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.
> 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?
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.
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.