Hacker News Reader

Comment by imroot | Hacker News Reader

I've always had amazing support from the rsync.net guys. Great service, amazing price, and surprisingly knowledgeable staff (I use duplicity to backup my home Linux servers, and they were able to help me diagnose a problem when I went to restore my backups a few months back).

I believe it's ran by the same folks who run JohnCompanies...

View on HN

How do you like duplicity? I tried it a few times and got various errors (like corrupt files, couldn't resume uploads, stuff like that), so now I'm wary. What's your experience?

We (and hundreds of customers that we know of) have had very good luck with duplicity. You do need to have a good grasp of how it all works and have a good plan as to how you will run (and refresh) the backups - we've provided a basic one here:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.html

In addition, the duplicity mailing list is very responsive and helpful.

Finally, the maintainer of duplicity is an account-holder at rsync.net, and we have funded duplicity development in the past, so if you are a customer and have specific questions, we can get answers straight from the source.

Ah, that's encouraging. I already do all the things mentioned in the guide, my problems came when I had to push 50 GB of data over a slow connection. When disconnected, duplicity would not be able to resume the upload, and would start again from the beginning, which didn't inspire confidence.

I also generated a full backup locally and uploaded it to the server, but duplicity couldn't recognize it, for some odd reason. This isn't exactly standard usage, but I would also not expect it to fail like that.

Still, thanks for the information, I'll check your service out, thank you.

$1800/y for 1TB is an amazing price?

This is why I will never recommend rsync to anyone. Their prices are ridiculous when compared to something like S3 or Glacier.

Well, to celebrate our first (I think ?) hn frontpage, please allow me to offer hn readers a lifetime locked in rate of 10c per GB, per month.

Grandfathered in forever, applies to all future upgrades/increases. The only catch is there is a 50 GB minimum order, and you have to pay annually.

You also have to be a new, non-existing customer.

Just email info@rsync.net if you are interested. We would be glad to serve anyone from this community.

Did you mean 50 gigabytes or 50 terabytes here as the minimum order?

gigabytes. So the minimum order would be 50 GB for $60/year.

Errr, if you're looking for a fast restoration, Glacier isn't a solution at all, they're intended for completely different use cases.

As the company representative noted, rsync.net charges one simple flat fee, and that alone, no surprises, is itself worth something.

I note that the ability to slot into almost any of my backup systems is very valuable. This excludes Bacula to LTO tape, but you need tape to get tape like behavior and it's pretty cheap not counting the drive and infrastructure (fast disk to avoid "shoe shining"). Currently 2.9 cents per GB for me, and it doesn't take long for that to look good compared to Glacier. Ah, and for those of us on Internet connections with caps and overages, tape is a very good option.

It computes to 15c per GB, per month, and there are no other charges - no access or bandwidth or usage charges.

So it's comparable to S3, depending on your usage and request level, which can add up ... and it is quite a bit cheaper than other competitors like Barracuda and so on.

We have large discounts for .edu, teachers, and FOSS contributors/authors, so please do email us if you are interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com