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Tarsnap outage postmortem

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Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#311

Post by vntok »

nixpulvis wrote: post #178
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, whose data isn't "super important"?. All my data is super important. Even the crap I just throw on my Google drive. I want to keep it. What is this mythical unimportant data that people still want to back up?

I really used to enjoy formatting my machines about every 6 months. Well I used to until macOS kinda went off the rails a bit. Now it’s mostly an exercise in running my arch script for my thinkpad. Being stuck between operating systems is kinda a mess though, makes backup and file sync in general really hard. But everyone’s gotta have their own cloud, right?! Why can’t I just put a cloud under my bed and forget about…

> Why can’t I just put a cloud under my bed and forget about it?

Just buy a Synology NAS. Keep default settings, set up a few user accounts, tweak a few things here and there, enable encryption, install Active Backup on all your devices, done.

There are many cheaper/more open options for self-owned NAS storage, but contrary to a Synology they're definitely far and away from "and forget about it".

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#312

Post by pkx166h_ »

cperciva wrote: post #246
koolba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure his brother works on tarsnap too. They should take separate buses to ______.

Pretty sure his brother works on tarsnap too. Yes, I hired him in 2015 IIRC. If you look at tarsnap's GitHub you'll see a lot of commits from gperciva.

Oh! Do say Hi to Graham for me.

He mentored me so that I was able to contribute and eventually help maintain and manage LilyPond's Documentation and Patch Testing in a meaningful and rewarding way - all without any programming experience.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#313

Post by mherrmann »

It sounds like most of the 26h downtime was spent restoring backups. Incidentally, this is exactly the reason why Tarsnap is unusable for me for production environments. Backup restoration (as a user) is excruciatingly slow. When my systems are offline, I have no patience to wait for hours for my backup service. Maybe things are better now; Last I tried was a few years ago when Tarsnap took on the order of magnitude of one hour to restore a backup of a few GBs.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#314

Post by ivoras »

viscousviolin wrote: post #121

Unrelated to the outage, but I'm curious nonetheless: would it be possible to hook up Tarsnap's encryption software to a Dropbox folder? I'm not sure if it even makes sense to use Tarsnap for this, but I'd love to have an easy setup that allows me to use Dropbox's servers but only let them see encrypted data so they can't snoop.

Doesn't plain old Duplicity (https://duplicity.us/) do that already? (except for de-duplication)

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#315

Post by Ellentonnq »

rsync wrote: post #248
deathanatos wrote: post #238

> Following my ill-defined "Tarsnap doesn't have an SLA but I'll give people credits for outages when it seems fair" policy, on 2023-07-13 (after some dust settled and I caught up on some sleep) I credited everyone's Tarsnap accounts with 50% of a month's storage costs. This speaks volumes to me about what kind of person Percival is; that credit would appear to be generously on the "make customer whole" side of the f…

"Thanks for being a beacon of light in the dark." That's well put. It makes me very happy to live in a world where tarsnap exists and is priced in picodollars.

[dead]

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#316

Post by idlewords »

tptacek wrote: post #195
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?

Yes. That's the thing about Tarsnap, a service with a TikZ diagram on its front page, built around a Unix utility, that meters in picodollars. It's meant to bilk money from uninformed mom-and-pop backup users.

I tried Tarsnap briefly once and was charged billions of picodollars. It definitely preys on the ignorant.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#317

Post by Aachen »

tinco wrote: post #155
patrec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about tarsnap is absurd. It's basically the world's most absurd backup service (insanely expensive, poor UX, bus factor of ~1, restoring moderate amounts of data appears to take days (!)[1]), brought about by an absurdly bad allocation of human capital (it's run by a double Putnam challenge winner, with several other impressive accomplishments), and as such, absurdly beloved by HN. [1] In case of an emerge…

If tarsnap has even a modicum of popularity, thanks to these prices it would be bringing in bank. If he's making bank, that means he's providing value (even if it's just to "uninformed"). And it seems this system mostly runs itself, so it's a side gig. It's probably a far more effective allocation than many other possible allocations of human capital. How many of the world's best and brightest are doing all sorts of…

> If he's making bank, that means he's providing value

I don't find that that logically follows from making bank. Not everyone who makes bank is a positive influence.

Tarsnap does provide value, even if I think it's less than its cost: I'm just commenting on the general case that making money would mean you're providing good value

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#318

Post by Aachen »

prmoustache wrote: post #111
Aeolun wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t adjust to my screen size. So in portrait mode I have sentences with 80 characters per line that are 5 points wide. That’s barely possible to read on a high dpi screen, but fairly uncomfortable.

I understand some websites are doing lots of funky stuff, but at this point the issue is on your particular client if it cannot zoom bare text correctly and smoothly. Any decent client should be able to allow you to zoom it so that you can maximize those 80 character column to the width of your phone screen in protrait mode regardless of font size and dpi.

Try it if you don't have a perfect 100% vision (20/20 this is called in USA I think?) and have a phone that fits in a normal pocket

Optimal reading width for speed/comprehension is also fewer than 80 characters afaik. I think different sources I read years ago were undecided whether it's closer to 60- or 70-character lines. Either way, rescaling when there is no ASCII art or position-dependent characters seems rather basic and 

 disallows that

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#319

Post by hollerith »

prmoustache wrote: post #111
Aeolun wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t adjust to my screen size. So in portrait mode I have sentences with 80 characters per line that are 5 points wide. That’s barely possible to read on a high dpi screen, but fairly uncomfortable.

I understand some websites are doing lots of funky stuff, but at this point the issue is on your particular client if it cannot zoom bare text correctly and smoothly. Any decent client should be able to allow you to zoom it so that you can maximize those 80 character column to the width of your phone screen in protrait mode regardless of font size and dpi.

What about us poor slobs whose vision is less than perfect where the 80-character line is too small even when it takes up the entire width of the display? The way zooming is implemented in the mobile browsers, we must horizontally scroll back and forth for every line we read.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#320

Post by ilyt »

catiopatio wrote: post #226
ilyt wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How tarsnap keeps backups readonly ? Just having service being a barrier is not enough

It supports distinct authentication keys with read, write, and/or delete permissions for the same data protected by a given encryption key. Those restrictions are enforced by the service.

So one bug and it is gone.

Thought it used readonly features of S3/Glacier or something..

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