Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by arsome on Monday January 25, 2021 @10:26PM (#25912128)

As tarsnap is run by a single person, it seems hard to suggest it to serious businesses due to the inherent risks there as well as the extremely high storage costs and difficult cleanup procedures compared to competing tools. I tend to prefer solutions like restic + B2 for their price and support, where you at least have a larger company behind the storage backend, you could even directly use it with S3 and it'd still be cheaper than Tarsnap.

Decent write up on the cryptography in restic here: https://blog.filippo.io/restic-cryptography/

Some tarsnap issues detailed here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by jclulow on Monday January 25, 2021 @11:10PM (#25912445)

Oh my word, that article on tarsnap is a frightful bore. I was a tarsnap customer and I thought it was great. If Colin is happy running it more like a utility than a rapacious VC-backed hyper-growth racket, I'm not sure why that is bad.

The only reason I stopped being a customer was because another rapacious racket of a business, Comcast, introduced miniscule but enforced data caps in my area, so online backups aren't attractive anymore and I've gone back to external drives and offsite rotation. When I cancelled, Colin sent me a personal e-mail to make sure it was alright to delete my backups. It was probably the best exchange I've ever had with a service provider.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by chipotle_coyote on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @02:14AM (#25913352)

> If Colin is happy running it more like a utility than a rapacious VC-backed hyper-growth racket, I'm not sure why that is bad.

I don't doubt your happiness, but I confess that I'm having trouble reconciling "running it more like a utility" with charging 25¢/GB per month for storage. That is just staggeringly high. What I'm paying $6/month for with Arq would be over $160/month if I were using Tarsnap, and I'm getting end-to-end encryption, deduplication, and versioned file backups. What advantages does Tarsnap bring to the table that justify such a tremendous cost?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by ForHackernews on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @12:52PM (#25918951)

The whole point of a backup service is that most of the time you don't need it at all, but when you do need it you really need it. From that perspective, it's like paying for insurance.

I'm not a tarsnap customer, but I think what you're paying for is a service built by a literal obsessive genius that will 100% work when the chips are down.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by imagica on Monday January 25, 2021 @11:23PM (#25912520)

I wish things turn around and smaller shops make a comeback. Big is not always better, in fact the service is almost always an afterthought.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by hyperdimension on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @01:35AM (#25913200)

"But that won't scale!"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by imagica on Friday January 29, 2021 @12:24AM (#25954325)

Lots of little ones would scale. And lots of jobs. It worked before...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by fletchowns on Monday January 25, 2021 @11:14PM (#25912461)

Unfortunately restic was a no go for me due to not being compatible with B2 keys that only have the permissions readFiles,writeFiles,listBuckets,listFiles (no deleteFiles). I don't want the attacker to be able to delete any backups if the manage to get to the B2 keys.

I believe this is the ticket that would add support for this to restic: https://github.com/restic/caddy/issues/2

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by pricechild on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @03:48AM (#25913758)

You can work around this by sticking rclone in the middle which does support soft delete: https://pricey.uk/blog/restic-backups-without-delete/

In short, give rclone your keys, (small ~/.rclone config file) tell restic to use an rclone backend and add an extra argument when running restic. (See the blog link above, all explained)

There's an open issue for this which doesn't seem to have moved: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/2134 - it does have a couple of PRs linked on there which implement proper soft-delete.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by fletchowns on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @04:56AM (#25914100)

Nice blog post! That's exactly what I needed earlier last year when I was looking at this stuff :)

Looks pretty straightforward. I am surprised it is not more of a priority to get merged though, it is so essential.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by SamReidHughes on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @12:21AM (#25912862)

Tarsnap seems to have become a multi-man operation.

https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/commits/master

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by tomnipotent on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @01:34AM (#25913193)

The other committer is his brother.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by eitland on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @02:26AM (#25913406)

Does it matter?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by tomnipotent on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @11:27PM (#25924287)

Yes. Having family help out on a 1-man show is an entirely different beast than hiring a full-time employee with wages, taxes, and healthcare. One of these two is a life-long trusted human that you've shared numerous life experiences with, the other is not.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by xchaotic on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @09:45AM (#25916264)

Looks like the brother just does the merges? (which are mostly automatic) so IMO best it matters because it's still mostly a one man, or at least a one family operation - i.e not very resilient to random acts of nature (which backups are supposed to protect from)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by SamReidHughes on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @02:00PM (#25919786)

Having them be two brothers makes for a lower business continuity risk than having it be a business owner + 1 random employee.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by varispeed on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @05:32AM (#25914300)

When a business becomes serious? Do you need to hire several workers to look legitimate? If that's still not enough, do you need to make yourself a slave of VC? Only problem I can see is that one man operation is susceptible to the run over by a bus scenario. However that is still better than a woke VC asking the "owner" to cancel some users.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by 5560675260 on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @06:06AM (#25914487)

I would seriously prefer a service like this to be run by a two man team. Or at least have a guarantee that I'll get automatically notified if something happens to a sole operator.

[ Parent | on HN ]