Rsync.net – Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups | Hacker News Reader

Rsync.net – Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups

rsync.net

117 pointsfgeorgy119 comments

A few quick notes about our experience with Rsync.net

1. It is more expensive than S3/Glacier, but they offer "free" read-only snapshots, which can be very useful if your backup software or script does not perform its own snapshots.

2. It can be difficult to determine how much space is taken by the peculiarities of ZFS vs. your own data.

3. Although they offer subaccounts, it is not possible to know the disk usage of a particular subaccount.

4. If you have transfer speed issues, you can contact them and they may whitelist your IP (good if you are doing server backup, not useful for home backup on dynamic IP), which significantly increased speed for us.

5. They have a 10% "free" soft quota, mainly because it is difficult for mere mortals to know in advance how much space your backup will take on ZFS. They send an email when you reach the soft and hard quota.

6. You can communicate with a knowledgeable human by email. This has been helpful to diagnose small but weird issues we were facing.

7. Although we like S3 and Cloudfront, it's nice to have a backup location that relies on standard tool (rsync) and that is outside our usual providers/datacenters.

"but they offer "free" read-only snapshots, which can be very useful if your backup software or script does not perform its own snapshots."

I really need to say two things here ...

First, the zfs snapshots that are enabled on all normal accounts[1] can be your entire retention scheme. Which is to say, you can just do a "dumb" rsync to us ... no retention, no schedule, nothing - just an rsync every night - and on our end, we handle creating, maintaining and destroying your schedule[2] of full clones of your entire account. It's just like apples time machine, although more efficient since its using ZFS (bits) and not hardlinks (files).

Second, as the parent implies, they are immutable. They are read-only and cannot be destroyed even by our local root. This means that if an attacker destroys your local data, and then gains control of your rsync.net credentials and wipes out your entire rsync.net account, the snapshots will still be there. You can't remove them.

[1] But not on the discounted borg accounts, since we assume smart folks using borg set up their own retention schedule and that is how we make the accounts discounted - by not adding/rotating the snaps.

[2] Yes, you can define whatever snapshot schedule you like - the 7 daily (<1TB accounts) or 7 daily + 4 weekly (>1TB accounts) are the default, but you can add whatever additional snapshots you like (more dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies ...)

I've been using (well, "using". Borg sends data to their server, checks have never failed, I've never had to look at it) them for years and like them, so my experience is similar to yours.

The problem I have with storage providers being expensive is a sense of unfairness. Disk prices get cheaper all the time, so a provider that doesn't periodically cut its prices feels to me like it's been getting progressively more and more expensive. Now that I saw that Backblaze is ten times cheaper than my rsync.net plan, I'm sad :(

The real human support via email is fantastic. You don't need to log into the portal to get the response from their staff. I migrated from bup to Borg and they sorted out the issue via email relatively painlessly. Definitely a feature that I would not have valued before needing it.

When I was at Creative Commons we used rsync.net extensively for various things, and the support from rsync.net was amazing. John would frequently call me, go the extra mile to get any issues fixed quickly and our setup was a little nonstandard.

Highly recommended.

There's much cheaper pricing here: http://rsync.net/products/attic.html

0.03 USD instead of 0.08 USD. Beating even their top tier -- so long as you follow the constraints mentioned within the link.

At 0.03 (1tb = $30/mo) it's still much more expensive than pretty much every other service mentioned in this thread.

I was surprised to learn about amazon cloud drive which is "unlimited" - which probably means they'll randomly turn it off if you actually use it - free egress traffic makes it much cheaper than s3.

Worth nothing that rsync.net pricing includes transfer: "No other costs. No contracts. All transfer/bandwidth/usage is free.".

Looking at https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html - all services charge more than 3 cents/gb if you actually need to restore from backup.

Now, that doesn't mean rsync.net isn't expensive for many use-cases -- but not as bad as the up front cost difference appears.

Using Amazon Cloud Drive for commercial purposes is prohibited. Also, in my experience it is far less reliable than AWS with random unavailable, slowness and API errors.

Yes but it's the only service that supports running the attic/borg server :(

We're also the only service that allows you to 'zfs send' to a remote zpool.

Well, pretty much any BSD/Linux storage server can run it; today even low-end appliances can do it (with some patience - no prebuilt ARM binaries), and of course any kind of server you can rent.

Borg 1.2 (~end of 2017, early 2018 perhaps -- wild guess) will include pluggable transfer/storage backends (certainty >98 %).

Important bit to point out:

> - filesystem snapshots are disabled since you'll be doing versioning and retention with attic or borg.

So this means you actually aren't protected from someone taking over your backup server and running rm -rf * on your rsync account.

That looks very nice, I've been looking for places to put my backups, though I'm using Restic, is there any information on supporting that? Their documentation/faq pages don't work properly...

I thank the rsync.net folks for getting rid of that horrific scrolljacking on the homepage which was there the last time I looked. Actually, it seemed to have been fixed since I complained about it to them on here.[0] Not sure if those events are connected :)

While their pricing is substantially more than many others (the primary complaint that I see here), in return their support is the best I have ever received from any company ever. Getting responses, in less than ten minutes in some cases, from fully-clued and super-competent engineers - I'll take it.

(no connection to rsync.net other than that I've used them at work in the past and I'm renting space on someone else's account for my personal backups)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12960218

We got a lot of complaints about that weird scrolling behavior - thank you for your own complaint which surely pushed us closer to ripping it out.

I can confirm that nobody that works at rsync.net is not an actual UNIX engineer. You will never talk to anyone here that isn't an expert.

Rare these days, but sometimes you'll even talk to me.

> I can confirm that nobody that works at rsync.net is not an actual UNIX engineer. You will never talk to anyone here that isn't an expert.

Ah, greetings rsync.net person, and thank you for the reply :) That makes sense. Your staff are a true credit to your company. And the only times I (or people I am working with) have had to talk to you is because we were trying to do something weird like getting a MegaFuck3000 NAS with Debian version -1.5 working with your systems, not because your infrastructure has ever failed. Much love for your company and all that make it as great as it is.

<small>(but seriously I preferred your old webpage)</small>

The scrolling is still totally broken. Go to homepage on iPad, try scrolling down.

For the love of god startups should at least test Andoid 2 versions back and iOS current version. It's just sloppy not to be test your home page on mobile.

Check out this page if you fancy some horrible scrolljacking. Scroll half way between two industries http://www.rsync.net/industries.html

Let me read the text where I want to put it dammit!

Anecdata, but I've had nothing but performance problems with rsync.net and while their engineers were helpful to try and diagnose why, ultimately I've been left with ~10Mbps to/from their network/storage. That's "fine" for storing with them, since I don't really mind how long the transfers take, but I dread restoring my data at that rate if I ever need to.

I might try a brand new (attic) account and see if that lands me on a storage array with good performance.

Please be in touch with us again (today, even) - performance issues at rsync.net are always network issues. We should be able to do something for you, perhaps moving you to one of our other global locations ...

Why not S3? I use Arq with my Mac to back up my important doc, which gets encrypted in my S3 bucket. However, I'm still looking for a viable method to backup all my photos and videos. Right now they reside on multiple external hard drives.

"Why not S3?"

S3 is a great solution and we have nothing negative to say about it. I will note that our special 'borg' pricing gets you down to 3 cents, and we charge nothing for usage/bandwidth/transfer, so pricing-wise, we're about the same.

The main thing that differs (and this is important to some people) between S3 and rsync.net is that rsync.net gives you an honest to god blank unix filesystem to do what you please with.

So while there are many very nice tools that target S3 natively, you can't do magical things like this:

  pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"

  ssh user@rsync.net "git clone git://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git freebsd"

  ssh user@rsync.net "test -f fileThatExists"

  ssh user@rsync.net du -Ahd2 some/directory

Although it's worth noting that we do maintain 's3cmd' in our environment, so you can do things like this:

  ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe

You need this:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

About your S3 question, having something like rsync.net (where you can run a server process) is much faster/easier/better because your backup software can know exactly what's stored on the remote side and only send diffs.

I'm sure this can be overcome with some clever client-side engineering, but having a server process is always going to be more flexible overall.

A more pragmatic reason is "because Borg doesn't run as well on S3".

This is very helpful. Thank you!

No problem, glad I could help!

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-...

I never used git-annex with an S3 remote, but generally I have good experience with git-annex.

Dropbox doesn't have completing, fixed interval backups and has fairly buggy, heavy, intrusive software (on linux). Google/Microsoft's services don't have differential backups and their software is generally lacking.

Rsync.net promises exactly what I want, but at 6/gb ($60/mo for 1 tb) it's 5x more expensive than Dropbox so I'm manually hacking around Dropbox's offering for the moment.

If you're interested in using 'borg' (you should be) you can use this link to sign up for a 3 cent account that is just like a normal rsync.net account, but has our server-side snapshot creation/retention turned off (the thinking is that smart borg-using people set up their own retention, with borg):

https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=f0a35f

If you do, however, want an rsync.net account with full snapshotting enabled, etc., you can use our long-standing HN-readers discount, which is currently 4 cents:

https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=710b50

I hope that helps - we'd be very happy to serve you with our product.

I've been using rclone (http://rclone.org/) + AWS CloudDrive form my home backups. Currently storing around 4TB for just 60eur/year. Perfect setup for me personally.

Me too, and I've tried a lot of setups before settling on this. I can download faster from Amazon drive than reading from a USB 2.0 hard drive, and rclone makes it easy to keep important documents in sync on both services as well as locally.

I've been looking into rsync.net for personal offsite backups (turns out using zfs locally doesn't make offsite easier), and was just doing the math comparing the monthly cost to buying drives, filling them, and leaving them at lab. Rsync.net offers a ton of awesome features, sadly the pricing is about an order of magnitude too high for a personal use case :(.

There's currently a 10 day wait, but if you're comfortable with DIY, OVH/SoYouStart has an ARM server with a 2TB drive for $16.80 USD/month: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/server-storage/

Single drive, which may limit the use case, but wow, that's cheap.

Can't you just schedule an rclone cron job? http://rclone.org/ - it supports a decent number of cloud services, maybe one suits your budget/requirtements? That's what I do from my FreeNAS box.

I just configured rclone to sync roughly 1MM files (and growing) to GCloud Coldline. Excellent tool.

Having looked around a bit now that seems like what I will end up doing.

"Rsync.net offers a ton of awesome features, sadly the pricing is about an order of magnitude too high for a personal use case"

Even though you are using ZFS on your end, it's possible that it would be cheaper and better to use our 'borg' functionality and send us your data with borg.

Cheaper, since our borg accounts (normal rsync.net account, but with our snapshot rotation disabled - you handle retention on your own, with borg) are discounted down to 3 cents.[1]

Better because the resulting backups are encrypted at rest in a way that rsync.net cannot access in any way. It's just garbage to us.

[1] http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

Yeah, and if you spend more than 60$ a year (which is low already), you can just have unlimited storage: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home (not an affiliate link, and I don't work for Amazon either)

what's your setup for incremental (supposedly encrypted) backups on Amazon?

why would I use this over tarsnap?

This is 4-8 cents per GB-month, with no transfer fees. Tarsnap is 25 cents per GB-month, plus transfer fees.

That's for Tarsnap's encoded data---but that seems roughly comparable to rsync.net's free snapshots. So Tarsnap is something like 5x the cost.

For that 5x cost, you get secrecy of your data (but not your connectivity, metadata, backup schedule) from your backup provider.

anyone that can suggest me a personal backup system? I've < 100GB of photos (RAW) to store as a second backup (I already have them in an external HD). Amazon Glaciar could work for me, just i don't get much how it works and if I can use as a sort of Dropbox with very low access rate.

I'm pretty happy with Arq [0]. It lets you choose from a few different backends [1]. I personally started with Glacier because this is only in addition to my on-site backup, so the 4 hour delay would only be relevant in the case of a house fire--at which point I'd just be happy to have the data at all.

However, a four hour restore time (for me) meant I rarely tested the backups on a practical level--since four hours is a long time. It also invalidates some use cases. For example, I'd be at work and want to restore a file I deleted yesterday. My on-site backups (at home) aren't available and it'll take four hours to get that file from Glacier. If that's the case, I'd rather just have it on S3.

So I did S3 for a while, but Google Nearline ended up being cheaper, so I switched to that. Arq supports all of them so it wasn't a big deal. Now I get a bill every month from Google for around $3.62, and can restore files nearly instantly if I need them. It does do incremental backups, although I think it's on the file level. I don't think it's "smart" enough to only upload the changed parts of a large VM snapshot, for example. I just don't have it back up my VMs because mine are all reproducible anyway.

This thread is the first I'm hearing of Borg, so that looks neat. No experience with it, though.

[0] https://www.arqbackup.com/ [1] http://i.imgur.com/Le3bGMb.png

My #1 concern with Arq is the integrity of backup data. This usually hasn't been an issue with using SFTP, S3 or Glacier as a backup destination but uploading to OneDrive or Amazon Cloud Drive usually ends up with a lot of backup errors.

The errors seem to be entirely the fault of OneDrive or ACD but it leaves me wondering what files are backed up (apparently Arq doesn't re-try backing up whichever files were affected until the next backup session), and what the integrity is of files that do exist at the destination.

I'm also unclear on whether any checksum validation is done by Arq (or even can be done) on uploaded files.

I've never used OneDrive or Amazon Cloud Drive, so I've not seen that.

Arq does have a button for validating data manually and a separate option for each backup destination that specifies how often (in days) backups should be validated. Whether that's a checksum or not, I don't know.

It recalculates checksums of your files and compares them to checksums of the backup data at the destination. (I work on Arq)

Arq does validate checksums of the backup data.

If there are transient errors it should be retrying. Please send mail to support@arqbackup.com so we can diagnose the problem and fix it. (I work for Arq)

Google Photos is great. 100GB of uncompressed data will cost you $2/mo. Supports RAW files and has some nice search features.

Killer feature: the ability to search images by face, metadata, and KEYWORDS. I can search for "dog" or "server rack" and Photos will return pictures that contain those things. It's pretty accurate.

You probably don't want to use Glacier for personal backups if there is a decent chance you need a significant restore, or want it quicker than hours.

Glacier now has an "expedited" retrieval tier which lets you restore your files within a few minutes. You pay $.03/GB for retrieval using that tier though. The bulk retrieval tier (5-12 hours delay) is $.0025/GB (in the US).

Any other possibile solution? I was thinking of Glacier just beacuse of the RAW camera files I want to backup. I've them in two external HD, I don't access them a lot, so I was thinking of keeping just 1 HD and put the rest in glacier. If it takes 24h to get them back is not a big deal for me.

Glacier is meant as an archive - put stuff in, read just very little bits back. Reading everything/significant parts back costs extra.

But if you're using it as an archive, and not so much as a backup (which for me implies restore), then it might make sense for you. There is a simplified calculator here: http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/

Buy external hard disks on special and store them at a friends house or the office.

Amazon Cloud Drive is really cheap and for this little data there is no danger of them kicking you off. Encryption is easy with rclone.

I use rsync.net with Borg:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

I pay around $50/yr for 150 GB.

I use Google Photos and love it. The app on my phone backs up everything.

If you have amazon prime it comes with unlimited free RAW backups.

what? where? I do have prime (but I'm from EU).

Look on the prime landing page, or google "amazon drive" or "amazon cloud drive"

e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/primephoto or https://www.amazon.de/clouddrive/learnmore/

Amazon Cloud Drive + rclone, truely unlimited[] uploads, mobile apps too, so you can backup your phone camera roll there too.

[](People at /r/datahoarder have petabytes of crap uploaded...)

Amazon Cloud Drive is actually 70Euro/year here. But with the prime I've unlimited space for pictures (as google does)

Duplicity to Google Drive has been working great for me , nightly I run a synthetic backup on a local box that syncs the drive to compress each day's incremental backups into a new full backup. Wrote a Google app to auto empty the trash every night.

I've got 4 TB's worth of photo's (All raw) and want them backed up.

With Crashplan Family: 160 per year. With the cheapest rsync.net: 1500 dollar's per year.

Yeah, not in 1500 years.

Different use cases. You can't archive stuff from crashplan. If you retire the your machine, you either migrate the whole thing to a new one, or your backups will expire after some days.

So if you want single machine backup - crashplan is great. If you want long term service data backup - rsync is great.

Partly true, you see: as long as you do not delete the top level "share" everything underneath can be deleted on your machine and it will stay available at crashplan.

SpiderOak Unlimited for me personally. Cross platform, dropbox-like sync, share rooms, encryption, etc

SpiderOak's client and support are utterly horrible though. It's an okay alternative to something like DropBox where you have a few, small, frequently changed files but it's useless when you have terabytes of data to backup. It completely refused to use even a fraction of my gigabit upload.

so I'm pretty tired today, but I'm reading their pricing as 60 dollars a month for 1 terabyte which seems too expensive? maybe I need to drink this coffee here.

No, you're right... even more in the case of 999GB

    $ echo $(( (8 * 999) / 100 ))
    79

79 dollars/month

I have a home made solution for personal disaster recovery, which is 30€/month in Hetzner (2TB storage, no bandwidth limit) + 6€/month in OVH (same capacity, less CPU and ram, but same storage/bandwidth conditions)...

For me the difference, is not only in the price, but in who has "root access" over the data. Remote backups in third party storage, by definition, should be encrypted. Using rsync almost implies that the remote will be unencrypted (or efficiency will be lost). But we're in the age of "Virtual PRIVATE network THIRD PARTY services" nonsense... so it's hard that nowadays operators understand those principles.

> Using rsync almost implies that the remote will be unencrypted

Not sure if you meant the protocol or the service rsync, but neither one implies you store unencrypted data.

Nor the protocol neither the service, but the data.

If you're going to encrypt all the backup locally before send it to rsync.net, tomorrow you will need to transfer all the GB again, even if just one bit did change...

That depends completely on the encryption mode. This could get a full technical explanation of different modes and architectures, but in short: you probably know that if you use full disk exception, you don't rewrite the whole disk just because one bit changed. There are many ways to keep the data encrypted without relying on other blocks content.

How am I not already aware of these guys? Pricing looks good.

Seems to be around 6 times more expensive than S3 for my usage (<1TB, EU Standard - Infrequent Access is $0.0125/GB vs $0.08/GB).

Of course, you can’t rsync to S3 so I’m handling backups with duplicity and using S3 as the storage target.

An important point to note is that esp. with S3 infrequent access or Glacier there are additional costs associated with restoring, which can be quite high. With S3/Glacier one needs to spend a bit of time to even figure out how much a restore would cost.

Yes, the data retrieval fee for infrequent access is $0.01/GB so a 1TB restore would cost me $10.

Thankfully I’ve not had to perform a complete restore, though I do regular test restores of a part of the backup just to make sure it’s all still working.

Edit: It’s actually $100 (as transfer from S3->Internet adds $0.09/GB)

No, it's $100, since the egress traffic will cost ~$0.09/GB.

You’re right, I hadn’t taken that into account.

Not the same thing, obviously, but 1/10th the price: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html.

Note 5 cents/gb to restore/access data though. Worth considering before you need to restore 8tb of data.

IIRC You can have them send you a harddrive with your data on it and you'll get the cost of the drive refunded if you send it back to them within 90 days or so.

The comment you replied to was referencing restore costs, not storage costs.

I was referencing restore costs. You can have B2 send you a Harddrive containing the contents of a bucket and send it back to get a restore for cheap.

Does it work with Linux? All docs that I read talk only about Windows and Mac.

Absolutely! We've been using it as a special remote backend for our multi-TB git-annex repos, and it has been both painless and cheap. They have supported integrations for HashBackup and Rclone, and you can roll your own with their S3-ish (though not straight compatible) API. They have recently added native snapshots as well.

That said, as others have mentioned, b2's value differentiator is in cold storage. For us, it's largely insurance against failure of our other backup modalities. If you are pulling a lot of data back on a regular basis, the pricepoint is much more in line with the top tier providers.

Last I looked, the Free software python client worked fine. It was off to a bit of a rough start in the alpha release - but then quickly got some love.

Note that I for now tend to mirror data between servers/vps' I control/rent, so I haven't really used b2 in anger.

I dropped backblaze when I read that you have to reattach external disks every 30 days or so or they'd just wipe the whole backup of that disk.

Their desktop backup is a completely separate product from B2.

Keep in mind that most "unlimited" backup systems have one or more gotchas. Like: * horribly inefficient clients written in java * annoying retention policies * limited compatibility, often no linux * bandwidth throttling * IOP throttling etc. * horrible restore times

However if you skip that an pay as you go you typically get much more control, much more compatibility (including linux), and much better performance. Like say using S3 or Backblaze's B2.

Currently using B2 for syncing my restic backups. It's pretty nice and cheap even compared to AWS Glacier.

It will be great if it can be used for individual backup needs with the help of an awesome desktop app like their desktop consumer backup app. (Arq doesn't fit my needs).

Or with something like Borg.

That pricing looks great, does it work with Borg?

Some people mentioned that b2 is "get what you pay for" with heavy usage throttling bandwidths and stuff like that.

(I cannot verify these claims since I have never used b2, I'm just noting what people told me).

I switched from Crashplan to Backblaze a few months ago and at least in my case the Backblaze client uploads a lot faster.

I've done the opposite. For me it doesn't matter how fast the uploads are (within reason), it matters whether I can restore reasonably quickly if something craps out. CP does have a disadvantage though: their client is written in Java and if you have a lot of files it takes up a ton of RAM.

That is suspicious to me. No address, no contact, no support.

I've been a happy customer for years. The contact is info@rsync.net - it's on the pricing page. I've emailed support a few times and they answer very promptly.

Rsync.net has been around forever - like 15 years. They predate the concept of 'cloud'. They were the first to use a 'warrant canary', in 2006. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary)

They are also regulars here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rsync and (for example) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277835

RE the warrant canary: all legal analysis I've seen points to the canary being functionally useless. A court would throw out the defense immediately, removing a canary pointing out that a warrant has been served is the same as tweeting that you got a warrant.

It's the minimal legal hack: completely useless in a court but massive generator of internet comments

Though it generating discussion around the warrants themselves is a good feature

It's still useful as a rhetorical tool against enforcement. If someone gets imprisoned for saying "no comment" and refusing to actively lie, that would hopefully cause an enormous outrage.

You don't "remove" a canary, you just stop updating it. The intent being that they can't force you to keep updating it.

They can't force you. Just like they can't force you to not tweet.

They can sure sue the hell out of you after you stop updating though.

The idea is that forced speech is different than free speech. That means that someone can force you to not say something, but not force you to say something.

so there are two things:

- The government cannot force you to update the canary. A court cannot get you to update it, because it's forced speech to demand an update.

- You created the canary of your own accord, and are responsible for its effects. Not updating the canary is, effectively, speech.

Though, from [0]:

"Realistically, though, courts compel speech all the time. Court-ordered apologies, disclosures, and notices are not unusual. And if ever a court would be inclined to compel speech, it would be in a situation like this one, where a company intentionally set out to get around a gag order with this kind of convoluted sea-lawyering."

[0]:http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/268/is-there-any-lega...

What if they could do it instead of you, even if you use distributed signing how difficult would it be?

What?

http://www.rsync.net/resources/index.html

"Unlimited Support From Real Engineers: support@rsync.net - +1-619-819-9156"

The address is in TOS http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html

"524 San Anselmo Ave., Suite 107" Does not sound like a real address as there seem to be 100x more companies registered with the same address.

Decoupling your physical mailing address from your office location makes a lot of sense, since changing the address would be very disruptive. Same reason you'd use Google Voice over giving someone your direct number.

And more and more companies these days don't even have any fixed physical offices, with remote-first cultures. What's the address of Trello? You won't find it on trello.com

It's not like you're going to actually walk there. If it's a legal address registered for the company, that's enough for every interaction you need with them.

They've been around for a long time and have a very good reputation.

It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted just for being cautious/skeptical.

Various aspects of rsync.net are periodically discussed on HN. About 417 days ago I raised a similar issue to yours, namely who is behind this company and what is the address.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10674029

At that time the owner responded on HN with clear information. It's unfortunate that, more than a year later, their website is still a bit of a dog's breakfast on this issue.

Sorry. I'll get this fixed today - we used to have a proper 'about' page before we redesigned the website and somehow it got lost ...

Founder is John Kozubik, who was previously the founder of JohnCompanies - the first VPS provider.[1]

Address is 524 San Anselmo Ave., San Anselmo, CA 94960.

Phone number is +1 619 819 9156.

http://www.rsync.net/resources/index.html

[1] Began offering FreeBSD jails in Aug/Sept 2001. Nobody had coined the term 'VPS' - we called them "server instances".

My recollection is he and his company were very well regarded. FWIW.

The owner is active on HN, it's a legit service.

What makes my suspicious is that I can't find any information on the company itself anywhere on the site. Where are they headquartered? What's their contact information? It's not even clear under what jurisdiction they operate.

Points well taken.

Again, we had all of this in place prior to an ill-advised website redesign.

As I said higher up in this thread, I'll make sure this gets republished and put in place properly today and I will add some verbiage that addresses your specific point about HQ and jurisdiction.

In the meantime, I will confirm we are a US firm with locations (ie., our own racks - not rented hardware) in San Diego, Fremont (San Francisco, basically), Denver, Zurich and Hong Kong.

Hi, I just did a quick tour on your new site and I see that this link is broken (I was curious to see how it's implemented): http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/veeam.html

Phys-sec means you don't just advertise your location, and keeping control over how people can contact you is another way to prevent social engineering attacks.

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