Tarsnap is cozy
til.andrew-quinn.me
Tarsnap is cozy
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Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#2Does anyone know how it compares to restic or duplicate?
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#350x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#4I've been using tarsnap for years and am in the process of migrating away from it.
Things that are not cozy:
1) There's no way to monitor your monthly spend per host/credit left on the account/etc. apart of logging into your account in a browser and manually keeping a spreadsheet. There's no web API to do it. You get an email warning when you have about 7 days of credit left. That's it.
2) Nothing is "a precious few megabytes" anymore. What seems like a negligible monthly spend at first can quickly grow up on you and soon you're spending highly non-trivial amounts. Which you might not notice due to 1) unless you are diligent in your accounting.
3) tarsnap restores are slow. Really really slow. A full restore can take days if you have non-trivial amounts of data (and make sure you have enough credit in your account to pay for that server-to-client bandwidth!) My understanding is that throughput is directly related to your latency to the AWS datacenter where tarsnap is hosted. Outside of north America you can be looking at nearly dial-up speeds even on a gigabit link.
Again, a problem that can surprise you at the most inconvenient time. Incremental backups in a daily cronjob tend to transfer very small amounts of data, so you won't notice the slowness until you try to do a full restore. And you generally don't test that very often because you pay for server-to-client transfers.
There are some workarounds for 3) and there's a FAQ about it, but look at the mailing list and you'll see that it's something that surprises people again and again.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#550x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc.
through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar
it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution
if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you
but if you need to backup you photo
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#6why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#750x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
you are comparing data storage to a backup solution, not the target market
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#8It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays.
Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#950x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc. through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar it's still more expensive but if you…
A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap, you can use any of its numerous competitors that are also maintained by professionals, whose whole business is also running a backup service. Say rsync.net or borgbase, which are at least 10× cheaper than tarsnap last time I compared them, and can be used with restic or borg which are much faster at restoring even relatively small amounts data (forget if we're talking terabytes, it's "weeks" vs "your link speed").
I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.
Re: Tarsnap is cozy
#10It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays. Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
The pricing isn’t due to AWS. Even if you used standard S3 and paid for data retrieval for your entire backup every single month, tarsnap is over 3x the price of just using S3 yourself. The markup on tarsnap is wild.
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.