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Tarsnap outage postmortem

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Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#31

Post by RockRobotRock »

mekster wrote: post #29
RockRobotRock wrote: post #13

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?

in that case I'm curious about all the downvotes for asking a reasonable question

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#32

Post by crossroadsguy »

stigz wrote: post #9
cperciva wrote: post #3

blinks Ok, I really wasn't expecting this to land at the top of HN. I'd love to stick around to answer any questions people have, but it's 10PM and my toddler decided to go to bed at 5PM... so if I'm lucky I can get about 4 hours of sleep before she decides that it's time to get up. I'll check in and answer questions in the morning.

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

You really shouldn’t if that’s a major concern for you and that is a valid concern. For the same reason I’ll never use PurelyMail otherwise it’s perfect.

I know you didn’t ask me — but I don’t think Colin can answer differently other than saying that he is training a family member or friend to take over if needed.

Here’s more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 this is also linked there http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html

Very old threads but I am not sure much has changed there https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html

Why would you use it instead of restic? Well, for pricing in pico dollars ;-)

and for it has a functional GUI with tiny system footprint and that there really aren’t many such solutions out there.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#33

Post by mekster »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24
stigz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service is a layer on top of S3 if that helps answer things. https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#is-tarsnap-reliable

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.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#34

Post by crossroadsguy »

IntelMiner wrote: post #27
stigz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

I'm curious how the prices shake out against services like Wasabi, since it's just dumping to an AWS S3 bucket Wasabi does $7/TB with no ingress/egress fees. My NAS is set up to rclone to it about once a day and I've yet to have any problems

I haven’t checked the pricing in a long time but you can use Tarsnap also if you have to backup only 7.3kb (okay I might ne exaggerating here but you get the drift) and pay for only that much. You can’t do that with Wasabi et al.

Also it’s really simple and does what it says it does, nothing more, nothing less. In today’s everything convoluted and bloated world this is a luxury imho. The GUI app is also quite good and functional. Support is prompt (that is if you need it).

You don’t have to worry about file being deleted just because your machine didn’t connect or backup for some time even if you keep paying (hello Backblaze) etc. I mean there’s no circus, melodrama , and cliffhangers involved.

I personally would never use it backup my entire laptop, due to price alone. But I have a subset of VVI files and Tarsnap is one of more than one backups for those files. So for that use-case Tarsnap is perfect for me, so far.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#35

Post by pritambarhate »

mekster wrote: post #29
RockRobotRock wrote: post #13

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?

There is also cost development and ongoing support. You haven't factored that in your 10 times the storage cost calculation.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#36

Post by baz00 »

zokier wrote: post #14

Based on the description it sounds like it should be relatively easy to test this recovery process on a regular basis, to catch any lingering bugs and evaluate the recovery time. As they say, the only backups are the ones you have tested.

As someone who just discovered my DR process does not work by testing it, 100% this. The only plan that is likely to work is a repeatable tested one.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#37

Post by crossroadsguy »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #31
mekster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

in that case I'm curious about all the downvotes for asking a reasonable question

Well while I use Tarsnap for a very small amount of data (due to pricing) and I quite like Tarsnap for my use-case scenario, your question might have been downvoted due to two reasons:

- your comment was a very valid question but rather quip-like, offhanded, seemed off etc etc. I mean something like that…

- Tarsnap is an hn darling

If I have to pick one I think it’s the latter :)

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#38

Post by abofh »

throwaway290 wrote: post #28
stigz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

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?

Not even then - most SLAs say that if it's breached, you pay less. Not that you get money back

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#39

Post by AceJohnny2 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #28
stigz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

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 of storage, and encryption, but not 99.999% uptime.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#40

Post by mekster »

pritambarhate wrote: post #35
mekster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is also cost development and ongoing support. You haven't factored that in your 10 times the storage cost calculation.

Sounds like a very poor excuse when competitors are way cheaper.
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