OP here, thanks for using the cost estimator! [1] I'm glad you got some use out of it.

I use Backblaze B2 myself for most of my general purpose backup needs. It's actually $6/month, I believe.

Tarsnap fills but one niche in my overall system. It's a very important niche for which I haven't found any other providers who do anything similar (keyfiles, prepaid, borderline anonymous etc), but it's not where I store the vast majority of my stuff.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/tarsnap-calculator/

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rafram 5 days ago | parent [-]

I just don't really understand what the niche is. If you have a tiny bit of data that you want to keep backed up and rarely access, you can encrypt it with any number of easy command-line or GUI tools and upload it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere else with a free tier. If it's securely encrypted, there's no reason to care that the storage provider knows who you are. Tarsnap definitely has nerd appeal, but I can't think of a real problem that it actually solves.

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hiAndrewQuinn 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I readily admit I'm a nerd about this stuff, and this is primarily a hobby of mine. I am explicitly not 80/20'ing this because it's fun. [1]

One use case: I don't like the idea of having any accounts at all which I log into without the aid of a password manager. That creates a bootstrapping problem - how am I supposed to log into Google Drive to get my Google Drive password? A prepaid keyfile-based model is one particularly robust way of solving this. You stick your e.g. 100 kB password database in there, print out and shred the keyfile, stick the printout in a fireproof safe, and be virtually certain that whatever you put in Tarsnap has been untouched however many years you come back to it later. Print it on archival paper with some silica gel packets and it might survive for millennia in your weird subterranean vampire family castle.

"The business won't survive that long." I'm not so sure. Its ongoing costs appear minimal, and it generates eye watering amounts of float. $5 paid today is >$200 fifty years from now when compounded at 8% real interest. That very fact makes it much more likely that Tarsnap actually will survive for those 50 years, which should make us more likely to trust it, which... You see where this is going. This is one of those things where aggressively pricing too close to the bare metal costs might actually be a bad thing to a very important subset of users. One might even make the argument that, if the margins are as good as I'm supposing they are, then depending on the goals of the founder, Tarsnap is more likely to outlive S3 than S3 Tarsnap.

But again: Primarily a hobby.

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/

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TiredOfLife 5 days ago | parent [-]

Google supports printable 2fa codes

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1187538?sjid=3244...

print those and password, stick the printout in a fireproof safe

	▲	hiAndrewQuinn 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're on the right path! Alas, I am a heretic and think recovery codes under my approach may cause more problems than they solve. [1] Caution may be justified when it comes to doing this for something with as wide a surface area as a Google account. For me, if I'm going to have to compromise on 2FA somewhere anyway, I might as well go full hog and get an honest to goodness keyfile. [1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#wait-what-a...

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stevage 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>but I can't think of a real problem that it actually solves.

Maybe it's good for storing stuff that's illegal to possess?

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shelled 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I actually do that. I have two folders one synced up to Dropbox and another to iCloud and they are encrypted with Cryptomator. But I back up the mounted folders i.e data to tarnsap. Besides those encrypted files (fragments?) of Cryptonator were messed up by both iCloud and Dropbox over the last few years. Gratned it could be Restic and Borg (I use these two as well for larger data sets), but for very small data tarsnap has woked well for me and prices are tiny. For a larger data set, I won't pick tarsnap.

If there's an simple but "solid" GUI backup tool with (true) PAYG I'd migrate away from Tarsnap, but there isn't one.