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Tarsnap outage postmortem

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Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#71

Post by TheDong »

switch007 wrote: post #53
TheDong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Colin's fault that you're using a browser that can't render an html rendition of an email which has been widely in use since before iOS existed. This is entirely Safari's fault for not having good compatibility with a common existing webpage format. Anyway, if you're the intended audience (someone using tarsnap), you also received a copy to your email address, where you can read the text with your email read…

A is the correct kind of HTML use for the body of plain text email ? It looks like paragraphs of text to me. is far more appropriate That isn’t apple’s problem, nor mine.

pre is the only correct element to use since in many emails, the exact formatting and linebreaks and such are important.

For example, a code review on a mailing list can only make sense with the linebreaks and spacing preserved.

However, as you knew to try, there is "reader mode", which is meant to heuristically ignore the exact html in order to display textual content.

Firefox's reader mode has no trouble figuring out that this is a block of text that can be reflowed.

Safari's heuristics clearly fall short on one of the more common kinds of textual blurbs you might want to reader-view-ize.

Seems like a safari problem to me.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#72

Post by TheDong »

Kwpolska wrote: post #45
TheDong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Colin's fault that you're using a browser that can't render an html rendition of an email which has been widely in use since before iOS existed. This is entirely Safari's fault for not having good compatibility with a common existing webpage format. Anyway, if you're the intended audience (someone using tarsnap), you also received a copy to your email address, where you can read the text with your email read…

How should a browser differentiate between a of hard-wrapped prose (that it could reflow in reader mode) and a of code?

In an email you can't of course since an email could contain one, the other, or a mix. And, in fact, most mailing list emails I read these days do contain code and code reviews.

However, if the user clicked the "reader mode" button, that's a good sign the user thinks this is reflowable text. Firefox's reader mode figures this out. Safari's doesn't.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#73

Post by GhostWhisperer »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #20
GhostWhisperer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, people have been saying they should "charge more" for over a decade

Can you not be snide and please help me understand? It seems 50 times more expensive than B2. I'm genuinely curious about the product.

i'm being snide if the prices are considered high; i don't have to agree with that

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#74

Post by JimDabell »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #37
RockRobotRock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

There’s also the fact that he has quite publicly been repeatedly nagged to raise his prices by another “HN darling” and he has been resistant to it. It’s actually quite an interesting read that covers a lot of the things brought up in this discussion:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#75

Post by JimDabell »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #20
GhostWhisperer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, people have been saying they should "charge more" for over a decade

Can you not be snide and please help me understand? It seems 50 times more expensive than B2. I'm genuinely curious about the product.

“What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap” goes into a lot of detail:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#76

Post by mattbee »

sandgiant wrote: post #65
mattbee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deduping in restic is just on the edge of acceptable for me, making me think I'd have trouble with a lot more data. Basically the one a month "prune" operation takes about 36h (to B2) . I feel I could be tuning something but also it works and I don't want to touch it.

Curious how much you backup, which version of restic you're running and why you think the deduplication is borderline unacceptable. There were several major (orders of magnitudes) improvements made to pruning within the past ~1 year, that's why I'm interested.

A straight upgrade, that I can do :) It's been running for years without one.

I was only edgy about it because when it takes 36h it blocks the next daily backup, and I wondered whether that was going to get worse (it hasn't).

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#77

Post by patrec »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #13

Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.

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 emergency, you will always be able to get back your data from tarsnap at a blazing rate of 50kB/s https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#78

Post by JacobAldridge »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #37
RockRobotRock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

For anyone not familiar with the (now 16 year old) comment that Colin is perhaps best remembered here for - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

He’s brought far more value to the community than that, of course.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#79

Post by aborsy »

mattbee wrote: post #62
aborsy wrote: post #59

Tarsnap is undoubtedly expensive, but it also donates to various efforts! Neglecting the pricing, does Tarsnap have any advantage over Restic? Restic also deduplicates, using little data.

The deduping in restic is just on the edge of acceptable for me, making me think I'd have trouble with a lot more data. Basically the one a month "prune" operation takes about 36h (to B2) . I feel I could be tuning something but also it works and I don't want to touch it.

I backup around 2TB with Restic, also tried locally with Borg. The size is nearly the same. Sadly, I can’t even test with Tarsnap! (absurd pricing for 2TB).

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#80

Post by patrec »

LukeShu wrote: post #69
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?

How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that. Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that. That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, n…

Completely ignoring costs, can you name a single use case for which tarsnap would be better than Borg or restic on rsync.net?
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