Online backup to S3 for the Mac
haystacksoftware.com
haystacksoftware.com
I don't want to commit to downloading this app without seeing how it functions. I understand it lets me back up to S3, but how?
I dare say if you add these images, your conversion rates will skyrocket.
Assuming this is your site, anyway.
It worked for me :)
Only about 1/3rd of the files decrypted correctly. The rest of the files were totally corrupted -- not cool. I contacted support and we investigated the problem for ~3 months. Luckily I didn't have dataloss, but what exactly was I paying for here?
We never got the problem resolved and I ended up getting a full refund for 1.5 years of service. Make sure to test your backups no matter where you store them.
You were paying for not worrying about whether you would lose your data. And that's exactly what Mozy gave you... at least until you discovered the corruption. :-)
1) Arq packs small files (under 64k) together into "packs", a bit like git does. So instead of thousands of PUTs of tiny files (which would also be very slow) it does fewer larger PUTs.
2) Arq caches indexes of those pack files locally, and caches the list of larger S3 objects as well. So it doesn't have to do a GET to figure out whether an object with a given SHA1 is already in the S3 account. (Arq stores every object by its SHA1 hash, like git does).
The file format is open (it's your data after all): http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt
Ok, so if you have lots of 64 kB files they're all PUT separately, using 15625 PUTs/GB (i.e., $0.15/GB)? I guess that's not too bad.
The file format is open
Nice! Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)
One thing caught my eye glancing through that document, though: "The name of each blob is its SHA1 hash." That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right? (If not, it definitely should be!)
I guess I could ask you to choose the threshold instead of picking 64k, but generally I've tried to choose reasonable defaults so that the user doesn't have to make those kinds of decisions.
Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)
Well, you could actually write your own code to read the files, since the format is open.
That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right?
It's the SHA1 of the contents of the object, and the object is encrypted data, so yes.
I think the parent's point was not vendor lock-in but rather, that publishing the source code to your particular implementation would lend more credibility to it since anyone can inspect it and verify that it does what it says it does.
No matter how many tests you do, you can never catch all of these.
Still, problem is that if you want to back up a lot of data, S3 quickly becomes rather expensive. In my case, storage costs alone for around 550GB that I currently store on Backblaze would run me $82.50 a month. Not exactly small change.
We both know what S3 is, and know that they charge per gig. But the market of people who want online backups for their macs don't necessarily know this.
Having that performance makes it more expensive than an archival specific solution, which tolerates latency just fine as long as high throughput is maintained.
There's a reason why Mozy, Carbonite, SpiderOak, etc. all run our own data centers. I can sell a 100GB account for usable across unlimited computers for $50 per year and be profitable.
That said, the market certainly has plenty of room for more backup choices, and any option to help people avoid data loss is a win. An exclusively Mac app seems like a good idea.
I would happily use a product like Arq (or Time Machine) for my documents and current photos, to make sure the backup is always current, and then whenever the backup hits 50gb, move it over to an off-site drive (at work, a relative's house, even in a safety deposit box).
What sort of alternative for restoring would you be interested in? Maybe an open-source command-line utility?
One of backup-bouncer's tests is called "combo-tests" where it tests several different file metadata types on the same file. Carbonite didn't restore this file at all.
Instead, Carbonite left a file called "Carbonite_Restore_F161_G1.tmp". It's a 1-line text file that reads "gotta boogie".
In any case, this looks really awesome for documents/projects backup to supplement my TimeMachine drive.
Maybe I should call out that use case on the landing page.
Would anyone be interested in this?
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/policy-clarificati...
Also Arq is a lot simpler to use. I really need to put up a screencast to show that.
Also the Mac metadata weren't restored properly: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/backblaze-backup-bouncer...