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Comment by shadytrees | Hacker News Reader

Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.

Tarsnap costs 2-3x more than Amazon S3, and S3 is already several times more expensive than it should be. What is the advantage of Tarsnap over S3 and one of its many clients?

Tarsnap also does encryption and compression. Now you might be able to implement something like that better then cperciva, but I know I sure as hell am not capable of implementing any system as secure as reliable as him. Does this knowledge cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on you.

As does CrashPlan, and deduplication too, and it's cheaper than S3. It also runs on Solaris, Windows, etc., using file system monitoring to pick up changes.

JungleDisk does encryption and you only have to pay for S3 usage after the one-off license fee.

Is that offer still available? I was under the impression that any new subscribers had to pay a monthly fee and it had been that way for a year or more.

Efficient secure Snapshotted backups. It says so in the 'Design' section. (maybe that ought to be on the front page as well) http://www.tarsnap.com/design.html

One point which rarely gets mentioned is that to use S3 you need to have the access codes on the server. So theoretically a malicious individual could break into your server and delete all your files on that box and then wipe all the files on S3.

Tarsnap enables you to separate out the ability to write/read/delete. So a compromised box could at worst be used to inflate your tarsnap bill but not to wipe out all your backups.

S3/AWS multi-factor authentication, in combination with bucket versioning, ensures that if you can keep a redundant offsite record of your key and version information, you can always retrieve your data. An attacker requires your key fob to permanently delete an item. Of course, you'll need to physically secure your key fob.

http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/

It has been a while since I looked at S3 and didn't spot multi-factor authentication at the time. At only $13for the fob it seems like an interesting alternative.

Thanks for the follow-up.

http://www.restbackup.com/ also provides protection from deletion. Rest Backup has an HTTP REST API so you can do backup & restore with curl.

I'm launching the Rest Backup beta next week.

I'm using duplicity with s3 instead.

it does one thing very well

price gouging?

Can you comment on your ability to successfully restore from backup?

I know of organisations that diligently back up their data, but fail to regularly check that they can restore from backups.

I've restored a couple times and done some tests, the transfer speed seemed a little slow but I don't know if it was on tarsnaps end or mine.

The server that I've done and tested restores for is only about 1.5 gb of information/configs.

The one time I had a huge failure and needed to restore I found Tarsnap amazingly slow. Between that and the overly complicated pricing I'm going to consider something else going forward.

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