Basically make it attractive for acquisition by some large shitty company who will shut it down.
Indeed. Acquisitions are often great for the founders, sometimes ok for shareholders, and usually a disaster for employees and customers.
What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rea…
Tarsnap preforms asymmetric encryption which lets you perform automated backups without needing to enter any passwords (or otherwise storing your encryption passwords in plain text).
Tarsnap does full deduplication across all backups for any given "machine", while still letting you independently remove any snapshots you like. i.e. no special "full snapshot" that must always be kept around, and no need for multiple full snapshots that have no deduplication between them.
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#83Earlier 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. Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable. I also don't think your definition of reliable is ge…
> 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.…
Tarsnap doesn’t help you with using the service well, if you need to implement your own retries, and if the docs tell you to just write a single-line shell script and call it from crontab [0].
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
Absolutely. I get that you're coming from a good and useful place here! It's special pleading for me to say "HN is awash in dubious business advice but you should take Patrick's advice more seriously than most, while remembering that it's just outsider-looking-in advice". But that's my take!
Mostly I was just moved to comment because I got the vibe that Patrick was coming across to you as condescending, and I know he was working hard not to come across that way.
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be honest it looks like reync.net read the article and took it's advice instead. They have a CEO page, though based on the first time the way back machine saw it it might be that patio11 took inspiration from them. [0]
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#86Earlier 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
> why someone would use it other than for the geek factor.
FWIW I (eventually) moved to rsync.net from BB because of that time BB put some JS on their web interface that sent... was it filenames to Facebook? Something like that. I'm using Restic so it was completely painless.
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
All fair points, and Patrick acknowledged this at the time - and in the previous HN thread back in 2014. I remember it was a good one. The detail that really pets me backwards is the whole "if you're here, you already know what this is for and how to use it" vibe. It's not just Tarsnap; many aspects of the OSS world uphold this most unfortunate tradition. I believe with all of my heart that it is unnecessarily hostil…
It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on…
I agree, understand and appreciate.
I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives.
Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you land on a project homepage that contains so little context that the only reasonable reaction is to have serious doubts that you're in the right place.
You're right, I do care. I have spent a huge amount of my life publishing OSS under different licenses and I want people to experience maximum benefit from that effort. It boggles my mind that people work so hard to build useful tools and then appear to actively gaslight potential users into feeling inadequate instead of attempting even the most basic onboarding advice.
Folks are not obligated to make their code or projects accessible, but if you can't justify even a simple "this is why this exists" statement somewhere prominent that conveys intent without inference or telepathy, I believe that they give up their right to grumble that nothing they do matters and nobody cares.
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It matters to you because you care about seeing things succeed according to your definition of success but consider that there are different kinds of people some of which are more than happy to present their works in such a way that it doesn't turn into a runaway marketing machine but presents itself more like you would look at a utility. I have a project like that myself in the works and if it ever starts to take on…
I agree, understand and appreciate. I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the unfortunate number of OSS projects which convey the "if you're here, you need no explanation", I am absolutely not hung up on profit motives. Instead, I am talking about the times where you are searching for a technical solution with only a vague intuition about the shape of an approach and some faith that it might exist. And you…
Well, there is an old English proverb that applies here: you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Obviously OSS writers could in many cases do better at communications. But communicating clearly is a skill that is unfortunately not all that common and there is an interesting thing about the very best programmers that I know: they all seem to excel at dialogue with the machine but only a small fraction of them is equally skilled at dialogue with humans, present or in writing. This creates an obvious and immediate problem: without infrastructure those people are still going to be able to create useful software, various tools and so on, but those tools are going to be bereft of documentation and explanation. This is the case for a large chunk of all open source projects and if you look a bit more closely at this you'll probably find that the most successful open source projects are successful primarily because their creators either had great communications skills (possibly even better than they had software skills) or that they found someone to contribute that skill early on in the project.
So what you are seeing is entirely the expected outcome!
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all
neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
> which is fine
I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.
Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)
#90> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. It might be rational even, but I’d expect the actual utility does have a negative term for I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also y…
As someone who flies a lot on his own dime, inscrutable airline pricing ends up being good. It means I can always get a seat, I just have to pay more. It means businesses subsidize mine and everyone else’s flights. When I’m travelling the world and have to use a train system with fixed prices, I don’t like that I have to book many days in advance or else the tickets are sold out. Just raise the price! Let the rich pa…
You mean everyone who really needs the service will never get it because the rich will always pay more?
Must be nice to always have the money to pay more to get service immediately, but I don't think that's something we should strive for.