
Rsync.net – Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups - fgeorgy
http://www.rsync.net/index.html
======
St-Clock
A few quick notes about our experience with Rsync.net

1\. It is more expensive than S3/Glacier, but they offer "free" read-only
snapshots, which can be very useful if your backup software or script does not
perform its own snapshots.

2\. It can be difficult to determine how much space is taken by the
peculiarities of ZFS vs. your own data.

3\. Although they offer subaccounts, it is not possible to know the disk usage
of a particular subaccount.

4\. If you have transfer speed issues, you can contact them and they may
whitelist your IP (good if you are doing server backup, not useful for home
backup on dynamic IP), which significantly increased speed for us.

5\. They have a 10% "free" soft quota, mainly because it is difficult for mere
mortals to know in advance how much space your backup will take on ZFS. They
send an email when you reach the soft and hard quota.

6\. You can communicate with a knowledgeable human by email. This has been
helpful to diagnose small but weird issues we were facing.

7\. Although we like S3 and Cloudfront, it's nice to have a backup location
that relies on standard tool (rsync) and that is outside our usual
providers/datacenters.

~~~
lighttower
The real human support via email is fantastic. You don't need to log into the
portal to get the response from their staff. I migrated from bup to Borg and
they sorted out the issue via email relatively painlessly. Definitely a
feature that I would not have valued before needing it.

~~~
mattl
When I was at Creative Commons we used rsync.net extensively for various
things, and the support from rsync.net was amazing. John would frequently call
me, go the extra mile to get any issues fixed quickly and our setup was a
little nonstandard.

Highly recommended.

------
AdamGibbins
There's much cheaper pricing here:
[http://rsync.net/products/attic.html](http://rsync.net/products/attic.html)

0.03 USD instead of 0.08 USD. Beating even their top tier -- so long as you
follow the constraints mentioned within the link.

~~~
rendaw
At 0.03 (1tb = $30/mo) it's still much more expensive than pretty much every
other service mentioned in this thread.

~~~
StavrosK
Yes but it's the only service that supports running the attic/borg server :(

~~~
rsync
We're also the only service that allows you to 'zfs send' to a remote zpool.

------
lewiscollard
I thank the rsync.net folks for getting rid of that horrific scrolljacking on
the homepage which was there the last time I looked. Actually, it seemed to
have been fixed since I complained about it to them on here.[0] Not sure if
those events are connected :)

While their pricing is substantially more than many others (the primary
complaint that I see here), in return their support is the best I have ever
received from any company ever. Getting responses, in less than ten minutes in
some cases, from fully-clued and super-competent engineers - I'll take it.

(no connection to rsync.net other than that I've used them at work in the past
and I'm renting space on someone else's account for my personal backups)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12960218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12960218)

~~~
rsync
We got a lot of complaints about that weird scrolling behavior - thank you for
your own complaint which surely pushed us closer to ripping it out.

I can confirm that nobody that works at rsync.net _is not_ an actual UNIX
engineer. You will never talk to anyone here that isn't an expert.

Rare these days, but sometimes you'll even talk to me.

~~~
lewiscollard
> I can confirm that nobody that works at rsync.net is not an actual UNIX
> engineer. You will never talk to anyone here that isn't an expert.

Ah, greetings rsync.net person, and thank you for the reply :) That makes
sense. Your staff are a true credit to your company. And the only times I (or
people I am working with) have had to talk to you is because we were trying to
do something weird like getting a MegaFuck3000 NAS with Debian version -1.5
working with your systems, not because your infrastructure has ever failed.
Much love for your company and all that make it as great as it is.

<small>(but seriously I preferred your old webpage)</small>

------
rys
Anecdata, but I've had nothing but performance problems with rsync.net and
while their engineers were helpful to try and diagnose why, ultimately I've
been left with ~10Mbps to/from their network/storage. That's "fine" for
storing with them, since I don't really mind how long the transfers take, but
I dread restoring my data at that rate if I ever need to.

I might try a brand new (attic) account and see if that lands me on a storage
array with good performance.

~~~
rsync
Please be in touch with us again (today, even) - performance issues at
rsync.net are _always_ network issues. We should be able to do _something_ for
you, perhaps moving you to one of our other global locations ...

------
sdotsen
Why not S3? I use Arq with my Mac to back up my important doc, which gets
encrypted in my S3 bucket. However, I'm still looking for a viable method to
backup all my photos and videos. Right now they reside on multiple external
hard drives.

~~~
StavrosK
You need this:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-
backups/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

About your S3 question, having something like rsync.net (where you can run a
server process) is much faster/easier/better because your backup software can
know exactly what's stored on the remote side and only send diffs.

I'm sure this can be overcome with some clever client-side engineering, but
having a server process is always going to be more flexible overall.

A more pragmatic reason is "because Borg doesn't run as well on S3".

~~~
cvwright
This is very helpful. Thank you!

~~~
StavrosK
No problem, glad I could help!

------
rendaw
Dropbox doesn't have completing, fixed interval backups and has fairly buggy,
heavy, intrusive software (on linux). Google/Microsoft's services don't have
differential backups and their software is generally lacking.

Rsync.net promises exactly what I want, but at 6/gb ($60/mo for 1 tb) it's 5x
more expensive than Dropbox so I'm manually hacking around Dropbox's offering
for the moment.

~~~
vitalysh
I've been using rclone ([http://rclone.org/](http://rclone.org/)) + AWS
CloudDrive form my home backups. Currently storing around 4TB for just
60eur/year. Perfect setup for me personally.

~~~
bckygldstn
Me too, and I've tried a lot of setups before settling on this. I can download
faster from Amazon drive than reading from a USB 2.0 hard drive, and rclone
makes it easy to keep important documents in sync on both services as well as
locally.

------
hyperion2010
I've been looking into rsync.net for personal offsite backups (turns out using
zfs locally doesn't make offsite easier), and was just doing the math
comparing the monthly cost to buying drives, filling them, and leaving them at
lab. Rsync.net offers a ton of awesome features, sadly the pricing is about an
order of magnitude too high for a personal use case :(.

~~~
diakritikal
Can't you just schedule an rclone cron job?
[http://rclone.org/](http://rclone.org/) \- it supports a decent number of
cloud services, maybe one suits your budget/requirtements? That's what I do
from my FreeNAS box.

~~~
leesalminen
I just configured rclone to sync roughly 1MM files (and growing) to GCloud
Coldline. Excellent tool.

------
pyvpx
why would I use this over tarsnap?

~~~
brians
This is 4-8 cents per GB-month, with no transfer fees. Tarsnap is 25 cents per
GB-month, plus transfer fees.

That's for Tarsnap's encoded data---but that seems roughly comparable to
rsync.net's free snapshots. So Tarsnap is something like 5x the cost.

For that 5x cost, you get secrecy of your data (but not your connectivity,
metadata, backup schedule) from your backup provider.

------
esseti
anyone that can suggest me a personal backup system? I've < 100GB of photos
(RAW) to store as a second backup (I already have them in an external HD).
Amazon Glaciar could work for me, just i don't get much how it works and if I
can use as a sort of Dropbox with very low access rate.

~~~
throwawayish
You _probably_ don't want to use Glacier for personal backups if there is a
decent chance you need a significant restore, or want it quicker than hours.

~~~
esseti
Any other possibile solution? I was thinking of Glacier just beacuse of the
RAW camera files I want to backup. I've them in two external HD, I don't
access them a lot, so I was thinking of keeping just 1 HD and put the rest in
glacier. If it takes 24h to get them back is not a big deal for me.

~~~
throwawayish
Glacier is meant as an archive - put stuff in, read just very little bits
back. Reading everything/significant parts back costs extra.

But if you're using it as an archive, and not so much as a backup (which for
me implies restore), then it might make sense for you. There is a simplified
calculator here: [http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-
calculator/](http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/)

------
zzzeek
Duplicity to Google Drive has been working great for me , nightly I run a
synthetic backup on a local box that syncs the drive to compress each day's
incremental backups into a new full backup. Wrote a Google app to auto empty
the trash every night.

------
devn0ll
I've got 4 TB's worth of photo's (All raw) and want them backed up.

With Crashplan Family: 160 per year. With the cheapest rsync.net: 1500
dollar's per year.

Yeah, not in 1500 years.

~~~
viraptor
Different use cases. You can't archive stuff from crashplan. If you retire the
your machine, you either migrate the whole thing to a new one, or your backups
will expire after some days.

So if you want single machine backup - crashplan is great. If you want long
term service data backup - rsync is great.

~~~
devn0ll
Partly true, you see: as long as you do not delete the top level "share"
everything underneath can be deleted on your machine and it will stay
available at crashplan.

------
unstatusthequo
SpiderOak Unlimited for me personally. Cross platform, dropbox-like sync,
share rooms, encryption, etc

~~~
Veratyr
SpiderOak's client and support are utterly horrible though. It's an okay
alternative to something like DropBox where you have a few, small, frequently
changed files but it's useless when you have terabytes of data to backup. It
completely refused to use even a fraction of my gigabit upload.

------
bryanrasmussen
so I'm pretty tired today, but I'm reading their pricing as 60 dollars a month
for 1 terabyte which seems too expensive? maybe I need to drink this coffee
here.

~~~
txutxu
No, you're right... even more in the case of 999GB

    
    
        $ echo $(( (8 * 999) / 100 ))
        79
    

79 dollars/month

I have a home made solution for personal disaster recovery, which is 30€/month
in Hetzner (2TB storage, no bandwidth limit) + 6€/month in OVH (same capacity,
less CPU and ram, but same storage/bandwidth conditions)...

For me the difference, is not only in the price, but in who has "root access"
over the data. Remote backups in third party storage, by definition, should be
encrypted. Using rsync almost implies that the remote will be unencrypted (or
efficiency will be lost). But we're in the age of "Virtual PRIVATE network
THIRD PARTY services" nonsense... so it's hard that nowadays operators
understand those principles.

~~~
viraptor
> Using rsync almost implies that the remote will be unencrypted

Not sure if you meant the protocol or the service rsync, but neither one
implies you store unencrypted data.

~~~
txutxu
Nor the protocol neither the service, but the data.

If you're going to encrypt all the backup locally before send it to rsync.net,
tomorrow you will need to transfer all the GB again, even if just one bit did
change...

~~~
viraptor
That depends completely on the encryption mode. This could get a full
technical explanation of different modes and architectures, but in short: you
probably know that if you use full disk exception, you don't rewrite the whole
disk just because one bit changed. There are many ways to keep the data
encrypted without relying on other blocks content.

------
gbh
How am I not already aware of these guys? Pricing looks good.

~~~
dan1234
Seems to be around 6 times more expensive than S3 for my usage (<1TB, EU
Standard - Infrequent Access is $0.0125/GB vs $0.08/GB).

Of course, you can’t rsync to S3 so I’m handling backups with duplicity and
using S3 as the storage target.

~~~
throwawayish
An important point to note is that esp. with S3 infrequent access or Glacier
there are additional costs associated with restoring, which can be quite high.
With S3/Glacier one needs to spend a bit of time to even figure out how much a
restore would cost.

~~~
dan1234
Yes, the data retrieval fee for infrequent access is $0.01/GB so a 1TB restore
would cost me $10.

Thankfully I’ve not had to perform a complete restore, though I do regular
test restores of a part of the backup just to make sure it’s all still
working.

Edit: It’s actually $100 (as transfer from S3->Internet adds $0.09/GB)

~~~
Scaevolus
No, it's $100, since the egress traffic will cost ~$0.09/GB.

~~~
dan1234
You’re right, I hadn’t taken that into account.

------
general_ai
Not the same thing, obviously, but 1/10th the price:
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html).

~~~
bachmeier
Does it work with Linux? All docs that I read talk only about Windows and Mac.

~~~
geephroh
Absolutely! We've been using it as a special remote backend for our multi-TB
git-annex repos, and it has been both painless and cheap. They have supported
integrations for HashBackup and Rclone, and you can roll your own with their
S3-ish (though not straight compatible) API. They have recently added native
snapshots as well.

That said, as others have mentioned, b2's value differentiator is in cold
storage. For us, it's largely insurance against failure of our other backup
modalities. If you are pulling a lot of data back on a regular basis, the
pricepoint is much more in line with the top tier providers.

------
kiwee
That is suspicious to me. No address, no contact, no support.

~~~
pteehan
I've been a happy customer for years. The contact is info@rsync.net - it's on
the pricing page. I've emailed support a few times and they answer very
promptly.

Rsync.net has been around forever - like 15 years. They predate the concept of
'cloud'. They were the first to use a 'warrant canary', in 2006.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary))

~~~
rtpg
RE the warrant canary: all legal analysis I've seen points to the canary being
functionally useless. A court would throw out the defense immediately,
removing a canary pointing out that a warrant has been served is the same as
tweeting that you got a warrant.

It's the minimal legal hack: completely useless in a court but massive
generator of internet comments

Though it generating discussion around the warrants themselves is a good
feature

~~~
StavrosK
You don't "remove" a canary, you just stop updating it. The intent being that
they can't force you to _keep_ updating it.

~~~
rtpg
They can't force you. Just like they can't force you to not tweet.

They can sure sue the hell out of you after you stop updating though.

~~~
SahAssar
The idea is that forced speech is different than free speech. That means that
someone can force you to not say something, but not force you to say
something.

~~~
rtpg
so there are two things:

\- The government cannot force you to update the canary. A court cannot get
you to update it, because it's forced speech to demand an update.

\- You created the canary of your own accord, and are responsible for its
effects. Not updating the canary is, effectively, speech.

Though, from [0]:

"Realistically, though, courts compel speech all the time. Court-ordered
apologies, disclosures, and notices are not unusual. And if ever a court would
be inclined to compel speech, it would be in a situation like this one, where
a company intentionally set out to get around a gag order with this kind of
convoluted sea-lawyering."

[0]:[http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/268/is-there-any-
lega...](http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/268/is-there-any-legal-theory-
behind-warrant-canaries)

