Show HN: Cloud Storage with ZFS send and receive over SSH

That's the key and that's why it's here. It's a very, very stretched analogy, but from the very beginning, we at rsync.net have tried to run rsync.net itself as a unix primitive.

After already supporting actions like this, for years:

  ssh user@rsync.net sha256 some/file

  ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsync/mscdex.exe

  mysqldump -u mysql db | ssh jo@rsync.net"dd of=db_dump"

Careful. Openssl enc is basically a poor toy example, it's not a robust authenticated encryption tool for real world use.

It explicitly doesn't support modern AEAD ciphers or even a simple MAC (so the ciphertext can be silently tampered with - note anyone who can do that can also replace your par2 files), and it doesn't use a robust key derivation algorithm for password use (single-round of a hash, basically, default MD5 - about as weak as it comes).

hpenc looks like a nice high performance modern alternative: https://github.com/vstakhov/hpenc

[1] https://objectivefs.com

Yes. Thousands of people do this, and it is in fact our recommended "browsing" recipe for OSX.[1]

Feel free to email us to discuss this further - we would be very happy to extend the long-standing "HN discount" to you.

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_sshfs.html

ExpanDrive @ http://www.expandrive.com enables a very fast/robust version of this use case.

As a reminder to folks reading this, email us about the long-standing "HN readers' discount".

How cheap Amazon is heavily depends on your retrieval needs. Glacier is basically for gigantic data vaults where you will never need to retrieve more than a small fraction of it. It's very cheap for that, but has retrieval fees if you need to retrieve >5% of your data at any given time, and they can be very high if you need to retrieve a significant amount of the data quickly (also, there's a 4-hour minimum retrieval latency, so you wouldn't want any possibly-needed-for-operations backups there). S3 allows your storage to be "online" full-time, but adds a $0.09/GB bandwidth charge for outgoing data, in addition to the $0.03/GB storage fee, so overall price depends heavily on what you're pulling out of it.

The $0.06/GB promotional offer in this rsync.net post actually seems surprisingly cheap, for always-online storage with no additional bandwidth fees. Even their normal prices seem pretty fair to me, for something that comes with full phone/email support, provides a regular POSIX filesystem with SSH access instead of a weird custom API, etc. If I were warehousing petabytes of never-to-be-needed data, the price difference over Glacier would be hard to ignore. But for a lot of needs it seems quite competitive to S3.

First, glacier and nearline are not online storage. They are not random access datastores that you can interact with in real time with arbitrary applications. There's not a comparison to be made there.

I think the proper comparison is with Amazon S3 and I hope you'll allow me to approximate their pricing, on average, to 4-5 cents per GB, per month. The headline price for storage, of course, is ~3 cents, but you are charged for all outbound data as well as certain IO operations. I think 4-5 cents is a decent approximation.

So ...

If you're just walking in off the street and getting a small quantity of rsync.net storage, yes, it is 4-5x the price of S3 and you are paying that premium for UNIX-native storage and a phone number / email address that connects you to a real engineer (sometimes me, actually). Given that, at these smaller quantities, you're paying $10 or $20 per month, I think that's a very, very high value for the money.

If you're using larger amounts of storage, the pricing gets down to ~6 cents per GB (assuming annual discount) or even 3 cents per GB at petabyte levels. So at 10+ TB quantities we are just barely more expensive than S3 and at petabyte quantities we are decidedly cheaper.[1]

As always, if you're a small end user, email us about the HN discount which is quite substantial.

[1] Actually, it's even more competitive relative to S3 since, by default, all accounts have 7 daily ZFS snapshots enabled and 1+ TB accounts have 7 daily + 4 weekly. Those typically add between 20-40% space usage on our end, but you don't pay for that ... on S3 you would indeed pay for that retention and you'd have to roll your own snapshot/retention script/logic. At rsync.net, Apple-style "time machine" snapshots are "just there".

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29007/gkkih.html

That's for Solaris only though. I wouldn't expected any other implementations to have on-the-fly encryption of that kind. So OpenSSH is unlikely to be adding overhead on that front.

So you can indeed encrypt your data "at rest" and you would indeed control your own keys. We recommend the 'duplicity' tool which works very well for encrypted offsite backups at rsync.net:

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

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