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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)

#71

Post by tptacek »

idlewords wrote: post #43
peteforde wrote: post #5

It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade. I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.

Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.

That was a good description of Patrick at the time he wrote this post, but stopped being accurate shortly afterwards. The majority of his career, in fact, has not been consulting or advice-giving; he made his living on a micro-SAAS, like you, for a bunch of years, and left consulting after an ill-fated startup he did with some schmuck on HN and spent the longest stretch of his career to date working in the payment industry mines at Stripe.

Your point is well taken! I appreciate also that you're not making an absolute declaration that advice is untrustworthy. I spent a long time as a professional advice-giver too, but if you lashed yourself to the mast and ignored my advice that there was a CBC padding oracle in your session cookie implementation, you were plotting a course to the ocean floor. Running a business means being careful which advice you let in and which you don't.

My only nit here is: between this and your other comment on the thread, I don't think Patrick's advice here was unwelcome. I have a vague recollection of Colin being asked first. Also: if anyone was going to ask before publishing unsolicited advice about someone else's business, it would be Patrick. So the Bingo Card thing is a bit of a low blow. Also, easy to make fun of when you exclude the context that he lived off that Bingo thingy for years.

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

#72

Post by rcxdude »

bogwog wrote: post #61
rcxdude wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For me I use it because of their ZFS send support. It's just way easier with the system I have to use that as opposed to any other option. The cost difference is worth that for my situation (a decent but not huge amount of data and limited time to spend on managing it). (There are also some potential advantages in that it is just an online file store which you can pull from and validate at any time, as opposed to having a specific process for a restore). Also the cost on their website is a starting point, you may find they can go cheaper if it matters to you (and e.g. if you are willing to use a different payment schedule).

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

#73

Post by akkartik »

I nodded along when I first read this, but ten years later I have two, more complex, reactions.

Reaction #1: Whoa, that's a lot of assumption that serious professionals operate within incorporated businesses, anybody else is frivolous.

Here's an alternative framing. Incorporated businesses don't prevent catastrophe, they just make sure there's nobody to blame when things go catastrophically wrong (e.g. https://prospect.org/health/2023-07-29-shock-treatment-emerg...). They also go off on strategic misadventures, destabilizing the product for existing customers while chasing more lucrative ones.

A caricature, yes. But a more accurate caricature I think than the one in OP.

---

Reaction #2: the Opticon page he glowingly links to no longer works. They probably switched hosting providers at some point, and that didn't affect their ability to do business even if it caused them to forget some of their past.

Backups as "ability to continue to operate in the present" are a very different thing from backups as "providing the future access to the past." It's absolutely true that any company will see more profit in the former over the latter. That seems like a weakness of capitalism more than one of Tarsnap.

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

#74

Post by rcxdude »

cdogl wrote: post #53
rcxdude wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? The point is "enterprise" plans are generally much more expensive relative to the use of the service or the extra feature (the most common extra features like SSO and auditing are generally cheap to provide, both in terms of resource usage and cost to implement and support). So while they may use the service more they wind up paying p…

This is why AWS took over the world. It’s the opposite: WYSIWYG vis a vis pricing. I’m not sure why so few other developer oriented SaaS services follow their lead.

It is convenient but AWS does employ another common tactic: the easily accessible prices are the highest ones. If you're a customer of any significant size you are being screwed if you are not negotiating a discount (IMO cloud is extremely expensive anyway, so if you have very high duty cycle usage you would be better off using something other than cloud).

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

#75

Post by jpgvm »

This is basically a masterpiece in missing the point of Tarsnap IMO.

IMO Tarsnap is about being the perfect lifestyle business for an extremely technical engineer, it's something I aspire to build one day also. Billing? Just the most simple model possible. Sales? Nah. Marketing? Nah. Fancy website even? Nah.

Just customers that know what they are buying, are happy to pay for it and software that is exemplary.

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

#76

Post by jacquesm »

maccard wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's very hard to run a service by yourself of this magnitude reliably, but I'd always take a 99.9% availability daily backup service that runs right at SLO over one that's down for a day once in a blue moon. That's a fallacy right there. Your assumption should be that any service you rely on will be down once in a blue moon, and possibly for a day or even longer. > Also, parent is talking about ingestion.…

> No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service, The entire service going down for 24 hours due to a reboot is not a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user. A production service which people rely on for critical data failing on the _textbook_ example of running a live service is poor engineering on the services part.

I've seen entire datacenters and many services go offline due to 'minor mishaps' and that was stuff done by the largest companies on the planet. If you don't account for failure of underlying infra + services you are not doing it right.

Tarsnap makes very particular guarantees, if you look into that then you'll realize that for some applications it is very useful and for other applications it is not, or that you may have to use not one but multiple backup services to be able to serve all your needs. This can be costly.

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

#77

Post by idlewords »

tptacek wrote: post #71
idlewords wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.

That was a good description of Patrick at the time he wrote this post, but stopped being accurate shortly afterwards. The majority of his career, in fact, has not been consulting or advice-giving; he made his living on a micro-SAAS, like you, for a bunch of years, and left consulting after an ill-fated startup he did with some schmuck on HN and spent the longest stretch of his career to date working in the payment in…

I respect Patrick for living off his Bingo card thingy! If I fault him for anything it's giving up that life; may we all find a Bingo card thingy to sustain us.

Unlike you I don't know either person in this discussion personally and you should construe my comment strictly as beating my favorite dead horse, "be wary of smart-sounding advice from people whose livelihood is built on sounding convincing to people like yourself."

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

#79

Post by bluGill »

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?

Sure, but if you took urber every day and after several years none was available for just one day your boss would forgive you and consider uber reliable. If it suddenly had a lot of failures you would be told to find a new way, but everyone has a few days per year they can't get to work(often sick)
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