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Rsync.net

rsync.net

80 points6ak74rfy64 comments

I'm a happy user.

I don't have a very complicated setup: a daily rsync cron job from my workstation to my Synology NAS, and a daily cron job from my NAS to rsync.net. I told rsync.net to notify me if I stop uploading data for more than 7 days.

I could use borg, rclone, restic, etc. but rsync is used everywhere, not just backups, so it's a pretty safe choice for long term storage IMO. (I was surprised to learn that rsync is only 26 years old)

That's the extend of my backup system and I'm pretty happy with it. Sadly, I haven't had the chance to put it to the test, one day if I feel brave enough I'll format my hard drive and see if my backup strategy forgot anything :-)

I don't know if you're just using rsync, but automatically syncing modifications, corruptions and deletions without any kind of retention system isn't a good idea, and your post reads like that's what you're doing. If you can't recover when you accidentally deleted something a month ago and want it back, I wouldn't call what you have a backup system.

The difference between rsync and borgbackup is exactly this: the latter does backup retention properly.

"I don't know if you're just using rsync, but automatically syncing modifications, corruptions and deletions without any kind of retention system isn't a good idea ..."

This is, broadly, correct.

However, we have been encouraging our customers to configure "dumb" 1:1 mirror rsync jobs to us and then allow the platform to handle all of the retention with the ZFS snapshots.

An rsync.net customer configures any arbitrary schedule of days/weeks/months/quarters/years and then we (rsync.net) handle the rotation, retention and maintenance of these snapshots.

The benefits of this, beyond the fire and forget aspect, are twofold:

First, they are more efficient than typical retention schemes like 'rsnapshot' or "rsync snapshots" since ZFS diffs on a bit basis and not a full file basis - so if you change a file, but only by a little bit, you don't pay the entire size of the files as a penalty in your snapshot size.

Second, the ZFS snapshots are immutable. Even if someone steals your rsync.net credentials and wipes out your entire account, the snapshots cannot be changed.[1]

Of course you may do whatever you'd like - you can even configure snapshots on an account you use 'borg' with and get very inefficient "snapshots of snapshots". Whatever makes you happy - we just give you an empty UNIX filesystem to do whatever you like with.

[1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1453044746213990405

Thanks, that's a good argument for trying borg. To be honest it was simpler to use rsync with my NAS than hacking borg in last I checked.

My use case has always been to save my data in case of disaster, I haven't needed to rollback an accidental deletion... yet.

That said, rsync.net has daily ZFS snapshots with weekly retention, so you're able to roll back in that case.

I run a borg backup from my synology NAS to rsync.net and it was pretty easy to set up. I installed borg and borgmatic from the community repositories and use the synology scheduler to run it nightly. I followed the tutorial at https://docs.borgbase.com/setup/synology/.

> automatically syncing [..] corruptions [..]

This made me shudder. I used to replicate external drive A to B, in case one failed. Drive A failed by slowly corrupting file contents, which I didn't notice until a significant part of them was synced to B. Fun times.

Sync is not a synonym of backup.

rsync.net retains the last 7 days backup (via zfs snapshots) for free though. That's enough retention period for many people. You can add more of you want, but you'll pay for the extra storage usage.

I'd argue it's not enough. If you're using ZFS, you may notice a corrupt file during a monthly scrub. If you're not using ZFS, you may only find out years into the future, when the backups are long gone.

For accidental deletions, 7 days is indeed most likely fine.

You can configure snapshots for at least a few months, maybe more. Just that those for the first 7 days are free.

Rsync copies data to destination. Backup software such as Restic or Borg are miles ahead: incremental, snapshots, checksums, compression, encryption, etc.

Highly recommend Restic and Borg.

A big fan and a regular user of rsync.net here. I've used their borg offering on a number of occasions for myself and companies I worked with. I highly recommend them for their pricing and excellent support.

https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

ZFS backup is the attractive part of this service. But that’s $60/month for 5TB. It’s quite expensive, even accounting for a $5/month full time VPS (enough RAM and CPU for ZFS receive). The ZFS offering was better until recently where the minimum storage was substantially increased.

On the other hand, for non-ZFS backups, there is Backblaze and other cheap storage.

It’s hard to make sense of rsync.net these days.

"It’s hard to make sense of rsync.net these days."

We updated our pricing this past year and are, I believe, price-competitive with Wasabi and B2 for large datasets[1].

For medium sized datasets there is a premium that might pencil out given the free usage/bandwidth/transfer.

For smaller accounts there is a premium and in return for that premium you get actual person to person support from real UNIX engineers as well as a simple platform "that just works".

It's not for everybody. That's just fine.

[1] https://rsync.net/pricing.html

Always read the small print on these cheap providers, check for outbound data limits or minimum retention times

Also rsync has a cheaper plan if you eg only need a borg remote. We use them and borgbase.

I agree, for things like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. Usually if the service is a flat rate and/or unlimited, there are gonna be issues around performance, both upload and download. Rather than impose hard data size limits, these services usually make upload and/or download so painful at higher sizes that they become unusable or infeasible.

There are many services these days that have minimum retention times, including the cheaper tiers of S3 and GCS.

Backblaze doesn't throttle, has no minimum retention times, no minimum object size, and is 0.5 cents/GB/mo for storage and 1 cent/GB/mo for downloads with a 10GB free monthly storage allowance (without registering a CC) and a free 1 GB/day download allowance. Not associated with BB other than through HashBackup (I'm the author). Many of HB's large customers successfully use BackBlaze for their offsite backups. It's rock solid if you strictly follow their API guidelines, esp related to error handling.

https://rsync.net/products/restic.html advertises that rsync.net supports restic in append-only mode, but it doesn't, and when I emailed support, they acknowledged that this didn't work.

I'm surprised the docs are still up. I've seen others on HN mention this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26508338

It's wishful thinking on our part.

We really, really want to make the append-only mode with restic work but the security implications of the restic serve model (and mount ? going from memory here ...) make us very uneasy.

You are correct - at the very least we should edit that page. We keep coming back to this idea that there must be some way to make it work ...

> We really, really want to make the append-only mode with restic work but the security implications of the restic serve model (and mount ? going from memory here ...) make us very uneasy.

That's fair. The words "serve" and "mount" ring alarm bells, but I think it's misplaced in this case.

rclone "serves" over stdio, so all communication occurs over stdio-over-SSH.

rclone doesn't mount, but does have an internal VFS, which is entirely userspace and implemented in rclone's Go.

I'm amazed that rsync is not a registred trademark, internationally [1] or in Australia [2].

[1] https://www3.wipo.int/madrid/monitor/en/

[2] https://search.ipaustralia.gov.au/trademarks/search/quick/re...

Perhaps authors meant it this way? It’s consistent with the open source ethos

Unfortunately from personal experience, this is becoming rarer, and I would no longer equate open source with open trademarks.

The most egregious I’ve seen is an “open source” hardware company also trademark a term within an education trademark class that technically prevented others from advertising their own seminars or workshops.

I'm not sure why link to the front page of rsync.net when there's no new update, but for anyone considering rsync, one thing to note is that they have other products for incredible prices.

To start a discussion about it

What's the advantage of this over Hetzner Storage Box[0]? Seems to be the better option if I don't go into petabyte scale...

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box

Without having tried Hetzner Storage Box: the insanely good support, the transparency, the longevity of the operation.

Storage Box only has European presence. (Finland and Germany)

I always thought rsync.net would support ZFS send and receive. Now reading the site I'm not so sure.

Yes, rsync.net does support zfs send and receive, they have a special discount for that

"Yes, rsync.net does support zfs send and receive, they have a special discount for that"

Yes, we do support zfs send/recv and it works just like you'd expect it to. We even have transfer resumes, etc., and we run the latest stable/production ZoL code for these accounts.

There is no discount for this. The price is the same as standard pricing but with a higher, 4TB minimum account size.

We have to give you a virtual machine and IP address, etc., which is why there is a higher minimum. If you have less than 4TB of assets to protect I would recommend using the excellent borg tool and a normal rsync.net account.

I see, seems I confused two things, I stand corrected.

Here's the page: https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html , but it doesn't seem like there's a discount any more (probably because the regular price has dropped)

It's not a discount. It's a special account that forces you to have 4TB minimum which used to be 1TB, so it's not cheap just to have a small amount of data. In that case, better to just spin up your $5 instance and put zfs on it.

The ZFS integrity checks?

A quick look at Hetzners page also seems to indicate they use zfs: they also have integrity checks and their snapshot directory is .zfs/snapshots. Seems pretty similar.

I’ve been with SpiderOak for a while and am considering dropping it (the client is buggy and the company seems to have moved on to other services, letting this die). I’ve seen rsync.net posted here before, and I’ve also seen rsync (rsync.net’s founder’s HN account) comment here often.

One thing I would like to see on rsync.net is a single page that shows the different prices for a specific chosen storage capacity, including the (special) borg account pricing. Perhaps a separate page for the “HN Readers discount” (at rsync.net/hn, maybe?) too? Trawling through older order links with specific codes posted on HN seems a bit tedious (and likely not reliable since those could be outdated).

SpiderOak's CLI has been pretty stable for me across Windows, Linux, and now Mac (M1). The GUI is definitely buggy and tends to freeze for long periods of time, though.

Does anyone have an inside knowledge of the company wrt their plan for SpiderOak One? I'm grandfathered into the old unlimited plan and I'd rather not have to migrate any time soon.

GP here. I'm not on an unlimited plan, but am on a grandfathered plan that's cheaper per GB compared to what's on the website now.

I've had multiple issues with SpiderOak on backing up with the GUI (sluggish or getting stuck) and creating multiple versions of the same files. While I don't have inside knowledge, the company has said in emails that it's not actively working on ONE backup (this has been the case for the last two or more years). Any changes/improvements on ONE backup are postponed and left to a "we may probably get to it at some point" state. From the website and the marketing emails, it looks like the company is focused on "Space Security" and the CrossClave messaging product for enterprises.

I'm also interested in this. I've been using SpiderOak for years, but am currently trying to migrate away (to rsync.net, coincidentally). It's not that I've ever had any issues with SpiderOak, but nor do they seem to be a very engaged company (e.g. I've never heard of a SpiderOak person posting here on HN, but @rsync is never far away and is always friendly). It does sound like their efforts are in other directions.

Same boat here, SpiderOak on Ubuntu (not much issues fortunately) but it does seem abandoned and not sure about its future.

As a general noob I also don't understand how I should use rsync.net appropriately. Do I encrypt all my data files before or is that done by Borg/Restic for example?

GP here. You’d have to encrypt the data before sending it to rsync.net. Borg and Restic can do that for you, but you’d have to manage the encryption keys safely). Doing it by yourself before borg or Restic do the backup is unnecessarily complex.

There’s a special “borg account” at a lower price (compared to the standard one) on rsync.net. That one assumes that you setup the retention policies for older versions in borg since rsync.net doesn’t do any (additional) snapshots/retentions (like it does for the standard, but slightly costlier, accounts).

The bigger issue is making sure others (in one’s circles) who may need the data are able to use the tool for backups and restores. That’s where I prefer GUI tools that are easy to use and easy to demonstrate, rather than CLI tools and scripts.

(0 experience in offsite backups so apologies if this question seems a bit dumb)

I'm confused - can this be used as a simple cloud storage platform, or are there limits on how often you can upload/download data? If I can SSH into it at any time, why not use this over other storage providers?

No limits. The main reason you'd not use this over other storage providers is probably the price. For the money you pay, you'd really only use this for data you can't afford to lose, and won't constantly monitor for corruption yourself – i.e. backups.

is it really that expensive? I pay like $100 per year for 400GB, which includes geo redundency.

Access speeds up and down are fast, I can up or download whenever and how often I like, and with winscp it's basically just a mounted fs I can use. Oh and support is great, the few times I've had questions they have responded in detail within a few hours.

Do they really provide a Unix engineer to help you with your setup / write scripts ... ?

Not GP. “rsync”, the HN user who’s the founder of rsync.net, has commented here that everybody who works for them is a Unix engineer and knows the technology quite well. Based on past comments (you can look for comments by rsync on hn.algolia.com), I’m sure they’d help with setup. But custom scripts…I’m not sure. Maybe that depends on the complexity.

According to their pricing page there is a 680GB minimum, which is ~$120/year.

They do snapshotting on your behalf, so all you need to do is rsync.

Also bandwidth is free in and out which is far better than some pricey ones.

Wow - this came and went on the front page of HN yesterday and we had no idea.

Thank you to everyone for your kind words - I will personally look over the discussion thread today, a day late, and see if there are any questions I can answer.

Could you please look at my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32747618) and make some changes to your website? The various pricing schemes and special discounts are difficult to find/discover and compare. I'd appreciate if you could acknowledge (as a reply to that comment or a reply to this one) that you've seen my comment.

Looking at this today!

Btw, I just posted this as a happy user - no affiliation with you in any way.

Thank you rsync.net -- the zfs filesystem / managed service from a team that administers their own hardware give me peace of mind knowing my customers data (which is champion nowadays) is safe.

Look forward to using you more!

Sweet! I wanted / wondered if this exists. Feels a bit pricey for my home backup usecase though. Maybe I am spoiled by the cheap backup options!

If you don't need their snapshotting, there's borg discount if you search for it.

I just found out that now you need to pay annually for this.

Their deals are simply getting worse and worse.

Curious what are some of those "cheap backup options" ?

idrive and backblaze

to some extent office365 too

Huge fan of Rsync, excellent support, great product.

I don't consider it excellent support.

I once had a slow performance on their zfs instance and asked the support what happened and all they said was, "It should be better now, please check" and it still had mixed performance for a while and I asked what was the problem and they ignored my request for comment.

Also, I don't care much but their email formatting is like a random chat without any salutation and signatures in the end but just body message which kind of looks a bit amateurish.

And they don't seem to respond when they ask me whether they should proceed with a change and I respond "Please proceed" and I get no acknowledgement, so not sure when the change took place or they've read it because one time, they just missed my email and once I asked why I'm getting no response they said they have somehow missed the mail...

Really all pretty basic stuff...

Sad to hear, I always got replies and a solution to my problems, but it was some years back.

Looks interesting but the pricing is confusing.

0.99 cents requires 680GB minimum but the 0.1 cents does not have a minimum.

Given the title for the 1 cent option is 100-999 Terabytes, it’s presumably 100+ terabytes as the minimum. Took me a minute though!

The 0.1 cents tier is for "100-999 Terabytes", so I guess the minimum is 100 TB?

Looks offline from Ukraine

Looks offline to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com