So, I guess it's about time I start using Tarsnap :)
No, seriously. What do most people use it for? Simply creating a daily backup of their hard drives? Also, are there any business users who use it to backup an entire organisation's systems?
Btw, more on-topic, I'm reminded of this quote, which I love, from Jeff Bezos: "There are two kinds of companies: Those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."
I've always thought that was a profound sentiment, and I've always wondered if, in the long run, that's the way to make a business survive.
What do most people use [Tarsnap] for? Simply creating a daily backup of their hard drives?
This is all anecdotal, but I think most people are at least somewhat selective in what they back up. In my case, I have some servers where I back up /, but on my laptop I only back up my home directory because I know if my laptop dies I'll be reinstalling FreeBSD from scratch anyway.
Also, are there any business users who use it to backup an entire organisation's systems?
I think so, but I'm not going to name names. Maybe some Tarsnap customers will reply here.
this quote, which I love, from Jeff Bezos: "There are two kinds of companies: Those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."
Yes, I found that quite inspiring too. And it has certainly worked well for Amazon.
> are there any business users who use it to backup an entire organisation's systems?
Stripe has been a happy Tarsnap customer for several years. It's robust and thoughtfully designed, Colin has provided great support, and "backups for the truly paranoid" is a pitch that very much resonates with us.
Definitely vault physical backup copies of private key material at a physical safety deposit box in a bank. Preferably two copies in two banks in two different timezones.
I keep all of the company registers and records, receipts, contracts, invoices, etc in Google Drive. We need to use Google Drive as it is the best of the options open to us for securely sharing files with accountants and lawyers.
I use https://github.com/Grive/grive to sync Google Drive to an encrypted local directory on my workstation at home. This is done daily.
Then I use TarSnap to backup that local directory.
Effectively I create an on-site copy of important docs from Google Drive, and then use TarSnap to create a secure and trusted off-site backup of those important docs.
Oh, and we also use TarSnap to backup our company (product) databases once a day too (though interim backups are stored closer to the servers too).
Our entire organisation is handled thus:
1) Systems and code via Github, and pulled often to one place (that local workstation) and then backed up.
2) Data dumps pulled locally and sent over to TarSnap of all product/customer data and all company files.
And the only on-faith thing is file attachments in the customer data:
3) Files via Amazon S3, trusting the durability of S3 and security of our interface to it.
This is all disaster recovery stuff. Secure, trusted backups.
"There are two kinds of companies: Those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."
Thats works well when your prices are based on 3rd party prices and you can optimize your business to keep your margin. But, for instance, a service oriented company, or a freelancer, will usually try to improve his/its skills and experience to charge more because the endresult is worth it.
In the case of a freelancer your are optimising your prices so that you can charge more while optimising your skills/performance so people need less of your time.
You can make money by working more effectively and efficiently while still charging less for the same "product".
But that wouldn't change my bottom line at all, i would just work faster/more and need more clients.
My clients usually are fine with paying more because they feel that my experience has value vs the next guy who just cobbles together their application without thinking much about maintenance, architecture, testing etc. I might even be slower than that guy.
Well im not convinced. For one, better skills/more experience doesn't necessarily make you faster, it might even make you slower because you put more effort into things others simply ignore, but the quality will be higher. Anyway, i see your point, i just don't think it translates into reality all that well. Not for longterm projects at least, which are hard to estimate anyway.
How does Tarsnap compare to Arq when using a Mac? Both do local encryption and incremental backups with deduplication. However, I pay $0.03 per GB-month on S3 with Arq and $0.25 on Tarsnap, almost an order of magnitude more expensive. And yet I constantly hear people saying that Tarsnap should be more expensive when I simply compare it to Arq and think that it already is very expensive.
You paid $40 for Arq, though. Assuming you intend to keep it updated, that's $30/year¹, which buys you 120GB-month per year on Tarsnap. It also works everywhere where there's an Unix shell (including Windows with Cygwin), not just Mac OS X.
¹ (assuming 16 months between major versions, as in 3 → 4)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't meant you could get 120GB of storage for a year, I meant you could each year buy 120 units of "GB-month" (like kWh but for storage).
You could distribute that equally throughout the year, using 10GB-month per month, yes. Or you could use 1GB-month in the first month, 2GB-month in the second, etc, as your storage needs grew.
Ugh. This works, but it's ugly. There are a lot of automated tarsnap assistants on github; I made one myself.[1] They can do helpful things like allow for daily, weekly, and monthly backups, keeping a certain number of each. (And personally I like giving each folder its own archive, and I dislike having slashes in the archive names.)
[1] https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron - which might be helpful to someone else. It splits up the archiving and the pruning of old archives, so you can do those with different keys. This part is as yet untested. It probably requires an tarsnap fsck if you do those on different systems. I was going to forgo the plug, but it might be helpful, and I'm about to get some sleep, so I'll probably miss the best time to contribute to the discussion.
I've always thought that was a profound sentiment, and I've always wondered if, in the long run, that's the way to make a business survive.
That depends on your customer and what your product positioning is. If, for example, you run a discount store, a la Amazon or Wal-Mart, then that advice will work well for you. If, however, you are running a company that sells products that are positioned as premium, lowering your prices can hurt you.
Cutting costs on premium products immediately changes customer perception, such as when Starter was purchased by Wal-Mart or Rock & Republic was purchased by Kohl's.
I only use it to backup configs and game saves. So far, I've used less than $0.05, backing up 73M with 93 days of history (I haven't deleted anything).
That is a daily snapshot of my /etc, important dotfiles, and game saves. I haven't needed it yet, but I'm sure I will be glad when I do.
EDIT: I just have a simple script in my cron.daily that backs up files and folders that I tell it to.
I have something close to 100G of document scans, database backups and /etc for all my servers in there. Use it to back up my office file server as well.
I find that the customers who are paying $0.01/month often provide the most enthusiastic word-of-mouth advertising. You're not useless at all, no matter how little you have stored. ;-)
[I haven't looked up your account, so I don't know if you're over or under $0.01/month, but the precise number really doesn't matter.]
It's only about 2MB per day to upload.
I have a daily cron that does the backup and deletes all but the latest two images.
Quality of service, along with Colin's amazing pricing, make it an easy win for me. I never feel like I need to stop and waste time thinking about other options.
Maybe nothing. I didn't look into other options because Tarsnap is already cheaper than a cup of coffee per month and it's run by someone I trust and want to support.
I'm with you on that it's cheap and also run by someone trustworthy. However, what happens if he decides to retire or something similar? At least S3 is almost surely going to be around.
I would like to use it to backup my photos and videos offsite (they are currently on a ZFS RAIDZ machine with snapshots), but, unfortunately, the cost is prohibitive. I currently use SpiderOak, which is overkill for my purposes, but comes out to about $5/mo for 100 GB.
Something like Popcorn Time is the future both as a client and moving to a shared backend where people can more easily split hosting fees... Because how many copies of The Big Lebowski need to be duplicated all over the place if there's plenty of bandwidth to serve it? A hosting service like Mega with the security of Tarsnap that could host and de-duplicate torrents would be very interesting. Imagine being able to instantly watch a movie if someone else on the same service happens to have already got it.
>A hosting service like Mega with the security of Tarsnap that could host and de-duplicate torrents would be very interesting.
Tarsnaps security is based on client-side encryption. They cannot read the plaintext. Therefore if more than one person uploads the same file, they will have two different encrypted versions of the same file, which can not be deduplicated.
You could use convergent encryption, but then users can query each others files.
No, seriously. What do most people use it for? Simply creating a daily backup of their hard drives? Also, are there any business users who use it to backup an entire organisation's systems?
Btw, more on-topic, I'm reminded of this quote, which I love, from Jeff Bezos: "There are two kinds of companies: Those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second."
I've always thought that was a profound sentiment, and I've always wondered if, in the long run, that's the way to make a business survive.