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Posted by hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago

Tarsnap is cozy(til.andrew-quinn.me)
135 points | 80 commentspage 2
bigstrat2003 3 days ago|
I really wanted to like Tarsnap and gave it a good hard look for my backup needs. Ultimately my problem was that there's no way for me to gauge how much the service will cost me. Going just by the amount of data in my home dir, it would be cost prohibitive to upload to Tarsnap. The site does assure me that thanks to compression and deduplication, the actual cost will be far less than I might estimate, which is great! But also, as far as I can tell there's no way to have the client give me an estimate of "here's how much data you actually have once the secret sauce is applied". So while the dedup and compression might make the costs far more reasonable, I won't actually know until I pay to store some data. Which means I might find that suddenly I owe Colin a lot of money if the size savings aren't very big due to my data not being very amenable to those measures. That's not a risk I'm willing to take, so ultimately I pursued other options.
ahazred8ta 3 days ago|
tarsnap --dry-run --no-default-config --print-stats --humanize-numbers -c /MY/DATADIR

will tell you the compressed size of your deduplicated data, which gives you the upload cost and first-month cost. 4GB of files usually works out to 3GB of dedup/compressed archive data for most people, less for people with many similar files.

bigstrat2003 3 days ago||
Thank you very much for the info! I'm glad to have been wrong, and that there is a way to do this.
xnx 3 days ago||
50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago||
It depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up.

The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.

dathinab 3 days ago|||
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

homebrewer 3 days ago||
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.

pessimizer 3 days ago|||
> A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap

Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.

If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.

https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

bigstrat2003 3 days ago||
That's what I do! I have a couple of friends from college and we back up to each other over a VPN. It's a very nice solution to the off-site backup need.
LiamPowell 3 days ago|||
> Say rsync.net or borgbase

Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.

lazyant 3 days ago||
you are comparing data storage to a backup solution, not the target market
turtlebits 3 days ago||
For the price, there better be some plan for this service to exist in 10/100 years. With a bus factor of 2, that gives me little confidence.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago|
I don't actually know what the bus factor for Tarsnap's infrastructure is. 2 is just the absolute lower bound from what I know of the company itself. It is in all likelihood much higher.

I can't read the founder's mind, but if I were them I would probably have some Kongō Gumi style designs on making it a 1000-year company just because that's a fun intellectual exercise. [1]

[1]: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/oldest-businesses-in-japan/

who-shot-jr 3 days ago||
Switched away from Tarsnap to BorgBase - https://www.borgbase.com/
adipid 3 days ago||
This sounds cool, but the other comments here are concerning. I've been considring Hetzner's Storage Box, as it's cheap and I could use just about anything to backup my stuff – although I prefer restic.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/

avian 3 days ago|
Storage Box with Borg backup can be setup to work almost identically to tarsnap.

The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).

In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).

Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.

Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.

A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)

noAnswer 3 days ago||
You could activate snapshots on your Sotrage Box and don't give your Borg user access to it.
snowe2010 3 days ago||
Does anyone know how it compares to restic or duplicate?
bccdee 3 days ago||
I use restic. Restic offers everything advertised on the tarsnap website (deduplicated snapshots, e2e encryption). I pay $6 per terabyte per month using backblaze's cloud object storage. Wasabi offers 1TB at $7/mo. S3 costs $26/mo, but glacier is only $3.6/mo.

Storing one terabyte of data in tarsnap costs $250 per month.

margalabargala 3 days ago||
Basically the same service, but much more expensive.
chevalier_1222 3 days ago||
why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago|
Tarsnap's model is an ideal fit for a very small subset of the data I'm interested in safeguarding for the future. https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/ goes into it in a lot more detail.
Sesse__ 3 days ago||
If you're interested in safeguarding data for the future, then I don't think the model of “my backup immediately disappears once the account runs out of money” gives me anything resembling a cozy feeling at all.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago||
That's actually one of my favorite features. That should never happen under the limited circumstances I use it for. If something goes so wrong that my account actually runs out of money before I notice, then I far prefer the default to be "intruder alert, intruder alert, wipe everything". There's a reason it's marketed as backups for the truly paranoid.
zarzavat 3 days ago||
Then why bother backing up at all? Buy some gasoline and set your laptop on fire, you'll never get more secure than that.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago||
For me, personally? I do it for kicks. But in general, there do exist many data loads in the world which are valuable to the holder, valuable enough to be worth the low cost of a backup, up until time T in the future. After T, however, they become more of a liability than an asset to hold. A self-destructing backup model is the obvious fit for such situations. Both the positive-sum and the negative-sum periods need to be considered to truly safeguard your data properly.
sharts 3 days ago||
probably rsync.net or zfs.rent are more cozy
iumo 3 days ago||
OP's has a link typo in tarsnap cost eestimator.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago|
OP, link seems to work fine for me.
iumo 2 days ago||
the link in the title of the estimator page. it is tarsnas.com/utility.html instead of tarsnap.com/utility.html
hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago||
Fixed, thank you!
kerblang 3 days ago|
gzip + ccrypt -> thumb drive

Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies

hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago|
I love thumb drives, but Tarsnap is cheaper than the expected 10 year lifetime of a fresh and well maintained thumb drive for the kind of data I hold in there by about a factor of 20 (50 cents vs $10).

It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.

1oooqooq 3 days ago||
tarsnap is not cheaper than anything