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Tarsnap is cozy

135 points by hiAndrewQuinn

by avian

2 subcomments

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.

by luizfelberti

0 subcomment

I also switched away from Tarsnap because I needed to restore my personal PDF collection of like 20GB once and my throughput was like 100Kb/s, maybe less. It has been a problem for at least a decade, with no fix in sight.
I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?

by amar0c

4 subcomments

It 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

by rafram

1 subcomments

OP's cost estimator tells me it would cost a cool $250 per month to keep a terabyte of data backed up in Tarsnap. The same amount costs me $8.25 per month with Backblaze. That's not very cozy!

by muppetman

1 subcomments

I used tarsnap for years, but as my data got bigger and I really wanted to have multipe offsite backups with different providers, I moved to restic. I loved tarsnap - it's a great product. But restic feels very similar but you can backup to your local HD, a remote HD, or "the cloud" and everything is the same CLI commands.

by aborsy

0 subcomment

As several said, Restic does the same for free (bring your own storage). Tarsnap makes no sense, it’s 50-100X more expensive than alternatives.
And Restic is good quality software.

by phyzome

1 subcomments

The interface is nice but it is excruciatingly slow at restores. I had to switch to borg, which has an extremely similar feature set but performs much better (and you can bring your own hardware).

by qhwudbebd

0 subcomment

I'm really surprised to hear that the slow restore times from tarsnap are still as big a problem now as they were a decade ago when I last used it. I absolutely loved the interface and the security model, and I was willing to pay at the (very) premium price point, but it was just too impractical trying to restore anything from it at the speeds I could achieve. (If I remember right, there was some problem with the design which meant normal latency between the client and the server tanked throughput to crazily low levels.)

by mmh0000

0 subcomment

Tarsnap seems very expensive.
I'm backing up about 8TiB of data nightly using BorgBackup[0] + InterServer[1] and pay $240/yr.
This gives me differential encrypted rotating backups that are 100% mine and do not lock me into any specific storage vendor.
[0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[1] https://www.interserver.net/storage/

by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK

0 subcomment

Coziness comes at a cost. $250/TB/month is very expensive. Dropbox charges $5/TB/m, Hetzner $4 (traffic included).

by bigstrat2003

1 subcomments

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.

by xnx

3 subcomments

50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.

by turtlebits

1 subcomments

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.

by who-shot-jr

0 subcomment

Switched away from Tarsnap to BorgBase - https://www.borgbase.com/

by adipid

1 subcomments

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/

by snowe2010

2 subcomments

Does anyone know how it compares to restic or duplicate?

by chevalier_1222

1 subcomments

why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?

by sharts

0 subcomment

probably rsync.net or zfs.rent are more cozy

by iumo

1 subcomments

OP's has a link typo in tarsnap cost eestimator.

by kerblang

1 subcomments

gzip + ccrypt -> thumb drive
Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies

by shelled

0 subcomment

I've been using Tarsnap for almost a decade for a small, but very important, personal data subset.
Tarsnap is very resilient; it doesn't do a lot, but what it does is solid. The mailing list is helpful, and you can reach out to its creators directly for prompt, useful responses if that is something you don't want on the mailing list (where names and email addresses are in the clear; use marc.info to search in it).
But if you are trying to start with Tarsnap, you should note a few things from the beginning:
- If you are looking for a completely (or even almost) frictionless backup experience - this is not it. Also, it doesn't have tons of features - which might be a good thing, but you should know and accept it.
- If you're used to tools like Backblaze, CrashPlan, Restic, or Borg, the limited feature set might frustrate you.
- Knowing this in advance will help you set expectations within its feature set. The doc/man pages are great resources once you actually read it.
- It has some quirks (may or may not be bugs) that require tinkering with your settings, env etc. Getting your hands dirty with sample data first is a great way to know Tarsnap.
- Set up your logs and scripts such that you can know/debug things later.
- Naming of your archives is important.
- You'll need at least two keys: a master key with read, write, and delete access on your archives/Tarnsap storage, and a un-passphrased regular key with only "write" permission for backups. Keep both safe, especially the master key. There's "nuke" as well…
- I used its GUI for the longest time but would absolutely not recommend it. It hides a lot, which might come back to bite you, and is not the most polished tool of all. Its last release was 7 years ago.
OP says:
> … If you use it solely to back up the few megabytes of “crown jewels” data we all have lying around"
and I actually use Tarsnap exclusively for my "crown jewels," which are in the early three digit MBs.
- So, unlike what many say, I do believe it is costly for today's storage/bw prices, especially if your data isn't very compressible. Tarsnap's compression is great, but not magic. However, i doesn't cost an exponential bomb either. Killer de-dupe though.
- You must have a plan for what and how much you want to back up, and the expected growth of that data.
- It is definitely not a "fire and forget" tool (and you should never forget your backups anyway).
I was frustrated with it until I gave up on the GUI, embraced the CLI/cron, reduced the amount of data being backed up and excluded (using copy and delete) some data being stored, and accepted what it can't do. Which is not really great but that's what it is.
Glaring omissions, IMHO: very few maintenance features (the scripts listed are not easy to work with), (almost?) no way of knowing what file changed in a certain archive, slow restores (may matter for a bigger data set), and the lack of an updated, polished GUI tool which I think is very important for personal data backup.
My request to cperciva would be: please consider this - while it's inspired by tar and stays close to it, it's also a cloud backup tool. Treating it a bit more like a modern cloud backup tool could be useful. Just my two cents.