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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for a new cloud backup service, one that works on linux/MacOS and with multiple machines. I've heard many mixed things about Backblaze -- ranging from "It's amazing!" to "Use their [pay per GB] buckets unless you are using a single Windows or MacOS computer", to "Other providers are cheaper". Certainly the best in terms of $/GB seems to be OpenDrive's "unlimited" option, which only includes 'no NASes' as a rather nebulous condition.

I'd love to know -- what do other HN users for this? The story author's point about backups only being backups once you've used them to restore really* rings true to me.

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I use rsync.net and borgmatic[1] backing up about a terrabyte. It's about the same price as S3 (with no egress charges, cheaper if you use just their Borg plan[2]) and you can backup a multitude of ways from rsync to zfs snapshots.

It's not as user friendly as something with a GUI but IMO anyone on HN should be able to get it working in about 30 mins.

1. https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

2. https://rsync.net/products/attic.html

Borgmatic (or plain Borg) to rsync.net is appealing.

One thing to notice about the super-affordable Borg plan is that it doesn't include free ZFS snapshots. My understanding is that you can have the SSH key used by the host to push its backup restricted to only Borg, and only append-only, within its repo... but if there's another way to access the ZFS (e.g., with an unrestricted SSH key), the Borg repo could be deleted. And then you might really want automatic ZFS snapshots as an additional layer of protection.

"One thing to notice about the super-affordable Borg plan is that it doesn't include free ZFS snapshots."

To clarify - it doesn't include free ZFS snapshots. You can configure and use them but we count them towards your quota.

If your data doesn't change much, they won't use up much space ...

Thanks, that rsync.net Borg plan looks like a great deal.

This is true. However rsync.net/borgmatic is my 3rd tier backup and Borg does the versioning/retention rather than zfs.

1. I have local zfs snapshots on my machine(s)

2. These get sent to my home NAS

3. They are then sent to a NAS I have at a friend's house

4. Then Borgmatic does it's thing to rsync.net

This covers my needs, I could upgrade to the full plan but if I need to be going to rsync.net shit has already hit the fan.

B2 is, at smaller capacities, cheaper than their Backup offering. You have to implement your own uploader, though. (We pay something like $8.50/month for ~2TB of storage in B2 and the necessary transactions to keep the backup up-to-date with rclone)

Their Backup client is so buggy and unreliable that you're honestly better off just backing up locally, there's less chance of your backups ending up worthless that way.

rsync.net has a special pricing tier for Borg users that might be worth looking into.

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg

https://rsync.net/products/attic.html

1. Sign up for Dropbox

2. Sign up for the optional 'PackRat' service, or whatever they call it nowadays

3. xcopy c:\*.* d:\dropbox\backup /s /e /d

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but that's basically what I do, using the Windows equivalent of a cron job to refresh the backup once a day. Not on the whole c: drive, just on my development directory tree.

The ability to dig through older versions of all files has been incredibly valuable, given the large number of build targets and other assorted binaries that aren't under source control.

I use the Backblaze client on laptops and desktops, and B2 for NAS backups. No complaints.

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