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Tarsnap is cozy

til.andrew-quinn.me

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Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#31

Post by dividuum »

amluto wrote: post #27
privatelypublic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tarsnap has a nice security model, and it’s quite a challenge to convince any open-source tool to match it.

restic is basically identical and you can choose where you store your data.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#32

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

rafram wrote: post #29

OP's cost estimator tells me it would cost a cool $250 per month to keep a terabyte of data backed up in Tarsnap. The same amount costs me $8.25 per month with Backblaze. That's not very cozy!

OP here, thanks for using the cost estimator! [1] I'm glad you got some use out of it.

I use Backblaze B2 myself for most of my general purpose backup needs. It's actually $6/month, I believe.

Tarsnap fills but one niche in my overall system. It's a very important niche for which I haven't found any other providers who do anything similar (keyfiles, prepaid, borderline anonymous etc), but it's not where I store the vast majority of my stuff.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/tarsnap-calculator/

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#33

Post by muppetman »

ghostly_s wrote: post #21
muppetman wrote: post #14

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.

What provider(s) are you using?

I use borgbase (they support restic) - backblaze with their s3 backend, and my own servers. So server A will copy to server B and vis-versa every ~10 minutes snapshot for quick/easy restoration should it be necessary, then nightly backups to borgbase/backblaze.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#34

Post by Sesse__ »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #15
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.

If you're interested in safeguarding data for the future, then I don't think the model of “my backup immediately disappears once the account runs out of money” gives me anything resembling a cozy feeling at all.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#35

Post by LiamPowell »

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…

> Say rsync.net or borgbase

Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#36

Post by rafram »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #32
rafram wrote: post #29

OP's cost estimator tells me it would cost a cool $250 per month to keep a terabyte of data backed up in Tarsnap. The same amount costs me $8.25 per month with Backblaze. That's not very cozy!

OP here, thanks for using the cost estimator! [1] I'm glad you got some use out of it. I use Backblaze B2 myself for most of my general purpose backup needs. It's actually $6/month, I believe. Tarsnap fills but one niche in my overall system. It's a very important niche for which I haven't found any other providers who do anything similar (keyfiles, prepaid, borderline anonymous etc), but it's not where I store the v…

I just don't really understand what the niche is. If you have a tiny bit of data that you want to keep backed up and rarely access, you can encrypt it with any number of easy command-line or GUI tools and upload it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere else with a free tier. If it's securely encrypted, there's no reason to care that the storage provider knows who you are. Tarsnap definitely has nerd appeal, but I can't think of a real problem that it actually solves.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#37

Post by avian »

adipid wrote: post #30

This sounds cool, but the other comments here are concerning. I've been considring Hetzner's Storage Box, as it's cheap and I could use just about anything to backup my stuff – although I prefer restic. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/

Storage Box with Borg backup can be setup to work almost identically to tarsnap.

The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).

In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).

Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.

Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.

A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#38

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

kerblang wrote: post #28

gzip + ccrypt -> thumb drive Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies

I love thumb drives, but Tarsnap is cheaper than the expected 10 year lifetime of a fresh and well maintained thumb drive for the kind of data I hold in there by about a factor of 20 (50 cents vs $10).

It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#39

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Sesse__ wrote: post #34
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're interested in safeguarding data for the future, then I don't think the model of “my backup immediately disappears once the account runs out of money” gives me anything resembling a cozy feeling at all.

That's actually one of my favorite features. That should never happen under the limited circumstances I use it for. If something goes so wrong that my account actually runs out of money before I notice, then I far prefer the default to be "intruder alert, intruder alert, wipe everything". There's a reason it's marketed as backups for the truly paranoid.

Re: Tarsnap is cozy

#40

Post by amluto »

dividuum wrote: post #31
amluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tarsnap has a nice security model, and it’s quite a challenge to convince any open-source tool to match it.

restic is basically identical and you can choose where you store your data.

restic can supposedly be set up to prevent a corrupted / compromised client from destroying old data using S3 versioning policy, but this doesn’t appear to be a well-supported feature with clearly-described security properties.

Tarsnap, in contrast, has an explicit first-class ability to prevent a compromised client from damaging old backups.

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