50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.

hiAndrewQuinn 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up.

The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.

▲

dathinab 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc.

through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar

it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution

if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you

but if you need to backup you photo

▲

homebrewer 5 days ago | parent [-]

A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap, you can use any of its numerous competitors that are also maintained by professionals, whose whole business is also running a backup service. Say rsync.net or borgbase, which are at least 10× cheaper than tarsnap last time I compared them, and can be used with restic or borg which are much faster at restoring even relatively small amounts data (forget if we're talking terabytes, it's "weeks" vs "your link speed").

I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.

▲

pessimizer 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap

Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.

If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.

https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

	▲	bigstrat2003 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's what I do! I have a couple of friends from college and we back up to each other over a VPN. It's a very nice solution to the off-site backup need.

▲

LiamPowell 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Say rsync.net or borgbase

Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.

▲

lazyant 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

you are comparing data storage to a backup solution, not the target market