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Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

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Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#81

Post by frankzinger »

icebraining wrote: post #39
frankzinger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To concur with my sibling commenter zie (who said that tarsnap is not that expensive): $ tarsnap --print-stats Total size Compressed size All archives 1418275826434 1212480481405 (unique data) 5342739088 2957847871 Ie, I have ~1.3TB of data stored in total but I am only being charged ($0.0239 US per day) for what amounts to ~2.75GB after deduplication and compression. Mind you, I have not compared tarsnap's prices to…

Right, all providers are cheap if you barely use any storage.

Yeah, I am surprised at how cheap Backblaze is, according to one of the comments here.

I will say though that what I've read about tarsnap's security and my experience with it as a user makes me reluctant to want to switch. I guess I might look into it once I need to store more data.

I have had some really bad experiences with other backup systems so having something which I am quite sure is very secure and which works reliably is great. The slow restore times somebody else mentioned might be a problem though. I've only had to restore small archives/files.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#83

Post by zie »

riobard wrote: post #31
zie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. I mean it looks expensive, until you take into account all the dedup and everything it does to reduce the cost. I put in $10 dollars a few years ago, I still have almost a $4 balance ($3.91).

How much data are you storing?

not much obviously, I am only storing critical data in tarsnap. Like others have said, if you are storing large GB's or TB's of data, rsync.net or something may be a better solution.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#84

Post by JohnTHaller »

tedmiston wrote: post #69
oliwarner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m. I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.

I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.

Did you post a writeup of this somewhere online you can link to?

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#85

Post by Gatsky »

Baeocystin wrote: post #77
Gatsky wrote: post #45

What sort of upload speeds do people doing cloud backups have? I could never contemplate uploading 100s of Mb each day with my crappy ADSL2+

I have basic cable-provided internet. 50 down, 3 up. Initial backups take a long time, no doubt. But the daily diffs aren't so bad. As long as you use something smart enough to only upload the deltas, you're fine. You can also snail mail drives to many cloud providers for your initial backup state if you want. I've never done so, but I've heard from friends that have that it worked out fine.

That's very helpful info, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#86

Post by tedmiston »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #84
tedmiston wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.

Did you post a writeup of this somewhere online you can link to?

I wrote a draft of it but didn't publish because it just felt like a rage post. I found it difficult to separate the objective events from the frustration of data loss. That said, there probably would be value as a lot of people blindly recommend Backblaze but haven't experienced edge cases like this.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#87

Post by oliwarner »

tedmiston wrote: post #69
oliwarner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazingly expensive though at 25c/GB/m. I pay Backblaze b2 about $1.60 a month for 280GB of photos. A number that doubles every few years. Today that would cost me $60 on tarsnap. That's not reasonable.

I did the same until Backblaze lost all data from one of my drives, which they didn't alert me about and I discovered abruptly attempting to restore after the physical drive died. Dealing with their customer support is very insecure (sharing your secret in plain text) and they still weren't able to recover the files. I don't see myself using or recommending it to anyone again.

I feel for you —losing backup data isn't too bad but not knowing about it is— but I could afford to keep almost 40 separate copies on Backblaze for the same price as one on Tarsnap.

I could keep one on B2 and one on S3 and one on Glacier... And still have saved $480 each year over one copy on Tarsnap.

It's too expensive.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#88

Post by sidmitra »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #30
sidmitra wrote: post #9

I used to use Crashplan which had unlimited storage and was fairly cheap(like 4$/month or something) for a family plan. You might want to check it out. https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/features/ Also it was one of the few services that had a client that worked on Linux

"used to use" is an interesting endorsement. Why don't you use it anymore?

My plan had expired. And i ended up not renewing(since i was cutting down on all 3rd party services that i use). So i just moved to an external hard disk and "Back in Time" on linux.

But i've been looking at re-subscribing to it again.

Re: Ask HN: Secure automated backup?

#89

Post by zapu »

tedmiston wrote: post #74
zapu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashplan worked well for me, sometimes I have to restore a file that I overwrite or that ends up being corrupted because of buggy (in-house) software and I never had any problems with that. My main issue is that I went with free plan + my own server because transfers to their servers were really bad. But to supply your own storage, you have to install Crashplan on the server, which uses significant amount of RAM. So…

Was the Crashplan client performance better when backing up to your own server vs to theirs?

If you mean client performance in general, I never had problems with that, it's just the connection to the server overseas was not that great. I have my own dedicated server in Europe to which I have much faster connection.
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