[avian]

I'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.

[privatelypublic]

Sounds like it's just a worse Glacier setup then?

Amazon has Pre-Pay in a semi-open beta.

CloudFront has 1TB/month free- knocking a large chunk of a restore's cost. (Note- you should have either encrypted your stuff yourself and/or S3 authorization/access control still works over CF)

At what seems to be <$2/mo per TB ($1/TB glacier Deep archive + 9cent/gb for metadata on S3 frequent access), no other solution comes close. The big issue is the lump cost of a restore. Which, is quickly worn down by being > $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.

[amluto]

Tarsnap has a nice security model, and it’s quite a challenge to convince any open-source tool to match it.

[kunley]

I found restic is a prety cool alternative. (No hosting though, I am sending restic backups to a private server/vps)

[muyuu]

yep it's what i'm using right now

restic, and my own computers and storage, and the occasional rented device (VPS or similar, typically)

i find that the hassle of setting up my stuff is still preferable than having to worry about managing bills, subscriptions, and third parties just changing their policies

[pbowyer]

Same but with rustic because I found it used significantly less memory.

https://rustic.cli.rs/

[porridgeraisin]

+1 for restic

Restic + rclone is a very nice combo. Works really well.