rsync.net is expensive because they are more of a "cold-storage be-all and end-all" data sink. Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that. I might be wrong on this, but I think they use Glacier.

Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you.

The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots.

Therefore, true data-loss will occur if:

  * Their house burns down

  * AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails

...all at the same time.

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Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit.

I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/

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EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now.

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

Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.