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Comment by weitzj | Hacker News Reader

It seems like nobody mentioned it, yet. Another great product is https://www.rsync.net/ and this just works. There are no bad surprises. You can overshoot your backup limits, and they will send you an email to fix this. But still you have your backup.

Your interface is rsync/scp/ssh.

They give you ZFS snapshots, you can use s3cmd from their machines, so you can delegate uploads to S3 via rsync.net.

Our prior backup setup was duplicity with GPG hitting S3, and this sometimes was flaky for listing the current keys.

Glad I read HN, I heard about rsync.net. They even have/had a HN discount. You should use the search functionality to find other threads.

https://www.rsync.net/products/platform.html

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

View on HN

rsync.net also supports borg[1], which is how I use it. They also have/had a special pricing for borg users[2]

1: http://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ 2: https://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

For those that don't know, borg is a backup utility[1] that has been called the "holy grail of backups"[2].

It takes your plaintext files and directories, chops them into gpg-encrypted chunks with encrypted, random filenames, and will upload (and maintain) them, with an efficient, changes-only update, to any SFTP/SSH capable server.

My understanding is that the reason people are using borg instead of duplicity is that duplicity forces you to re-upload your entire backup set every month or two or three, depending on how often you update ... and borg just lets you keep updating the remote copy forever.

[1] http://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

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

Great product but too $$$$$$$$$$$$$ for my taste.

It's almost like they try to be a self-sustaining, viable business instead of burning through VC money with irresponsible pricing that kills fair competitors.

The snark is really not necessary or contributing to the conversation.

AWS Glacier, hardly a VC-backed startup, charges a literal tenth of the cost. Given that most people are going to be holding on to their backups rather than retrieving them regularly, the pricing math works out better even though it's a bit more complicated.

Say you push 2TB up to Rsync, AWS Glacier, and Backblaze B2, and you need that data back a year later.

Rsync will cost you $80x12: $960, bottom line.

Glacier will cost you $8.00x12: $96 for the storage, plus .01 for a thousand retrieve requests, plus 0.01 per gigabyte retreival, plus 0.09 per gigabyte transfer.

$96 + .01 + $20 + $180 = $296.10

Backblaze B2: $10x12 = $120 for the storage, plus 0.01 per gigabyte retrieved:

$120 + $20 = $140

I'm guessing the "startup" dig was directed at Backblaze, but they're actually charging more for the plain storage than AWS, where you're paying more for the bandwidth!

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> I'm guessing the "startup" dig was directed at Backblaze

And ironically, Backblaze is 99% self-funded and doesn't have VC funding and no deep pockets. We're profitable, the only way to stay in business without VC funding.

(Note: we did have a tiny "friends and family" round in 2009 which was 9 years ago. Plus we sold a small percentage of the company to a silent investor who didn't even get a board seat, no votes, no control. 100% of the board of directors are founders of Backblaze.)

"AWS Glacier ... charges a literal tenth of the cost."

Amazon Glacier and Google Nearline are not comparable products. What we offer at rsync.net is a live, online, random access filesystem - so the appropriate comparison is with Amazon S3.

I believe our current pricing is reasonably comparable to S3 - and at larger quantities is actually cheaper. Also, the borg pricing (2 cents) is cheaper at any quantity.

Fine... but your marketing is literally all about backups. The front page of rsync.net is "cloud storage for offsite backups".

If you hadn't told me this, or if I don't call a human on the phone number (why? this is an immediate turnoff) listed on your cloud storage page, or go read on "open platform" (which sounds less like a tech page and more like a marketing page), I'd never know about it.

The Borg/Attic/HN discounted price is a quarter of the regular price IIRC. Well worth it IMHO. They're reliable, answer emails very fast, and are happy to provide technical help should you need it to configure your system.

I use their Borg discount as well, and am extremely happy with it. I do wish it were cheaper, but I get 150 GB for $50/yr, which is enough for me with careful rationing.

I wish I had a TB for $50 so I didn't have to be so judicious with my photos, but the ability to use Borg is so fantastic that I can't complain.

Your account is about to get larger ...

We lowered the borg rate to 2c this past month and, as is our policy, existing accounts get enlarged to match ...

So in the near future, your 150 GB account will become ~208 GB in size ...

That's great news, thank you!

You can get get a 500GB storage server for about that price, a bit more for a TB. I run an Ubuntu instance and use borg to backup my home systems to this server. my affiliate link: https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881

(straight link: https://www.time4vps.eu/storage-servers/)

That's pretty useful, thanks!

Well, it's 3/4 the regular price, and they disable the daily filesystem snapshots. [0]

So it's still 6x the price of B2, which made me go with Backblaze.

[0] https://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

Our current, headline price is 4c per GB, per month and the borg accounts are 2c - so it is half-priced. (we're in the middle of a price drop this month - that page still had the old 3c rate on it ...)

The ZFS-created snapshots of your filesystem are disabled - it is assumed that you will handle your retention/point-in-times with the borg tool itself (we don't like doing snapshots of snapshots ...) Also, while you get full technical support for the use of rsync.net in general we offer no technical support for your use of borg.

The assumption is that borg users know what they are doing - and that assumption has proved to be correct.

Speaking of ZFS, I use B2 with zfsbackup-go. Sanoid is making snapshots and zfsbackup-go is uploading them. [zfsbackup-go](https://github.com/someone1/zfsbackup-go)

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