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Comment by snuxoll | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the value-added component here where tarsnap compresses and deduplicates data.

That's not exactly rocket science these days (see bup). What you're paying for with tarsnap is making it totally rock solid and as usual the last 90% of the work is also 90% of the cost.

The point that suxnoll is making, though, is that the cost is not nearly high to begin with, b/c the data is dedup'ed and compressed. You're justifying an issue that doesn't quite exist.

The query that suxnoll responded to supposed that you have 400 GB of data with small deltas. But that's only possible if you're filling your harddrive with files created from random noise from /dev/random and updating all your files monthly by more random noise.

> That's not exactly rocket science these days (see bup)

Actually, combining crypto and dedupe in such a way that the server can never tell what's on the client computer but the client can still reliably pick what's changed and dedupe it?

That's honest-to-goodness computer science. And Colin is the guy who invented this stuff.

Crashplan does that to save you bandwidth and them space but you get unlimited space for the same price.

I did not miss that. If a lot of the data in question is in the form of sparebundles, mp3s, and/or video — for me, it would be — then good luck meaningfully de-duplicating and compressing that.

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