
C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage - risq
https://www.online.net/en/c14
======
lucb1e
For anyone else who was wondering what "80 Go" means, it's 80GB.

It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French
call their bytes "octets" \-- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I
thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps
variant of theirs or something.

~~~
mikmak
indeed the slider was lost in translation, I have forwarded this to our web
team, thanks

------
kakwa_
This offer is really strange.

It claims lot of guaranties for your data (99,999999999% durability).

It claims to be secure against all natural and human destruction, despite
being located in only one datacenter, 25 meters under the ground, in Paris,
which means it could be subject to floods (directly or indirectly).

It claims to be able to handle formats that don't exist yet (for example,
LTO-1 to LTO-10, the most recent version of the media being LTO-7).

It claims (with a footnote) to be able to handle "Secret Défense" data, which
is extremely dubious. "Secret Défense" is the second most restricted
classification in France. It's for highly sensitive information. Companies
dealing with "Secret Défense" have to put many security measures in place
(proper access control, separated networks, personnel habitation by the
government, physical protection, tracking of every copy of every documents...)
and are regularly audited by the government. The penalties for messing with
that kind of data are pretty harsh, you could spend several years in prison if
you publish an SD or just a CD (Confidentiel Défense) document, even
accidentally.

Even if it's clearly targeting backup of state related data, it doesn't seem
to have been audited by the ANSSI (french National Agency for Computer
Security).

What is weird is that Online is a well established company (the parent
company, Iliad is 4 billions euros in revenue).

~~~
mikmak
Well, the shelter is still actually quite higher in Paris than the Seine (and
quite far from it too), floods are not a concern at all in the area of this
datacenter.

Regarding the LTO format, well LTO-10 seems to exist from what Google tells me
(but I am no expert there to be honest ;)

As for the Secret Defense certification, this is ongoing, and, as you stated,
we are part of a larger group which already have lots of relation with
institutions like ANSSI but we (Online) have also been working with them to be
certified in the coming months, of course this is a long and tedious process
(as every certification is _sic_ ), but we are working on it every day and we
see no reason we could not get to the end of it, we have a complete team of
guys working on completing all the certifications displayed on the website and
we are working with all our teams to get things done right for this.

The whole C14 infrastructure itself has been carefully designed _from the
beginning_ with people knowing all the certifications requirements to make
sure nothing could get in the way to pass the certifications for it.

Hope this clears a bit your worries,

Mik (Online.net network)

------
bluedino
>> Your important data are encrypted AES-256 and replicated many times then
stored in our 25 meters deep underground fallout shelter, located in Paris,
with no known natural, technological and military risks.

So, only one location.

~~~
a-priori
Yeah, it's pretty silly to say "no military risk" about any single location.
Yes, France is as geopolitically stable location as there is on Earth, but
it's also part of NATO and NATO has rivals, like Russia and China, with whom
they may go to war with in the future. France has been invaded in the past,
and may be again.

If you're really concerned about possibilities like that, you should be
storing your data redundantly such that it's unlikely that all the locations
would be on the same side of a war. France is a good choice for one location;
now choose one non-NATO superpower (China?) and one unaligned nation (Brazil?
India? Egypt?).

You want to be reasonably certain that at least one location would be either
neutral or the victor in any war. Only then can you say you're as close to 'no
military risk' as you can get.

~~~
leed25d
Antartica?

~~~
jdc0589
But what if there is a massive Goa'uld battle?

~~~
50CNT
If that is part of the threat model for your SaaS app, you may be over-
engineering.

------
ris
Website impossible to use because it hijacked my scrollbar without
understanding the dimensions of my browser window.

~~~
Etheryte
Pages that affect your scrolling in any way are the worst. It's just as bad as
popups.

------
hoahluke
This looks great and seems feature-rich enough to get started with straight
away! I'll definitely check it out for server backups over scp.

My only suggestion is that you have a native English speaker proofread the
text on your website. There are a few grammatical and translation errors which
make the service seem less professional.

~~~
lucb1e
Or just anyone who actually speaks English. As a Dutchman I spotted a bunch of
mistakes as well...

------
nickpsecurity
The one advantage of this business nobody is mentioning so far is that they've
been around since 1999. The first thing I do when I see "long-term" or "put
all your data in our hands" is see if they're a recent, VC-backed company. If
they're recent, then they might be inexperienced. If they have a good team,
then the product and network are still new with bugs waiting to be found. If
they're VC-backed, then _run_. The reason being they'll sell out eventually
with the service and your data possibly going offline. Happens way too much.

So, for anything long-term, I always recommend going with an established
company with a track record for innovation. I don't know these people but
they've been hosting since 1999. That means they showed up during a hard time
[1] for IT then lasted and improved until 2016. I don't know if they're VC-
backed or the quality of their product. Looks innovative, though, for a 90's
era company. So, altogether a nice, first impression without the sell-out risk
common among storage providers that show up on HN a lot.

Note: One can still use VC-backed providers so long as they're just one among
many you use. That way you yourself can exit when they do without threat to
operations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-
com_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble)

------
jamescun
No mention of what technology is backing the service, however I like the
support for existing file transfer protocols (particularly SFTP), no need to
wait for or build yourself an integration, existing tooling just works.

~~~
renchap
From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed
because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split
the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on
a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the
hardware later.

~~~
tiernano
sounds similar to backblaze... though they use XFS (IIRC) for their file
system, but do the RAID type stuff themselves...

~~~
renchap
Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you
need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on
the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the
safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.

~~~
rsync
Wait, this isn't random access (live) storage ?

How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be
checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...

~~~
rakoo
It says on the page that there's a 7 days window during which your data is
freely accessible and mutable, after which it is permanently stored in the
homemade infrastructure.

------
mwambua
Very interesting. Aside from the slight inconvenience of not being able to use
standard tools like ftp, scp and rsync... Amazon Cloud Drive's $60 a year plan
([https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/))
is still significantly cheaper for storing more than ~2.5TB. It's also free of
charges per operation and such like.

Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and
redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.

~~~
brandur
Can anyone with direct and frequent experience with Amazon Drive comment on
how well the product's been working out for them overall?

I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its
interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does
seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I
currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use,
but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.

Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a
folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files
that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that
have subsequently been removed locally.

~~~
mwambua
I've been fairly happy with it... though I'm not a heavy user. I've mostly
used it to backup pictures and email.

I use rclone ([http://rclone.org/](http://rclone.org/)) for my syncing email
backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be
worthwhile checking out.

Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely
useful for serverside backups.

~~~
DavideNL
Unfortunately rclone doesn't support encryption (yet) though... so the cloud
provider can see all your data -
[https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219)

(unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)

~~~
mwambua
Mmm... true. Though if you're truly paranoid then you'll never really trust
anyone to encrypt your data. :) I use tools like attic ([https://attic-
backup.org/](https://attic-backup.org/)) to create encrypted snapshots of my
backups.

------
tiernano
Interesting... If i am reading this right, to store 1TB there its costs
EUR2.05 per month. uploading and downloading are "free" but only from the non
vault. You upload and download from a tmp storage, which, after either 7 days
or when you say, gets put into permanent storage. that move is what costs
EUR0.01 per gig... hence, uploading 1TB will cost EUR10.24. uploads can use
FTP, SFTP, Rsync or SCP and they also an API too... might try this out...
handy for photo storage...

------
nine_k
tl;dr: a cheap _data archival_ solution; upload is free, storage is cheap
(€0.002 / GB / mo), download is somewhat less cheap (€0.01 / GB) and not
instant; rsync / sftp IS supported for upload, but an API call is needed to
complete the operation.

Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from,
but would like to keep just in case.

(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)

~~~
RubyPinch
> send [...] using FTP, SFTP, Rsync or SCP,

and upload and download are both free, operations (archiving/unarchiving?, et
al) are not

Unless they changed it in the space of 16 minutes, I think you might of wanted
to give a closer look for making your tl;dr

~~~
nine_k
Oops! Thank you; fixed.

------
cm2187
That's €0.002 per GB/m, AWS Glacier is $0.007 per GB/m. So it's like a third
of the price. Do I read this right?

~~~
lucb1e
Amazon has always been extremely expensive in storage. I wanted to start a
company doing online backups because every option was outrageously expensive.
Like, so expensive I could just buy new disks and host them myself every 2
months for what they were trying to charge. (A disk lasts about 3 to 4 years,
so that's a >2000% profit margin.)

Only Backblaze had unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month, but I wanted to
upload multiple terabytes from a server and they only allowed uploading stuff
through their custom, closed-source client.

I didn't have enough time to get my backup service off the ground, but prices
have been getting significantly better since then (this was two or three years
ago). Dropbox, Google Drive and others are now nearly reasonable and Amazon is
lagging behind a bit. I'm still waiting for another price cut, and C14 seems
to be doing it. Backblaze B2 is also interesting, but it has other issues
again.

~~~
cm2187
Re Blackbaze B2, what other issues can you think of?

~~~
lucb1e
What I mentioned in another post in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971353)

------
runako
Their comparison section looks like an advertisement for Backblaze B2. C14
looked interesting until I got to that part. Now, I'm not sure why I would
choose C14 over Backblaze.

~~~
programLyrique
I think there may be something missing in the comparison table. When I look at
the prices of Backblaze, [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
providers.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html) it
is $0.05 for 1 mo but in the table on the website of C14, it's written "free"

~~~
ausjke
Also I think Backblaze is geared towards backing up your Desktop with its own
client software, or can I use regular scp/ftp/etc(standard transfer utilties)
to do my own upload/download?

~~~
dunham
Backblaze "B2" is a separate service for blob storage with a REST API. It's
currently in public beta. I presume its built on the same infrastructure. You
can store about 10GB for free if you want to play around with it.
(backblaze.com/b2/docs)

------
ianleeclark
It's nice that the customer actually gets to control the encryption key. I'm
not too knowledgeable on secure cloud storage systems, but from what I've
heard about other cloud storage systems that encrypt files, it's typically the
cloud hoster who controls the keys.

~~~
jlgaddis
On "other cloud storage systems", nothing is stopping you from encrypting your
files _before_ uploading them.

This is exactly what I do for personal files that I upload to S3/Glacier for
archival purposes -- they are GPG encrypted before ever being transmitted.

------
CiPHPerCoder
If they hadn't hijacked my browser's scrollbar, I might have kept reading.

Can anyone compare the advantages of C14 to, say, S4 by Least Authority? I
kind of like not having to trust my service providers for security when
encryption does the job well enough.

------
thinkMOAR
Why is regular FTP even supported for so called secure storage?

So far it reads as secure 'because we say it is secure'? I find the whole idea
of putting your data on hardware other control and still consider it 'secure'
a bit strange. Though that might be just my twisted mind.

Also note they charge for internal traffic (and im not sure if you can measure
these yourself to make sure the invoice is correct.):

"An operation is an action between your temporary safe-deposit box and C14
infrastructure: Archiving, Unarchiving, Destruction or Verification.
Transactions are billed according to the volume of data to be processed at a
price of € 0.01 / GB"

Do your math before simply signing up, my penny.

~~~
mikmak
the FTP is actually TLS enabled

Mik (Online.net staff)

~~~
davidcelis
so why not say FTPS?

------
leetbulb
Any different than Backblaze B2? Seems that B2 is still cheaper and more
mature.

~~~
chrisper
B2 has a file limit of 5GB. No thanks.

What's with the downvotes?

Here: "A file contains a sequence of bytes. Any file on your computer can be
uploaded to B2 and stored in a Cloud Storage, as long as it's not too big.
Files can range in size from 0 bytes to 5 billion bytes. "

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/files.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/files.html)

~~~
RubyPinch
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html)

~~~
chrisper
Thanks. I was using rclone last time to upload files and that's when I had hit
the file limit. So I googled and found the link I provided in my comment. It
appears that rclone does not support large file upload! hm...

EDIT: Actually it's in progress:
[https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456)

EDIT2: It is actually already implemented in v1.30!

------
IgorPartola
I am confused: what is the "Cost of Operation"? Is that a one-time fee? For
1.3 TB of data, they are quoting something like 2.58 per month and 12.88 "Cost
of operation".

Also, can I use this with duplicity?

~~~
ausjke
After reading the page the 'cost of operation' might be what happened before-
your-download and after-your-upload, as you are dealing with its deposit-
cache-storage, so I assume it means 'archive-from-deposit/unarchive-to-
deposit'. This is the same as charging for download(so download is _not_
free), and nearly the same as charging for upload(unless you remove the
uploaded content from deposit quickly).

For Glacier I believe the download is not free? You need pay for the retrieval
of stored data.

------
rdebeasi
The name is interesting. I wonder if it's a reference to carbon 14, the
radioactive isotope of carbon used for carbon dating.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating)

Or, maybe the service is 4.66 times as good as Amazon S3?

Or, the 14th letter of the alphabet is N. If we swap that for 14 we get "CN",
which is the top-level domain for China, which is most certainly not in
France.

The conspiracy theory possibilities are endless! ;)

------
advisedwang
> The durability of your data are covered by a contract with clear guarantees
> with financial compensation for loss of data.

I wonder what the details of the SLA are. I can't find them on the page.

~~~
mikmak
in the T&S here
[https://www.online.net/cgv-c14-en.pdf](https://www.online.net/cgv-c14-en.pdf)

~~~
emilyfm
Note the SLA compensation (clause V) says it only applies if the data is
stored in more than one C14 datacentre, which is currently not possible.

------
anc84
What is the difference between Standard and Entreprise except for the latter
being more expensive?

~~~
Algent
Looking at their documentation it look like there is more redundancy and you
get "increased priority" on requests.

[https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers](https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers)

------
wslh
How does it compare against Amazon Cloud Drive that has unlimited storage for
USD ~60/year?

~~~
_asummers
Whoah. I had no idea about this. That's massively cheaper than Google and
Dropbox. Is there some catch about max download size limits per day or
something?

~~~
chrisper
There is an unpublished max file size. I think the max file size is 10GB.

------
dpc_pw
Would it be possible to use it for syncing data? I mean I have deduplicated
data, and then I generate more backups, and would like to sync new
chunks&remove old chunks from the c14 backup.

------
ixtli
I honestly might pay for this service because they used the word "data"
correctly (it's the plural of datum) which got me to keep reading long enough
to get to the numbers.

------
advisedwang
What is the difference between "standard" and "enterprise"? Typically I expect
to see something extra in return for the extra cost of the enterprise
offering.

~~~
mikmak
it's quite detailed in the documentation here :
[https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers](https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers)

------
ape4
Intuitively, it seems sub-optimal (for Americans and Canadians) to send your
backup across the Atlantic ocean - probably slower than something on the same
continent.

~~~
programLyrique
You have to pay a 1 € to add or get back the data, so it's more for long term
storage. I don't think the speed of transfering data is hugely crucial in this
case.

------
ruipgil
Two things very wrong with the landing page: the horrendous parallax effect
and the "Go" instead of Gb.

------
lil1729
"Long term" and "cloud" in one sentence! Isn't "long term cloud" an oxymoron?

There is no cloud, only other person's computers.

------
homero
Idk I'll stick to b2

------
pi-rat
While the price seems awesome, please stop overriding my browser's scroll :/

~~~
gizmodo59
[http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/) I do not
understand why many choose to do it. It is definitely annoying.

~~~
iyn
For me the apple site looks and feels fantastic ;)

~~~
lucb1e
The intro animation is annoyingly slow, but are you supposed to be able to
scroll on that page?

Another page, the specs, does not seem to override my scrolling, so that feels
fantastic indeed but it's probably not what you mean.

------
syats
"C14" is suspiciously similar to "CIA"... just saying.

~~~
xxdesmus
No, It's really not.

~~~
neals
Or is it, agent "xx"?

------
swehner
"send up to 20 TB of data using FTP... " \-- that's funny. At 24 MBit/s it
comes to 2,000 hours, which is more than two months.

~~~
tiernano
where did the 24mb/s come from?

~~~
swehner
Highest listed ADSL _download_ rate
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line#ADSL_standards),
ADSL2+)

But here we actually want the upload rate, so it would take even longer.

