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Comment by slavik81 | Hacker News Reader

Tarsnap is not reasonable alternative for most users. Consider that I was paying $5/mo for 200GB of storage from CrashPlan. From tarsnap, that would be $50/mo.

And, frankly, my measly 200GB isn't much data. A 2TB HDD costs under $100 and could cost $500/mo to back up with tarsnap. It would still have been $5/mo with CrashPlan.

I get that Colin is basically just charging the S3 costs plus a small margin, but the reality is that S3 is far too expensive to be used to store low-value consumer data.

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The most expensive S3 storage tier is $0.023/GB/month, or $4.60/month for 200 GB. That's quite a markup to $50.

It seems the price of S3 has dropped significantly over the years while tarsnap has remained more or less constant. I guess my statement was out of date.

I backup quite a bit and after deduplication with tarsnap it's not nearly as much.

While I'm sure there would be minor savings, the price differential is so large that the data would need to be >90% duplicate to be cost-competitive even for small data sets.

I've been using duplicacy and it supports a bunch of different remote endpoints. https://duplicacy.com/

I hear that a lot about tarsnap, do you all mainly back up VMs or log files?

The majority of my most important backup data is my photos. I don't see how tarsnap could duplicate (or even further compress) that.

I evaluated tarsnap for my photos a while back, and this was the conclusion I came to. I would have been paying for basically the entire size of my photo library, which is quite large.

That's kind of another problem though. No way to predict costs in advance. All you can do is know the upper bound.

I have approx 2.5tb on CrashPlan, so that gives me an upper bound of $625 per month. Maybe it might be 50% lower when deduped, maybe more, maybe less. Who knows. Not really a pricing model I can make a decision on.

Tarsnap looks great for certain use cases. But it doesn't really make sense for home users with a large amount of data.

You can do a dry run with Tarsnap to see how much it would transfer and how much it would deduplicate before ever running for Realz(tm).

Using the --dry-run flag.

The Tarsnap client has a "dry-run" mode, which will dedup your data and tell you how much GB will it take up. Based on that, you can then make a calculation of how much will it cost.

Didn't know this. Thanks. I might give it a look as I'm being forced to switch provider anyway.

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