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Comment by NoraCodes | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Tarsnap [1] for your off-site backups. It has a tool that does pre-encryption with user-controlled keys, deduplication, and a reasonable price; for your use case, about $1500 a month, though more in the first month for bandwidth. I've used them for years.

1: https://www.tarsnap.com/

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1500/month is a reasonable price for 6TB of personal data? Not sure I'd agree with that.

Seems like extortion IMO - surely a VM could be spun up in any Cloud service for a fraction of the cost?

They deduplicate and compress before storing, so it may end up only taking 1.5TB.

Still, that's $375/month. Nothing to shake a stick at.

I think the intended use case of tarsnap is for <100 GB raw data that is really important to you, for which you must have an offsite backup that is (according to them) insanely backed up and safe. I could see myself using them for a curated folder of personal documents I can't afford to lose in the event of a house fire. Then again, I could probably fit all my most important documents into my 1Password vault.

If it's encrypted, it's not deduplicable and not compressable

from my understanding of the tarsnap client, it performs the deduplication then encryption locally to achieve high compression. still the cost is too high for my exact use case.

At $375 a month you could buy a new drive and have yet another copy every month.

Tarsnap is an order of magnitude more expensive than S3 standard, two orders of magnitude more expensive than S3 Glacier. It's great for secure backups on the order of kilobytes or megabytes (I use it), but not for this.

18k a year is not reasonable for personal backups.

$1500 a month is four or five 18 TB drives every single month.

You could just make four copies of all your data every month, and throw hard drives in all directions.

Only if you have a sysadmin in your family who would be able to access it if something bad happens to you though.

1.5k per month is more than 23tb of hard drives for 10 years ....

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