Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by patrec on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @08:25AM (#25915485)

Colin Percival is obviously a smart and very skilled guy but I am mystified why people on HN keep recommending tarsnap, it seems a terrible product for almost any imaginable audience.

If I'm a normal end user, I will probably get a vastly easier to use product at about 1-10% of the price from Backblaze. And if I'm a serious business that can easily afford the > 10x premium and engineering to configure the backup I probably wouldn't want to entrust it to some company with what looks to be a bus factor of one and the apparent technical limitation that a restore might cost me a few DAYS of unanticipated downtime [1].

I mean, sure, if you are some unix nerd wanting to backup your dotfiles and a few small documents (or repos) for maybe around ~$50/year, why not go with some artisanal backup service for HN street cred (and a laudable open source donation policy)? But what other good use cases are there?

Am I missing something obvious?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621093

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces by JoachimSchipper on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @11:08AM (#25917408)

E.g. relative to the author's script, tarsnap get you automatic deduplication across backups... which, if you're like me and basically generate more and more data, allows you to store lots of historic backups at basically no overhead over just storing today's data.

Also, good encryption and security; e.g. Tarsnap is trusted by Stripe (https://www.tarsnap.com/testimonials.html).

Tarsnap does have real downsides - restores can indeed be slow, bare per-GB cost is high, and "like tar" is not a user interface that everyone will like - but there are definitely upsides, too.

[ Parent | on HN ]