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Comment by skrause | Hacker News Reader

How does Tarsnap compare to Arq when using a Mac? Both do local encryption and incremental backups with deduplication. However, I pay $0.03 per GB-month on S3 with Arq and $0.25 on Tarsnap, almost an order of magnitude more expensive. And yet I constantly hear people saying that Tarsnap should be more expensive when I simply compare it to Arq and think that it already is very expensive.

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You paid $40 for Arq, though. Assuming you intend to keep it updated, that's $30/year¹, which buys you 120GB-month per year on Tarsnap. It also works everywhere where there's an Unix shell (including Windows with Cygwin), not just Mac OS X.

¹ (assuming 16 months between major versions, as in 3 → 4)

> It also works everywhere where there's an Unix shell

This really is Tarsnap's key differentiator (for me).

It's also worth noting that Arq does have command line functionality[1] (on OSX) as well as an open source CLI restore tool[2].

[1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/support/arq_help/pages/scrip...

[2] http://sreitshamer.github.io/arq_restore/

120GB * ($0.25/GB)/Month * 12 Months/Year = $360/Year correct?

So, $30/Year buys you only 10GB-month of storage on Tarsnap.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't meant you could get 120GB of storage for a year, I meant you could each year buy 120 units of "GB-month" (like kWh but for storage).

You could distribute that equally throughout the year, using 10GB-month per month, yes. Or you could use 1GB-month in the first month, 2GB-month in the second, etc, as your storage needs grew.

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