magnitude more expensive than S3. If you are storing a few GB, this might not matter ("over half of Tarsnap users spend under $1 per month on storing their backups"), but if you have that little data, why not just dump it on a free Dropbox/Gdrive/etc account?…
Because tarsnap is cheap, incredibly well documented, open source, and run by an awesome guy. It's an all around win-win.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#24Sorry if this is offtopic, but can anybody explain the value proposition of tarsnap to me? It seems like a nice service and all, but the pricing is an order of magnitude more expensive than S3. If you are storing a few GB, this might not matter ("over half of Tarsnap users spend under $1 per month on storing their backups"), but if you have that little data, why not just dump it on a free Dropbox/Gdrive/etc account?…
Because tarsnap is cheap, incredibly well documented, open source, and run by an awesome guy. It's an all around win-win.
Rsync.net is even cheaper, has no requirement for a custom client, and arguably are more dependable because they're not just reselling S3
Edit: not to mention they offer actual support not just "contact the author" email link as a last resort.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way to think about your fear is, shouldn't that just be a tarsnap feature? Add some metadata for a machine that tarsnap should expect a once a day/week/month backup from this machine, and if it doesn't get one, to send you an email?
whistles Until the day when Colin considers it in-scope for Tarsnap, I recommend Deadman's Snitch for this purpose. I literally spend more on DMS to monitor Tarsnap than I spend on Tarsnap. No, I don't think that is just, either.
For those interested in patio11's thoughts on how he would run tarsnap
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
And the discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#26For those that want to run a similar service using their own systems, I found that Attic [1] is a great open source backup tool that works in a very similar way, including deduplication and compression.
I backup some VPS servers to my NAS at home using attic over an SSH tunnel. Incremental backups are quite small and it's easy to automate with a simple cron job.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because tarsnap is cheap, incredibly well documented, open source, and run by an awesome guy. It's an all around win-win.
Rsync.net is even cheaper, has no requirement for a custom client, and arguably are more dependable because they're not just reselling S3 Edit: not to mention they offer actual support not just "contact the author" email link as a last resort.
I contacted the author today. He responded to me in 30 seconds.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#28I suppose I should have known that this would end up at the top of Hacker News...
It's the picodollars - tarsnap was the second business I fell in love with on HN (the late Kiko was #1) purely because of the awesome vibe I felt emanating from your enterprise (which I'm assuming is a reflection on you as well).
Years later, you've also become a cause celebre for holding true to a clear business and lifestyle vision (again, perceived at distance), in spite of the recommendations and 'support' provided by Patrick and others, including myself. Keep being true, and I suspect the community will keep learning from you Colin.
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#29Sorry if this is offtopic, but can anybody explain the value proposition of tarsnap to me? It seems like a nice service and all, but the pricing is an order of magnitude more expensive than S3. If you are storing a few GB, this might not matter ("over half of Tarsnap users spend under $1 per month on storing their backups"), but if you have that little data, why not just dump it on a free Dropbox/Gdrive/etc account?…
Because tarsnap is cheap, incredibly well documented, open source, and run by an awesome guy. It's an all around win-win.
But its not cheap, which was my point. 100GB of storage costs:
$300/year at tarsnap
$36/year at S3
Re: Tarsnap performance issues in late March, most of April
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
whistles Until the day when Colin considers it in-scope for Tarsnap, I recommend Deadman's Snitch for this purpose. I literally spend more on DMS to monitor Tarsnap than I spend on Tarsnap. No, I don't think that is just, either.
For those interested in patio11's thoughts on how he would run tarsnap http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ And the discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953
Did Colin ever reply to that? I've always wondered what his response was.