OP's has a link typo in tarsnap cost eestimator.
OP, link seems to work fine for me.
Tarsnap is cozy
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#52This 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…
You could activate snapshots on your Sotrage Box and don't give your Borg user access to it.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#53Coziness comes at a cost. $250/TB/month is very expensive. Dropbox charges $5/TB/m, Hetzner $4 (traffic included).
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fair enough. Personally I use an ssh target with zfs file system with its own automatic snapshots. The restic snapshots don’t directly correspond to the zfs snapshots, but I can live with that.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#55I'm really surprised to hear that the slow restore times from tarsnap are still as big a problem now as they were a decade ago when I last used it. I absolutely loved the interface and the security model, and I was willing to pay at the (very) premium price point, but it was just too impractical trying to restore anything from it at the speeds I could achieve. (If I remember right, there was some problem with the design which meant normal latency between the client and the server tanked throughput to crazily low levels.)
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#56For the price, there better be some plan for this service to exist in 10/100 years. With a bus factor of 2, that gives me little confidence.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I readily admit I'm a nerd about this stuff, and this is primarily a hobby of mine. I am explicitly not 80/20'ing this because it's fun. [1] One use case: I don't like the idea of having any accounts at all which I log into without the aid of a password manager. That creates a bootstrapping problem - how am I supposed to log into Google Drive to get my Google Drive password? A prepaid keyfile-based model is one parti…
Google supports printable 2fa codes
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?sjid=3244...
print those and password, stick the printout in a fireproof safe
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#58As several said, Restic does the same for free (bring your own storage). Tarsnap makes no sense, it’s 50-100X more expensive than alternatives.
And Restic is good quality software.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#59The interface is nice but it is excruciatingly slow at restores. I had to switch to borg, which has an extremely similar feature set but performs much better (and you can bring your own hardware).
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#60The interface is nice but it is excruciatingly slow at restores. I had to switch to borg, which has an extremely similar feature set but performs much better (and you can bring your own hardware).
Seriously. If you are considering Tarsnap, or use it but have never tested a restore, don't hand wave this comment away.
You might be tempted to think: it's a popular service, it can't be that bad.
But, it really can be, and if you've not tried it yourself, you'll only find out when you need it. Which could be way too late.