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Comment by arsome | Hacker News Reader

As tarsnap is run by a single person, it seems hard to suggest it to serious businesses due to the inherent risks there as well as the extremely high storage costs and difficult cleanup procedures compared to competing tools. I tend to prefer solutions like restic + B2 for their price and support, where you at least have a larger company behind the storage backend, you could even directly use it with S3 and it'd still be cheaper than Tarsnap.

Decent write up on the cryptography in restic here: https://blog.filippo.io/restic-cryptography/

Some tarsnap issues detailed here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

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Oh my word, that article on tarsnap is a frightful bore. I was a tarsnap customer and I thought it was great. If Colin is happy running it more like a utility than a rapacious VC-backed hyper-growth racket, I'm not sure why that is bad.

The only reason I stopped being a customer was because another rapacious racket of a business, Comcast, introduced miniscule but enforced data caps in my area, so online backups aren't attractive anymore and I've gone back to external drives and offsite rotation. When I cancelled, Colin sent me a personal e-mail to make sure it was alright to delete my backups. It was probably the best exchange I've ever had with a service provider.

I wish things turn around and smaller shops make a comeback. Big is not always better, in fact the service is almost always an afterthought.

"But that won't scale!"

Lots of little ones would scale. And lots of jobs. It worked before...

> If Colin is happy running it more like a utility than a rapacious VC-backed hyper-growth racket, I'm not sure why that is bad.

I don't doubt your happiness, but I confess that I'm having trouble reconciling "running it more like a utility" with charging 25¢/GB per month for storage. That is just staggeringly high. What I'm paying $6/month for with Arq would be over $160/month if I were using Tarsnap, and I'm getting end-to-end encryption, deduplication, and versioned file backups. What advantages does Tarsnap bring to the table that justify such a tremendous cost?

The whole point of a backup service is that most of the time you don't need it at all, but when you do need it you really need it. From that perspective, it's like paying for insurance.

I'm not a tarsnap customer, but I think what you're paying for is a service built by a literal obsessive genius that will 100% work when the chips are down.

Unfortunately restic was a no go for me due to not being compatible with B2 keys that only have the permissions readFiles,writeFiles,listBuckets,listFiles (no deleteFiles). I don't want the attacker to be able to delete any backups if the manage to get to the B2 keys.

I believe this is the ticket that would add support for this to restic: https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2

You can work around this by sticking rclone in the middle which does support soft delete: https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/

In short, give rclone your keys, (small ~/.rclone config file) tell restic to use an rclone backend and add an extra argument when running restic. (See the blog link above, all explained)

There's an open issue for this which doesn't seem to have moved: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 - it does have a couple of PRs linked on there which implement proper soft-delete.

Nice blog post! That's exactly what I needed earlier last year when I was looking at this stuff :)

Looks pretty straightforward. I am surprised it is not more of a priority to get merged though, it is so essential.

Tarsnap seems to have become a multi-man operation.

https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master

The other committer is his brother.

Does it matter?

Looks like the brother just does the merges? (which are mostly automatic) so IMO best it matters because it's still mostly a one man, or at least a one family operation - i.e not very resilient to random acts of nature (which backups are supposed to protect from)

Having them be two brothers makes for a lower business continuity risk than having it be a business owner + 1 random employee.

Yes. Having family help out on a 1-man show is an entirely different beast than hiring a full-time employee with wages, taxes, and healthcare. One of these two is a life-long trusted human that you've shared numerous life experiences with, the other is not.

When a business becomes serious? Do you need to hire several workers to look legitimate? If that's still not enough, do you need to make yourself a slave of VC? Only problem I can see is that one man operation is susceptible to the run over by a bus scenario. However that is still better than a woke VC asking the "owner" to cancel some users.

I would seriously prefer a service like this to be run by a two man team. Or at least have a guarantee that I'll get automatically notified if something happens to a sole operator.

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