Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozataman | Hacker News Reader

As an alternative, I use Arq continuously on all my computers and I highly recommend it (Sorry I'm on my iPhone and won't be able to give a link). It lets you use your own AWS credentials for backup and you can encrypt the data before it is sent to AWS.

The issue I have with Tarsnap is that the data is still at the hands of a small operation, as far as I can tell, and honestly I'm afraid we won't get our data if something happens to the guy. This is fine of course for many services, but data backup is inherently as mission critical as it gets. The whole reason for it is reliability, assurance and redundancy. It is not a nice to have, it is for many people the only place they fully trust to keep their data forever.

I wish Tarsnap had an innovation that made it possible to use it with one's (or an organization's) own AWS credentials. An on-site mode, if you will. Otherwise it has always seemed to me like a great piece of software.

View on HN

Have you discussed your reservations with cperciva (the guy behind Tarsnap)? I'm sure he'd be happy to address them if you just ask.

Haven't thought of that tbh. I only have a single reservation that I mentioned in my above post. Not to put any words in his mouth, but I'm not sure there can be a solution to it given his current architecture of the system. It is inherently a multi-tenant SaaS backup service...

Well, there's only one way to find out if there's a solution -- contact cperciva and ask him :)

I've just sent an email to Colin about this. Will edit my comment as soon as I have a response.

EDIT: Wow, got a response in less than 5 minutes:

It's not something I'm looking at doing right now. The way the Tarsnap server side is designed, in order to keep costs low (and performance high), data is aggregated between multiple Tarsnap users and stored in S3 as large chunks; keeping each user's data segregated would add a lot of additional complexity and cost.

I have the same thought. I'm using backblaze at the moment but am actively looking to move to either arq or tarsnap. I like that arq is in your own account and the file format is open so you can work on it yourself. Also, storing to glacier means it's dirt cheap. It's reassuring to here someone having a positive experience with it. Backblaze ha been a mixed bag for me.

Arq is fantastic! :)

Have you considered Crashplan? I've had positive experiences with it. The only downsides are that the client program uses a ton of RAM and there's no API.

I just started using Arq myself, and it's perfect for what I need. The Glacier backup is the killer feature. Tarsnap is really nice, but it would bankrupt me. I have 300+ gigs of photos and video (I have children and I'm a total tool with my camera, I know). That's $90 a month for Tarsnap vs $3 with Arq using Glacier. For $90/month it would probably be cheaper to rent a machine somewhere and just use rsync.

http://www.hashbackup.com has dedup, compression, encryption, and lets you use your own storage: AWS or compatibles, rsync, ssh, ftp, imap, local dir, mounted remote dir. Disclosure: I'm the author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com