I've been using tarsnap for years and am in the process of migrating away from it.
Things that are not cozy:
1) There's no way to monitor your monthly spend per host/credit left on the account/etc. apart of logging into your account in a browser and manually keeping a spreadsheet. There's no web API to do it. You get an email warning when you have about 7 days of credit left. That's it.
2) Nothing is "a precious few megabytes" anymore. What seems like a negligible monthly spend at first can quickly grow up on you and soon you're spending highly non-trivial amounts. Which you might not notice due to 1) unless you are diligent in your accounting.
3) tarsnap restores are slow. Really really slow. A full restore can take days if you have non-trivial amounts of data (and make sure you have enough credit in your account to pay for that server-to-client bandwidth!) My understanding is that throughput is directly related to your latency to the AWS datacenter where tarsnap is hosted. Outside of north America you can be looking at nearly dial-up speeds even on a gigabit link.
Again, a problem that can surprise you at the most inconvenient time. Incremental backups in a daily cronjob tend to transfer very small amounts of data, so you won't notice the slowness until you try to do a full restore. And you generally don't test that very often because you pay for server-to-client transfers.
There are some workarounds for 3) and there's a FAQ about it, but look at the mailing list and you'll see that it's something that surprises people again and again.
privatelypublic 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like it's just a worse Glacier setup then?
Amazon has Pre-Pay in a semi-open beta.
CloudFront has 1TB/month free- knocking a large chunk of a restore's cost. (Note- you should have either encrypted your stuff yourself and/or S3 authorization/access control still works over CF)
At what seems to be <$2/mo per TB ($1/TB glacier Deep archive + 9cent/gb for metadata on S3 frequent access), no other solution comes close. The big issue is the lump cost of a restore. Which, is quickly worn down by being > $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.
amluto 3 hours ago [-]
Tarsnap has a nice security model, and it’s quite a challenge to convince any open-source tool to match it.
dividuum 3 hours ago [-]
restic is basically identical and you can choose where you store your data.
amluto 2 hours ago [-]
restic can supposedly be set up to prevent a corrupted / compromised client from destroying old data using S3 versioning policy, but this doesn’t appear to be a well-supported feature with clearly-described security properties.
Tarsnap, in contrast, has an explicit first-class ability to prevent a compromised client from damaging old backups.
placardloop 1 hours ago [-]
That’s because restic is not opinionated about where and how you store your backups. Restic provides a nice interface to create the backups, and then lets you choose where you want to store them (and how access to them is managed), be it locally or via SFTP or S3 or many other backends. Any security properties related to S3 are not in the scope of what restic is meant to do.
It’s pretty simple to enable versioning and object lock on your S3 bucket, but it is another step if you’re using restic. Sure, if you just want all of that taken care of for you, you can use tarsnap, but you’re paying a 5x+ premium for it.
The other nice thing about restic is that since it’s just the client-side interface, it allows others to provide managed storage. Borgbase.com is a storage backend that is supported by Restic that supports append-only backups, and is cheaper than tarsnap.
I would like to see an explicit discussion of what permissions are needed for what operation. I would also like to see a clearly specified model in which backups can be created in a bucket with less than full permissions and, even after active attack by an agent with those same permissions, one can enumerate all valid backups in the bucket and be guaranteed to be able to correctly restore any backup as long as one can figure out which backup one wants to restore.
Instead there are random guides on medium.com describing a configuration that may or may not have the desired effect.
kunley 4 hours ago [-]
I found restic is a prety cool alternative. (No hosting though, I am sending restic backups to a private server/vps)
muyuu 3 hours ago [-]
yep it's what i'm using right now
restic, and my own computers and storage, and the occasional rented device (VPS or similar, typically)
i find that the hassle of setting up my stuff is still preferable than having to worry about managing bills, subscriptions, and third parties just changing their policies
porridgeraisin 2 hours ago [-]
+1 for restic
Restic + rclone is a very nice combo. Works really well.
luizfelberti 4 hours ago [-]
I also switched away from Tarsnap because I needed to restore my personal PDF collection of like 20GB once and my throughput was like 100Kb/s, maybe less. It has been a problem for at least a decade, with no fix in sight.
I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?
amar0c 4 hours ago [-]
It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays.
Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
placardloop 4 hours ago [-]
The pricing isn’t due to AWS. Even if you used standard S3 and paid for data retrieval for your entire backup every single month, tarsnap is over 3x the price of just using S3 yourself. The markup on tarsnap is wild.
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.
ghostly_s 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah that pricing is crazy for something without any of the security that comes with using a BigCo. I've bounced off it in the past as soon as I got to their cutesy pricing model but I just played with the calculator linked here to model my needs -- three thousand USD a year for 1Tb of cold storage??
manbash 4 hours ago [-]
Do they charge for actual bandwidth as well? Seems like it. From tarsnap.com:
> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage: Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month)
Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)
muppetman 4 hours ago [-]
I used tarsnap for years, but as my data got bigger and I really wanted to have multipe offsite backups with different providers, I moved to restic.
I loved tarsnap - it's a great product. But restic feels very similar but you can backup to your local HD, a remote HD, or "the cloud" and everything is the same CLI commands.
ghostly_s 4 hours ago [-]
What provider(s) are you using?
muppetman 3 hours ago [-]
I use borgbase (they support restic) - backblaze with their s3 backend, and my own servers. So server A will copy to server B and vis-versa every ~10 minutes snapshot for quick/easy restoration should it be necessary, then nightly backups to borgbase/backblaze.
mmh0000 2 hours ago [-]
Tarsnap seems very expensive.
I'm backing up about 8TiB of data nightly using BorgBackup[0] + InterServer[1] and pay $240/yr.
This gives me differential encrypted rotating backups that are 100% mine and do not lock me into any specific storage vendor.
I really wanted to like Tarsnap and gave it a good hard look for my backup needs. Ultimately my problem was that there's no way for me to gauge how much the service will cost me. Going just by the amount of data in my home dir, it would be cost prohibitive to upload to Tarsnap. The site does assure me that thanks to compression and deduplication, the actual cost will be far less than I might estimate, which is great! But also, as far as I can tell there's no way to have the client give me an estimate of "here's how much data you actually have once the secret sauce is applied". So while the dedup and compression might make the costs far more reasonable, I won't actually know until I pay to store some data. Which means I might find that suddenly I owe Colin a lot of money if the size savings aren't very big due to my data not being very amenable to those measures. That's not a risk I'm willing to take, so ultimately I pursued other options.
adipid 3 hours ago [-]
This sounds cool, but the other comments here are concerning. I've been considring Hetzner's Storage Box, as it's cheap and I could use just about anything to backup my stuff – although I prefer restic.
Storage Box with Borg backup can be setup to work almost identically to tarsnap.
The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).
In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).
Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.
Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.
A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)
rafram 3 hours ago [-]
OP's cost estimator tells me it would cost a cool $250 per month to keep a terabyte of data backed up in Tarsnap. The same amount costs me $8.25 per month with Backblaze. That's not very cozy!
hiAndrewQuinn 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Does anyone know how it compares to restic or duplicate?
bccdee 3 hours ago [-]
I use restic. Restic offers everything advertised on the tarsnap website (deduplicated snapshots, e2e encryption). I pay $6 per terabyte per month using backblaze's cloud object storage. Wasabi offers 1TB at $7/mo. S3 costs $26/mo, but glacier is only $3.6/mo.
Storing one terabyte of data in tarsnap costs $250 per month.
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
Basically the same service, but much more expensive.
xnx 5 hours ago [-]
50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
hiAndrewQuinn 4 hours ago [-]
It depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up.
The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.
dathinab 5 hours ago [-]
it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc.
through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar
it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution
if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you
but if you need to backup you photo
homebrewer 4 hours ago [-]
A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap, you can use any of its numerous competitors that are also maintained by professionals, whose whole business is also running a backup service. Say rsync.net or borgbase, which are at least 10× cheaper than tarsnap last time I compared them, and can be used with restic or borg which are much faster at restoring even relatively small amounts data (forget if we're talking terabytes, it's "weeks" vs "your link speed").
I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.
LiamPowell 3 hours ago [-]
> Say rsync.net or borgbase
Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.
pessimizer 4 hours ago [-]
> A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap
Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.
If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.
That's what I do! I have a couple of friends from college and we back up to each other over a VPN. It's a very nice solution to the off-site backup need.
lazyant 4 hours ago [-]
you are comparing data storage to a backup solution, not the target market
kerblang 3 hours ago [-]
gzip + ccrypt -> thumb drive
Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies
hiAndrewQuinn 3 hours ago [-]
I love thumb drives, but Tarsnap is cheaper than the expected 10 year lifetime of a fresh and well maintained thumb drive for the kind of data I hold in there by about a factor of 20 (50 cents vs $10).
It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.
chevalier_1222 4 hours ago [-]
why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?
hiAndrewQuinn 4 hours ago [-]
Tarsnap's model is an ideal fit for a very small subset of the data I'm interested in safeguarding for the future. https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/ goes into it in a lot more detail.
Sesse__ 3 hours ago [-]
If you're interested in safeguarding data for the future, then I don't think the model of “my backup immediately disappears once the account runs out of money” gives me anything resembling a cozy feeling at all.
hiAndrewQuinn 2 hours ago [-]
That's actually one of my favorite features. That should never happen under the limited circumstances I use it for. If something goes so wrong that my account actually runs out of money before I notice, then I far prefer the default to be "intruder alert, intruder alert, wipe everything". There's a reason it's marketed as backups for the truly paranoid.
Things that are not cozy:
1) There's no way to monitor your monthly spend per host/credit left on the account/etc. apart of logging into your account in a browser and manually keeping a spreadsheet. There's no web API to do it. You get an email warning when you have about 7 days of credit left. That's it.
2) Nothing is "a precious few megabytes" anymore. What seems like a negligible monthly spend at first can quickly grow up on you and soon you're spending highly non-trivial amounts. Which you might not notice due to 1) unless you are diligent in your accounting.
3) tarsnap restores are slow. Really really slow. A full restore can take days if you have non-trivial amounts of data (and make sure you have enough credit in your account to pay for that server-to-client bandwidth!) My understanding is that throughput is directly related to your latency to the AWS datacenter where tarsnap is hosted. Outside of north America you can be looking at nearly dial-up speeds even on a gigabit link.
Again, a problem that can surprise you at the most inconvenient time. Incremental backups in a daily cronjob tend to transfer very small amounts of data, so you won't notice the slowness until you try to do a full restore. And you generally don't test that very often because you pay for server-to-client transfers.
There are some workarounds for 3) and there's a FAQ about it, but look at the mailing list and you'll see that it's something that surprises people again and again.
Amazon has Pre-Pay in a semi-open beta.
CloudFront has 1TB/month free- knocking a large chunk of a restore's cost. (Note- you should have either encrypted your stuff yourself and/or S3 authorization/access control still works over CF)
At what seems to be <$2/mo per TB ($1/TB glacier Deep archive + 9cent/gb for metadata on S3 frequent access), no other solution comes close. The big issue is the lump cost of a restore. Which, is quickly worn down by being > $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.
Tarsnap, in contrast, has an explicit first-class ability to prevent a compromised client from damaging old backups.
It’s pretty simple to enable versioning and object lock on your S3 bucket, but it is another step if you’re using restic. Sure, if you just want all of that taken care of for you, you can use tarsnap, but you’re paying a 5x+ premium for it.
The other nice thing about restic is that since it’s just the client-side interface, it allows others to provide managed storage. Borgbase.com is a storage backend that is supported by Restic that supports append-only backups, and is cheaper than tarsnap.
https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/030_preparing_a_new_...
I would like to see an explicit discussion of what permissions are needed for what operation. I would also like to see a clearly specified model in which backups can be created in a bucket with less than full permissions and, even after active attack by an agent with those same permissions, one can enumerate all valid backups in the bucket and be guaranteed to be able to correctly restore any backup as long as one can figure out which backup one wants to restore.
Instead there are random guides on medium.com describing a configuration that may or may not have the desired effect.
restic, and my own computers and storage, and the occasional rented device (VPS or similar, typically)
i find that the hassle of setting up my stuff is still preferable than having to worry about managing bills, subscriptions, and third parties just changing their policies
Restic + rclone is a very nice combo. Works really well.
I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?
Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.
> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage: Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month) Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)
I'm backing up about 8TiB of data nightly using BorgBackup[0] + InterServer[1] and pay $240/yr.
This gives me differential encrypted rotating backups that are 100% mine and do not lock me into any specific storage vendor.
[0] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[1] https://www.interserver.net/storage/
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).
In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).
Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.
Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.
A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)
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/
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/
Storing one terabyte of data in tarsnap costs $250 per month.
The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.
through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar
it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution
if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you
but if you need to backup you photo
I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.
Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.
Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.
If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.
https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096
Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies
It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.