Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by St-Clock | Hacker News Reader

A few quick notes about our experience with Rsync.net

1. It is more expensive than S3/Glacier, but they offer "free" read-only snapshots, which can be very useful if your backup software or script does not perform its own snapshots.

2. It can be difficult to determine how much space is taken by the peculiarities of ZFS vs. your own data.

3. Although they offer subaccounts, it is not possible to know the disk usage of a particular subaccount.

4. If you have transfer speed issues, you can contact them and they may whitelist your IP (good if you are doing server backup, not useful for home backup on dynamic IP), which significantly increased speed for us.

5. They have a 10% "free" soft quota, mainly because it is difficult for mere mortals to know in advance how much space your backup will take on ZFS. They send an email when you reach the soft and hard quota.

6. You can communicate with a knowledgeable human by email. This has been helpful to diagnose small but weird issues we were facing.

7. Although we like S3 and Cloudfront, it's nice to have a backup location that relies on standard tool (rsync) and that is outside our usual providers/datacenters.

"but they offer "free" read-only snapshots, which can be very useful if your backup software or script does not perform its own snapshots."

I really need to say two things here ...

First, the zfs snapshots that are enabled on all normal accounts[1] can be your entire retention scheme. Which is to say, you can just do a "dumb" rsync to us ... no retention, no schedule, nothing - just an rsync every night - and on our end, we handle creating, maintaining and destroying your schedule[2] of full clones of your entire account. It's just like apples time machine, although more efficient since its using ZFS (bits) and not hardlinks (files).

Second, as the parent implies, they are immutable. They are read-only and cannot be destroyed even by our local root. This means that if an attacker destroys your local data, and then gains control of your rsync.net credentials and wipes out your entire rsync.net account, the snapshots will still be there. You can't remove them.

[1] But not on the discounted borg accounts, since we assume smart folks using borg set up their own retention schedule and that is how we make the accounts discounted - by not adding/rotating the snaps.

[2] Yes, you can define whatever snapshot schedule you like - the 7 daily (<1TB accounts) or 7 daily + 4 weekly (>1TB accounts) are the default, but you can add whatever additional snapshots you like (more dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies ...)

I've been using (well, "using". Borg sends data to their server, checks have never failed, I've never had to look at it) them for years and like them, so my experience is similar to yours.

The problem I have with storage providers being expensive is a sense of unfairness. Disk prices get cheaper all the time, so a provider that doesn't periodically cut its prices feels to me like it's been getting progressively more and more expensive. Now that I saw that Backblaze is ten times cheaper than my rsync.net plan, I'm sad :(

The real human support via email is fantastic. You don't need to log into the portal to get the response from their staff. I migrated from bup to Borg and they sorted out the issue via email relatively painlessly. Definitely a feature that I would not have valued before needing it.

When I was at Creative Commons we used rsync.net extensively for various things, and the support from rsync.net was amazing. John would frequently call me, go the extra mile to get any issues fixed quickly and our setup was a little nonstandard.

Highly recommended.

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