An rsync.net account is the swiss army knife of cloud storage | Hacker News Reader

An rsync.net account is the swiss army knife of cloud storage

twitter.com

44 pointsrsync21 comments

... if it's not clear, the enabling technology here is the wonderful rclone[1] tool which rsync.net has built into the platform.

So, in the same way that you can run 'git' commands over SSH:

  ssh user@rsync.net "git clone git://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git freebsd"

... you can now, also, run 'rclone' over SSH:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/some/bucket gdrive:/blah

[1] https://rclone.org/

rclone is such an incredible program. Rock stable, compatible with so many services... Thanks a lot for making it part of rsync.net! (I'm a recent customer of yours and am very happy about everything)

Thanks for letting us know. I'm a client of yours and I'm happy with the service. Aside: Ever consider making some portion of the storage available for sharing. I often take screenshots/share documents with my teams and use a program that can use SFTP. Great work.

Well, one bedrock design consideration at rsync.net is that there will never be an HTTP server on our systems - the storage is accessible by SSH only.[1] Surely that limits our product fit and reduces our growth BUT what it does for security and attack surface is priceless.

However, the idea that you might have a fixed subdirectory in your rsync.net account - with a distinct password and login - is interesting and we should think about that.

You're saying that would be useful even though it is accessible only by SFTP ?

Here's a dialogue box from the program:

https://dsh.re/14836

Yes your suggestion would work. I'd be happy to connect to a subfolder with my SSH key or secondary SSH key. As it stands, I set up connections to other SSH servers with keys. It would definitely maintain your strict need to maintain security account security.

Reach out to me if you want some more feedback: I'm Rsync.net user 59243

Indeed not enabling HTTP access on rsync.net servers makes sense, because it opens up such a big can of worms. If users want to they can use something like filestash (https://www.filestash.app/) that gives a drive-like access to storage placel that respect standards, such as SFTP. It's very easy to install on a cheap server and bridge to rsync.net without storing any secrets on that server

Happy rsync.net client here, thanks for the great service; the ability to use rclone for exactly this purpose, without having to worry about ingress/egress charges, is a huge value-add.

Edit: Will free-of-charge ingress/egress always be a feature of the service? With more customers using rclone for shifting data to/from/between other services, I'd hypothesize that bandwidth use could be creeping up.

Edit 2: A feature I'd love to see would be the ability to setup automated cron-like jobs directly from the admin portal, for e.g. automated rclone backups, eliminating the friction of having to setup another service to periodically run a command on rsync.net. (Tricky to do in a serverless fashion for long-running commands like rclone.) Is this something that might be in the pipeline?

Yes, there is the potential of an rsync.net account being used as a "seedbox" - as the young people call it.

However, even our discounted pricing is more expensive than the cutthroat seedbox provider pricing that we see out in the world - so I think serious folks will use rsync.net accounts for brokering data like this, but the datahoarder crowd will store their petabytes elsewhere.

Also, we have recently turned up multiple 10gb pipes at he.net which we found to be very affordable in 2021 so, at least for now, we have bandwidth to spare ...

It'd be great to have some more info on the page and examples maybe for people to understand it better as I couldn't figure out how to sync between providers until I saw this comment of yours.

Fantastic product, always seen your posts on HN and signed up a few months ago with a 100GB plan. Been very happy :)

Very happy rsync customer here. Their pricing is kind of weird, but after being a customer for a year or so they gave me a big discount that makes it competitive on cost/GB-month terms with cheaper providers, and of course rsync’s infra and redundancy are rock solid.

Are you willing to share the price? rsync.net has quite a bit that appeals to me, but I cant justify 5x the cost of B2 (which I'm generally happy with).

That being said, if there was no 400GB minimum, I'd open an account this week, even at the higher prices.

They have "borg accounts" with a lower minimum (100gb) and a lower unit price at the cost of support and "roll your own" (i.e. use your backup tool's) versioning: https://rsync.net/products/attic.html

We switched to use the https://www.borgbackup.org/ software, which does deduplication, and rsync.net offers special lower pricing https://rsync.net/products/attic.html Note the "There is NO borg specific technical support or integration engineering. You're here because you're an expert." disclaimer.

We're excited about both (borg is also built into our platform). We're tending to steer people to borg for "plain old backup" and saving rclone for the interesting use-cases that involve platform-to-platform data transfer ...

How about restic?

So for some reason I am just discovering borg (been an rsync.net customer since 2014), currently all my data is GPG encrypted on the client side, so database dumps, files and server logs. I have a custom script that encrypts all files, then rsyncs them to rsync.net, if I need them, rsync them back to a local machine and decrypt using GPG. A drawn out process that seems quite antiquated, especially seeing as my need to access these backups is maybe once per year. It would seem from initial (quick) reading, borg just basically makes this whole process easier and arguably even more secure?

It certainly makes the process easier, although if you have done what you describe properly, I don't know that it makes it more secure ...

I've been using Rsync.net for 2 years now with borgbackup.

Never had any issue with their service, always above board.

I had to recover my backup and didn't have any issue. Thanks for the great service.

Another happy customer here. I like their responsiveness over email. I also got a big discount after a year or so and also got a very good offer when I signed up for their service (I'm using their ZFS VM for sending ZFS snapshots).

Only it is hard to find this offer: https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html.

Another happy rsync.net/borg customer here, found through a blog post [1] which also contains some quick instructions.

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

Another satisfied customer here. Thanks a lot rsync.net, I have nothing but praise for your company and service!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com