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What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

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Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#61

Post by bogwog »

rcxdude wrote: post #26
wofo wrote: post #13

Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.

I would characterise rsync.net as aiming at a similar market segment. Both of them have a big "by geeks, for geeks" vibe (rsync.net even has a page designed to be sent to your boss if you're recommending it at work), in fact in some ways rsync.net is even more barebones: they don't even provide their own backup utility, it's basically just an SSH login to a ZFS volume. But it is a lot cheaper, it has some unique feat…

rsync.net is more expensive than something like backblaze though, which makes me wonder why someone would use it other than for the geek factor.

The OP alluded to tarsnap being the best, but didn't really explain why that is. Rsync too sounds like it'd be fun to use, but it's 3x the price of backblaze b2 and has a minimum order size of ~$10/month

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#62

Post by 6581 »

rcxdude wrote: post #26
wofo wrote: post #13

Interesting timing... A few weeks ago I evaluated using tarsnap for my business and ended up going for borg + rsync.net, for some of the reasons pointed out in the post. It seemed like the more "professional" option (the website was clearer and the service didn't require me to top-up at irregular intervals). I guess I'm not the intended audience of tarsnap.

I would characterise rsync.net as aiming at a similar market segment. Both of them have a big "by geeks, for geeks" vibe (rsync.net even has a page designed to be sent to your boss if you're recommending it at work), in fact in some ways rsync.net is even more barebones: they don't even provide their own backup utility, it's basically just an SSH login to a ZFS volume. But it is a lot cheaper, it has some unique feat…

> they don't even provide their own backup utility

They do for Windows: https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_backup_agent.h...

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#63

Post by justin_oaks »

pushcx wrote: post #23

Billing is why tarsnap was too unreliable for prod usage for me. You deposit funds with a credit card, a difficult-to-predict usage calculation occurs based on how many deduplicated blocks of new data and how many API calls you will use in the next few weeks and months, and then eventually, at an essentially random time, you get an email from tarsnap guessing you have about a week of funds left and warning that your…

I'm a sysadmin, but not the one who pays bills at my job. It drives me crazy when a service doesn't have separate technical and billing contacts.

And it wastes my time when I get emails about billing renewals. And the billing person at my company doesn't see the email unless I forward it.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#64

Post by erhaetherth »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
Kwpolska wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability is important for a backup service. If your machine explodes and you need to restore from backups, but the backup service is down, you need to wait and may lose money due to the outage (SLA, unhappy customers, no ability to onboard new customers etc.). If you’re doing weekly backups, but the backup service was down during the backup slot, and your crontab setup doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t retry until i…

Yes, reliability is important. And by that measure Tarsnap is 100% reliable. But not 100% available , and that's something that often gets confused. Having to wait while you are trying to restore a backup would be extremely annoying but that implies that you've done something wrong in your planning: if you expect your backup service to be 100% available then you are probably not engineering things right because for m…

That's a funny definition of "reliable". I'd factor availability into reliability. If I Uber to work and every time an Uber picks me up it gets me to my destination with 100% success but once a week no Ubers are available, is that a reliable mode of transportation? Would my boss not shout at me to find a more reliable way to get to work?

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#65

Post by influx »

db48x wrote: post #58
CodesInChaos wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at 10x the cost And that's comparing to S3 Standard. Infrequent Access is 2x cheaper than that, and Glacier Instant Retrieval 6x (if your files aren't tiny).

True enough, but you do get a bit more than just storage from tarsnap. S3 provides storage and an API for uploading things to it, but you can’t just back up your files to S3. You have to figure out what files have changed, compress them, encrypt them, and index them so you can retrieve them again later, etc, etc. That’s a non–trivial amount of software to write. It’d be really great if someone had already done so… Oh…

Restic backs up to s3 and it’s quite simple to setup and monitor.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#66

Post by JamesSwift »

vasco wrote: post #29
shubhamjain wrote: post #10

I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some t…

> It does one thing and does it well From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost. It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.

> It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.

This is a very unfair take, based on basically nothing but the single recent outage report it seems. Tarsnap is generally liked by HN and if you use it, you will know why. Its a great service technically, and _extremely_ affordable. I was a happy user for years but have moved to local time machine backups with B2 offsite replication just because its seamlessly integrated into my NAS (and is also very affordable).

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#67

Post by erhaetherth »

db48x wrote: post #58
CodesInChaos wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at 10x the cost And that's comparing to S3 Standard. Infrequent Access is 2x cheaper than that, and Glacier Instant Retrieval 6x (if your files aren't tiny).

True enough, but you do get a bit more than just storage from tarsnap. S3 provides storage and an API for uploading things to it, but you can’t just back up your files to S3. You have to figure out what files have changed, compress them, encrypt them, and index them so you can retrieve them again later, etc, etc. That’s a non–trivial amount of software to write. It’d be really great if someone had already done so… Oh…

Several people have written that software. Duplicati, Borg, Arq for example.

> But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc.

None of these solutions free you from having to monitor your backups, including Tarsnap. Tarnsap requires setup on your server. You have to make sure it's running and backing up the correct files. And you really should verify you can restore a backup.

I'm really not sure what Tarsnap adds over these aside from saving you from having to sign up for B2 to S3 and punching in an API key.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#68

Post by justin_oaks »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #14

I've read this before, and I still think it is pretty remarkable for its clarity and the amount of useful, actionable judgement that it contains. A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?

That's an interesting question because Patrick has gained a ton of experience since then, selling BCC, then doing Appointment Reminder, Starfighter and quite a few years of working for Stripe. Surely that would have resulted in additional insights. He's still active here so maybe he'll chime in.

I was going to ask if any significant changes were made to Tarsnap based on Patrick's previous advice. A cursory inspection of the website indicates "No". Pricing is the same, the messaging is still aimed at geeks, the website design is similar.

If anyone knows of changes that were made, please share.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#69

Post by tptacek »

vasco wrote: post #29
shubhamjain wrote: post #10

I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some t…

> It does one thing and does it well From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost. It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.

You are talking about a service that appears to have had a single documented outage event over the span of eleven years.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#70

Post by growse »

erhaetherth wrote: post #64
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, reliability is important. And by that measure Tarsnap is 100% reliable. But not 100% available , and that's something that often gets confused. Having to wait while you are trying to restore a backup would be extremely annoying but that implies that you've done something wrong in your planning: if you expect your backup service to be 100% available then you are probably not engineering things right because for m…

That's a funny definition of "reliable". I'd factor availability into reliability. If I Uber to work and every time an Uber picks me up it gets me to my destination with 100% success but once a week no Ubers are available, is that a reliable mode of transportation? Would my boss not shout at me to find a more reliable way to get to work?

Eric Brewer's calling, and would like a word.

Availability and correctness are fundamentally opposed. The word "reliable" is contextual.

A backup service that is always available but serves up garbage is not as reliable as one that serves me the correct data, but only on Mondays.

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