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Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

(caveat: I may be running on old tarsnap company info but) I must say, the ONLY thing that has ever made me shy away from seriously using tarsnap was the prospect of an unexpected Colin Percival outage. i.e. key person risk. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this.

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It's an MTBF like calculation: do you trust the well engineered one person company that has a well engineered solution with few moving parts over the much larger company that has far more moving parts and their probably less well engineered solution with far more moving parts?

I personally would go with the simpler solution because in my experience you need an awful lot of extra complexity before you get to the same level of reliability that you have with the simpler system. Most complexity is just making things worse.

You can see this clearly when it comes to clustering servers. A single server with a solid power supply and network hookup will be more reliable than any attempt at making that service redundant until you get to something like 5x more costly and complex. Then maybe you'll have the same MTBF as you had with the single server. Beyond that you can have actualy improvements. YMMV and you may be able to get better reliability at the same level of performance in some cases but on average it always first gets far more complex, costly and fragile before you see any real improvements.

I strongly believe that the best path to real reliability is simplicity (which is: as simple as possible) and good backups. For stuff that needs to be available 24x7 and 365 days per year this limits your choices in available technologies considerably.

While I get this as a risk, I'm not convinced it's any more risky than a larger corporate entity.

This is Colin's job. Colin has his name attached to it. It's really important to Colin.

You're not going to get the same kind of service from BigBackupCorp. Their employees are replaceable, their management is replaceable, and to be honest, you as a customer are replaceable, if they decide to move in a different direction and become BigFlowerArrangementShippingCorp.

The neat thing about a small business is that it runs entirely on its own profits. There are no stock price games or VC jiggery-pokery or anything like that. If it's a profitable business, there will be somebody to come along and take it over and make it their job with their name attached to it. I think the open Internet benefits a lot from this sort of thing.

It isn’t necessarily about Colin quitting. Key person gets hit by bus is also always a concern. You can say someone will pick it up, but I know nothing of whether such plans are in place. Does the person who would inherit the business have the know how to sell it? Is there enough documentation in place for a transfer of assets to be successful?

Companies and corporations get "killed" often too, even if the people in them are alive.

This is how that scenario shakes out:

  1. Key person gets hit by bus
  2. You see the black bar on Hacker News and learn the sad news
  3. You go download all your data from the service, which is still up because there is no bus access to data centers.
  4. You feel like a jerk for all your creepy "hit by bus" talk.
  5. A few weeks later, some VC-funded operation with multiple employees you depended on disappears overnight without a trace.

> You go download all your data from the service

Just about this step... you are supposed to have it already. You just have to find another service and start using it.

I wonder if Tarsnap could stand up to everyone downloading their data from it at once, especially without anyone to help keep it alive.

Make a list of the competitors tarsnap has outlived and maybe it will change your calculus a bit. The risk you need to evaluate is not "what if something happens to the proprietor" (which I've always found pretty macabre), but "what if something happens to him and then the service goes down and also I never backed up my backups". This is a risk you can make as small as you want with judicious planning.

I mean, if you are on HN, you will probably learn of a Colin outage within 24 hours, so practically speaking you would really only have a problem if your primary data storage, Tarsnap, and Colin all failed in the same 24 hour window or so before you had time to switch to a new backup provider.

Pretty sure his brother works on tarsnap too.

They should take separate buses to ______.

Pretty sure his brother works on tarsnap too.

Yes, I hired him in 2015 IIRC. If you look at tarsnap's GitHub you'll see a lot of commits from gperciva.

Nice. Being able to work with your family is great.

Oh! Do say Hi to Graham for me.

He mentored me so that I was able to contribute and eventually help maintain and manage LilyPond's Documentation and Patch Testing in a meaningful and rewarding way - all without any programming experience.

I would never consider a backup provider to be more reliable than that, because if you depend on it, it will fail you at the hardest time.

Better to have multiple layers of backup, of which tarsnap and friends are only one, and verify regularly.

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