That's like comparing rsync to google drive. One is an open source tool where you can use whatever back-end you want, the other is a service. (Which is fine, just different kinds of things.)

However, in this case it's the open source tool that has a much easier user interface (I am actually proficient with tar, but still my tarsnap experience is like comparing 'restic backup /my/files --repo /mnt/backupdisk' with https://xkcd.com/1168/)

> One is an open source tool where you can use whatever back-end you want, the other is a service.

What is your definition of "service" that makes tarsnap - a company that asks you to pay them over time to provide an, uh, service - not one?

They probably meant this article is the open source tool and tarsnap is the service

Indeed. Restic is just something you apt install and nobody provides you any service (you have to organise your storage space yourself); tarsnap is not simply free to use for yourself with your own storage. (Not saying it has to be free, but that's what makes it the definition of a service you have to purchase.)

tarsnap is solid but has two major weakspots — it’s not price competitive, at least for the b2c product retailed from the site, and it is very slow.

Is tarsnap too expensive now?

For years we had a running discussion here, where patio11 writes a nice article called something like:

fake patio11> "10 reasons why tarsnap must raise the price and stop using funny units"

And a week later cperciva writes another article called something like:

fake cperviva> "Nah. Amazon reduced the storage price 10%, so I'm reducing the price of tarsnap in 1 picodollar/byte"

Tarsnap works out as ~6$/GB/year for me. That’s for a mostly managed backup service. The only thing missing is snapshot pruning which is slow and a bit of pain due to the way tarsnap’s cache works. Restore is on par with restoring from tape — reliable but slow, but who can really complain about how fast disaster recovery is?

Raw managed storage with rsync.net is 0.18$/GB/year.

Do it all yourself, with the associated peril and time sink that entails, and the disks will cost you 0.04$/GB/replica.

Tarsnap has its place and I’m still a happy customer, but it’s one small part of a wider strategy that includes bulk storage elsewhere — rsync.net with borgbackup and plain rsync, on premises ZFS dumpsters, and offsite drives used like they are tapes.

on https://rsync.net/pricing.html it says 2.5 cents per GB per month. so 0.33$/GB/year.

i have 700G so it would cost me ~ $230/year (and you have to buy a min of 400G)

microsoft onedrive is $70 for 1TB and you don't pay for bandwidth. can use rclone.

you get some other goodies too (office) which i don't use but i'd imagine it's a nice to have for some people.

Is the Microsoft OneDrive is $70 for 1TB a good option for the truly paranoid, or Microsoft will share the content in case they get a court order or some with a tank in their front door?

use restic.

I want to live in a world where tarsnap exists and is priced in picodollars.

I would be sad if either of those ceased.

Tarsnap is not expensive at all for its target audience: folks with highly compressible data. For any data that's not very compressible, it's super costly.

Example, if you are into photography it's not uncommon to generate hundreds of GBs of files _per year_. Only in 2020, I generated over 200GB of photographs. Putting that on Tarsnap would cost me about $60/month. In 5 years time, I could be paying upto $4000/yr. Tiered services like B2 would cost an order of magnitude less.

Why on earth someone would pay 10x-20x alternatives for encryption that these days is available in high quality free open source software such as Restic, Borg or Duplicacy?