
Show HN: Cloud Storage with ZFS send and receive over SSH - rsync
http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html
======
xoa
I've used ZFS as my primary data workstation FS (as opposed to NAS), first
under OS X and then FreeBSD, for over 4 years now, and amongst the many
benefits backup/replication definitely rates highly for me. But while I'm
interested to see native send/receive in the cloud, particularly once
resumable support makes it into mainline OpenZFS, I'm actually not sure how
useful it'd be in general for plain backup purposes. One of the most valuable
choices Sun made in send/receive was that it uses normal stdin/stdout, and
that in turn can give ZFS immense flexibility in terms of cloud storage
targets. While I do local online replication to a NAS, for remote backup I
just dump to files. Simplifying here without all the exact options:

    
    
      zfs send tank@snapshot | lz4 | openssl enc | par2 > file
    

OpenSSL of course using AES-256 and a key, and par2 adjustable based on
characteristics of the target storage. This is part of a simple script to
produce and cycle incrementals. The result are an original and then set of
deltas that are client encrypted and have some redundancy even in the face of
errors in the foreign filesystem or transmission process, and thus can be used
practically _anywhere_ with minimal thought towards remote security, no need
to trust any sort of closed client or service, etc. It works nicely with
Amazon's offerings (including Glacier), particularly since they allow actually
physically sending in a hard drive which is really handy for freelancers or
small businesses with significant datasets but highly mediocre netlinks (ADSL
5/1 or some equivalent is still depressingly common in America at least).
Since par2 can also split output to arbitrary sizes and numbers, it'd be
possible to use this workflow for anything from optical to storage lockers as
well (dataset size permitting).

Really, with stdin/stdout the sky is the limit, and there are minimal ties to
any specific service since only the most generic raw cloud storage features
are being used.

~~~
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
Are you doing a full dump each time and syncing that? Or are you dumping and
syncing incremental streams (i.e. zfs send -i [...])? If the latter, how do
you deal with expiring old dumps, without having to re-sync a full dump
periodically?

~~~
eeZi
That's what I thought as well. It's impossible to expire old backups that way
since all backups sets depend on each other.

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showerst
Something I don't see in the docs, is it possible to mount rsync.net storage
with something like sshfs and use it like a filesystem? If possible, is there
anything stopping it from being a good idea?

I'm looking for an EBS style mountable storage for digitalocean instances,
since they don't scale up disk space to price very well.

~~~
hemancuso
Shameless plug:

ExpanDrive @ [http://www.expandrive.com](http://www.expandrive.com) enables a
very fast/robust version of this use case.

~~~
Veratyr
Don't want to post off topic but you should really update UserVoice. I bought
Expandrive V4 but haven't (and likely won't) upgrade to V5 since your
communication has been so limited.

The specific issues I had:

\- You promised transparent client-side encryption in V5 [0]. V5 is now here
and encryption is nowhere to be found.

\- You advertise a Linux beta yet when contacted about participation you
haven't responded [1]

[0]: [https://expandrive.uservoice.com/forums/205560-expandrive-
fe...](https://expandrive.uservoice.com/forums/205560-expandrive-feature-
requests/suggestions/5241535-client-based-transparent-file-encryption)

[1]: [https://expandrive.uservoice.com/forums/205560-expandrive-
fe...](https://expandrive.uservoice.com/forums/205560-expandrive-feature-
requests/suggestions/5492206-expandrive-for-linux)

Just in case people see your plug and decide to purchase based on what they
see in UserVoice.

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colechristensen
I've been a happy rsync.net customer for some time now. I don't use it much
but it's there when I need it. When maintenance or issues arise, notifications
come with good warnings and explanations – the cost is reasonable and the
service good.

~~~
rsync
Thanks! We're very glad to be serving you.

As a reminder to folks reading this, email us about the long-standing "HN
readers' discount".

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_8cm8
For all the great ingestion capabilities of rsync.net, their pricing still
isn't nearly competitive with any of the cloud storage services.

Could someone from rsync.net explain why? Am I looking at rsync.net the wrong
way? Is it meant to serve a different use case?

The front page of the website says "Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups" but the
pricing shows that it costs 8-20c/month depending on usage. Meanwhile GCS
Nearline and Amazon Glacier (also offsite backup products) are at 1c/GB and
even their regular storage is at ~3c.

Sell me. What does rsync.net offer me that justifies an 8x-20x price bump?

~~~
_delirium
I don't have anything to do with rsync.net, but having looked at both AWS and
them:

How cheap Amazon is heavily depends on your retrieval needs. Glacier is
basically for gigantic data vaults where you will never need to retrieve more
than a small fraction of it. It's very cheap for that, but has retrieval fees
if you need to retrieve >5% of your data at any given time, and they can be
_very_ high if you need to retrieve a significant amount of the data quickly
(also, there's a 4-hour minimum retrieval latency, so you wouldn't want any
possibly-needed-for-operations backups there). S3 allows your storage to be
"online" full-time, but adds a $0.09/GB bandwidth charge for outgoing data, in
addition to the $0.03/GB storage fee, so overall price depends heavily on what
you're pulling out of it.

The $0.06/GB promotional offer in this rsync.net post actually seems
surprisingly cheap, for always-online storage with no additional bandwidth
fees. Even their normal prices seem pretty fair to me, for something that
comes with full phone/email support, provides a regular POSIX filesystem with
SSH access instead of a weird custom API, etc. If I were warehousing petabytes
of never-to-be-needed data, the price difference over Glacier would be hard to
ignore. But for a lot of needs it seems quite competitive to S3.

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doublerebel
I've been going over beginning a ZFS storage service for a long time, however
two technical problems have held me back so far:

    
    
      * ZFS send/receive does not support pause/resume
    
      * SSH overhead may be overkill especially if the ZFS data is already encrypted
    

Therefore:

    
    
      * Do you have any plans to solve these issues?
    
      * Have you found them to be a problem in production?
    
      * Do you support encrypted ZFS?

~~~
alcari
Nobody outside of Oracle supports encrypted ZFS, and that's probably not going
to change any time soon (I'd love to be wrong, though).

~~~
stock_toaster
While a bit cumbersome and arguably suboptimal, at least on FreeBSD you can
use geli+zfs to get full disk encryption.

~~~
alcari
Sure, but that doesn't help in the context of zfs send, which serializes at
the filesystem level for transport. The stream is still going to be in plain
text. In fact, Oracle's ZFS still sends the stream decrypted and decompressed,
even if those properties are enabled.

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joosters
When I scroll down the page on my iPad, it appears to instantly reload and
snaps back to the top of the page again! What on earth is the page doing?

~~~
pan69
Custom scrolling seems to be the new Flash.

~~~
tracker1
I don't mind the parallax affect nearly as much as their homepage... it's just
a weird UX.

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gull
I may use this if it supports built-in encryption. Are encryption keys saved
on the client or are they saved on your servers?

~~~
rsync
We give you an empty filesystem to do what you want with.

So you can indeed encrypt your data "at rest" and you would indeed control
your own keys. We recommend the 'duplicity' tool which works very well for
encrypted offsite backups at rsync.net:

[http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)

[http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.html](http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.html)

~~~
gull
Do you plan on giving an encrypted filesystem?

