[stigz]

Why would I use your service over restic?

God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

[ivanhoe]

It's a pretty well-known fact for years that tarsnap is basically a one-man show, and yet Colin has managed to provide fantastic service so far. Sometimes having ppl who built the service also managing it is actually a big plus, compared to other services where you first have to fight through outsourced & underpaid support that's limited to template answers, only to finally get some "engineer" who got that job 2 months ago and is more clueless on their system than myself...

[stouset]

And to be frank, I've seen plenty of mission-critical services at $bigco which may have had a team of engineers working on them, but the core functionality was maintained, understood, and supported by effectively one senior engineer. If anything went wrong, the supporting junior staff might have been able to fix reasonably simple stuff, but there was essentially one person who understood the system deeply enough to handle problems of any real significance.

[andrewmunsell]

I hate to bring this up, but what about the bus factor? If Colin is physically unable to continue maintaining the service and something like this happens again, how will anyone be able to get their data out? It's not really a concern about the service Tarsnap provides today

[tomjakubowski]

Why the scare quotes? I would expect any well-experienced power user to know a complicated system better than a fresh engineer two months into working on it, with no previous experience on the system. Especially if the power user is an engineer themself.

[crossroadsguy]

You really shouldn’t if that’s a major concern for you and that is a valid concern. For the same reason I’ll never use PurelyMail otherwise it’s perfect.

I know you didn’t ask me — but I don’t think Colin can answer differently other than saying that he is training a family member or friend to take over if needed.

Here’s more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7514753 this is also linked there http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg00846.html

Very old threads but I am not sure much has changed there https://www.tarsnap.com/contact.html

Why would you use it instead of restic? Well, for pricing in pico dollars ;-)

and for it has a functional GUI with tiny system footprint and that there really aren’t many such solutions out there.

[twic]

> God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service

Hence the toddler.

[devonkim]

I am really confused by the communication thread and am interpreting that the toddler is somehow in charge of running the infrastructure as a joke. Yet I can’t see it as either a joke or serious.

I’m a native English speaker but sometimes I swear I’m losing grasp on communication in the Internet age and am sincerely trying to understand this all.

[hunter2_]

Are you suggesting that those who build enterprises don't have time for kids? Seems plausible, but is the difference in lifestyle so consistently prevalent as to be stereotypical? Elon has 10!

[amluto]

tarsnap natively protects against inadvertent or malicious deletion or corruption — old tarsnap backups are immutablez The low-cost competitors (restic, borg, etc) seem to have this feature as an afterthought, and they make it surprisingly difficult.

(FWIW, S3 can be somewhat straightforwardly configured so that old data is effectively immutable. Google Cloud Storage’s similarly named versioning feature appears to be far weaker.)

[e1g]

Yep, S3 is reasonably easy to configure for immutability. I personally use restic to send (encrypted) blobs to https://www.borgbase.com which has append-only mode and monitoring to warn me if some backups didn't happen.

[88913527]

Even large organizations can have fairly regular availability issues. I appreciate the noted flaws of "single point of failure", but I also see orgs where 100s of people have access to the infrastructure, make a change, and then it breaks something. I wouldn't do business with an org just because they have many people, that won't mean they're operationally sound, at least not to my expectations.

[k8sToGo]

If the data is super important you should be setting on two different providers anyways for backups.

[VWWHFSfQ]

Honestly, whose data isn't "super important"?. All my data is super important. Even the crap I just throw on my Google drive. I want to keep it.

What is this mythical unimportant data that people still want to back up?

[throwaway290]

What use is SLA? If a service goes down for too long, are you really going to hire a lawyer sue it over SLA or just... use another backup?

[abofh]

Not even then - most SLAs say that if it's breached, you pay less. Not that you get money back

[AceJohnny2]

It's not about suing, but defining expectations about how you can rely on a service.

For example, my team has people across the world for HW bringup, so we can't allow our code hosting or CI to be down for more than a few hours. Of course, backups have different uptime requirements, but as for everything, it's a tradeoff between features, of which an SLA is one.

Tarsnap's features are granularity of cost, reliability of storage, and encryption, but not 99.999% uptime.

[IntelMiner]

I'm curious how the prices shake out against services like Wasabi, since it's just dumping to an AWS S3 bucket

Wasabi does $7/TB with no ingress/egress fees. My NAS is set up to rclone to it about once a day and I've yet to have any problems

[crossroadsguy]

I haven’t checked the pricing in a long time but you can use Tarsnap also if you have to backup only 7.3kb (okay I might ne exaggerating here but you get the drift) and pay for only that much. You can’t do that with Wasabi et al.

Also it’s really simple and does what it says it does, nothing more, nothing less. In today’s everything convoluted and bloated world this is a luxury imho. The GUI app is also quite good and functional. Support is prompt (that is if you need it).

You don’t have to worry about file being deleted just because your machine didn’t connect or backup for some time even if you keep paying (hello Backblaze) etc. I mean there’s no circus, melodrama , and cliffhangers involved.

I personally would never use it backup my entire laptop, due to price alone. But I have a subset of VVI files and Tarsnap is one of more than one backups for those files. So for that use-case Tarsnap is perfect for me, so far.

[Mawr]

Uptime isn't an important property of a backup solution, so I'm not sure where the expectation comes from?

[vntok]

It sure should be up when you need it, exactly at the time you need it.