
C14, the Secure Cold Storage Platform, for Free During the Summer - tusbar
https://blog.online.net/2016/07/04/c14-the-secure-cold-storage-platform-for-free-during-the-summer/
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boulos
From their FAQ:

> Where is my data stored?

> Your data will be stored in our fallout shelter, located 25 meters under the
> ground in Paris, France, starting in September 2016.

So where is it for now? And like Backblaze, a single site storage solution
means you should only consider this as an extra backup (not primary storage).

There's a note that in September they'll also be expanding to offer multisite,
but don't have pricing yet for that (hopefully just 2-3x depending on number
of sites)

I'm curious about the 40 TB per archive limit. Is that some sort of equivalent
to a full back blaze storage pod? I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction
like that, so I'm curious how customers will be expected to work around it.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not on GCS).

~~~
rsync
"I can't imagine an S3/GCS bucket restriction like that, so I'm curious how
customers will be expected to work around it."

Amazon S3 has a 5TB object size limit and only 5GB (!) can be uploaded in a
single PUT[1]. Different limits, but still something people have to work
around.

An _actual filesystem_ on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone
offer cloud storage based on that ?

Man, that would be awesome.

[1]
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObje...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UploadingObjects.html)

~~~
masklinn
> An actual filesystem on ZFS makes all of these limits disappear. Does anyone
> offer cloud storage based on that ?

rsync.net advertises

> a ZFS filesystem, accessible with any SSH/SFTP tool, running on a UNIX
> system.

You're paying for that though, rsync.net _starts_ at 8c/GB/month (for 10+TB),
the smallest offering (under 1TB) is 20c/GB/month), by comparison S3 is 2.75c
to 3c/GB/month in standard storage (and 1.25c/GB/month for IA)

~~~
Veratyr
I'd be really curious to know why rsync.net is so expensive. Is there
something inherently costly about scaling a ZFS based filesystem like this?

~~~
rsync
We offer unlimited technical support and integration engineering for even the
smallest customers.

You can emergency page us on Christmas day.

We'll set up "pull" jobs on our end to pull the backups from you.

These things are very valuable to some people ...

~~~
Veratyr
I can definitely see the value in those things but I think there's also a
place for "dumb" storage. Some people want that great support, some people
don't need it.

I'm in the latter category and I'd rather have the choice to pay for it than
be forced into it, which is why despite loving the trial I had with you guys,
I couldn't justify continuing.

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swinglock
Why is there a charge for deleting data? If I want to stop using the service
or just lower the storage charge, I need to pay for that? Scrubbing I can
understand if scrubbing is not mandatory, but deleting should just be marking
data as free to overwrite so someone else can be charged.

~~~
0xmohit
I'm not speaking on behalf of C14 or similar service, but the charge for
deleting data isn't very new. Quoting from
[http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

    
    
      For objects that are archived to Glacier, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for objects deleted prior to 90 days.
    
      Objects that are in Standard – Infrequent Access have a minimum 30 days of storage, and objects that are deleted, overwritten, or transitioned to a different storage class before 30 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days.
    

The difference that I see here is that C14 appears to charge for deletion
regardless of the access.

Maybe it's a way on ensuring income for a certain duration on capacity freed
up by way of such deletes.

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sargun
Does anyone know about a bare metal provider like Scaleway / Online.net in the
US? I have no problem with the EU, other than the speed of light.

~~~
boulos
Digital Ocean is arguably kind of close. SoftLayer and Rackspace are the
biggest players in this space, but unlike Scaleway there's no way to start at
$10/month.

Why do you feel like you need bare metal though?

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine, and we don't offer bare metal (so of
course I'm trying to sell you on virtualized offerings).

~~~
sargun
I'm not really looking for someone like Rackspace. I want someone that lets me
easily spin up capacity on demand at pretty low cost.

I love compute engine. I run a bunch of nodes on it, but unfortunately it
doesn't do nested virtualization. I specifically want to run some virtual box
workloads and some other stuff that needs light weight virtualization.

I've found a couple virtual server providers that offer nested Virtualization,
but not entirely sure how it works. They were also crazy expensive.

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tluyben2
I have to register my debit/credit card and it refuses with "Error" :) I asked
support but that's not a very good start.

~~~
balamaci
Same for me. I wanted to use them two weeks ago but could not get passed it. I
just gave up on 3rd card attempt. And btw why can't they support pay-pall? It
always makes me uneasy to pass in the credit card details directly on a site.

~~~
tluyben2
Seems that under the guise of security it seems that sites can leave their
payment process to be complete crap (UX/UI, feedback and everything else). I
see this far too often; sometimes not even the "Error" appears, just a page
reload without any indication. It is not that hard to be clear guys...

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pbhjpbhj
It seems really cheap, do you think it's sustainable at those prices?

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belorn
From the perspective of sustainable, I can find retail harddrives for about
€0.023 per GB (not counting taxes). This site take €0.002 per month, so with a
very simplistic view, a harddrive is producing profits after about a year.
There is of course many additional costs, and they could also be getting a
better deal than current retail prices, but from a pure question of "X+1
customer mean a gain or a loss", I would lean towards sustainable.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'd expect energy costs of a data centre + wages to dwarf the actual HDD
costs.

A half-hour support call is going to cost something like €10 - for which you
need to service 5TB-months of data (ie one month of 5000GB of data at 0.2
euro-cents pays for the support cost in min. wage employees).

It's great if this is a sustainable business as I only have 1TB of data at
home and probably only a third of that needs backing up. So 4TB-months of data
per annum, €8 - that's much cheaper than buying a HDD myself c. £50 [currently
€60] which I expect to have c. 5 years of life. Though the A in ADSL then
starts getting really annoying.

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tehabe
I wonder, can you use Carbon-14 to store something? A halflife of 5730±40
years should be fine for now but you should be prepared to copy it on a
regular basis …

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amaks
Do they offer end-to-end encryption? If they use ZFS I assume they should have
checksums that detect data corruption.

~~~
mikmak
well kind of yes I guess, protocols to transfer from your side to C14 platform
is fully encrypted (SSH/FTPS ...) then it's encrypted by the C14 platform
itself to the end-storage backends

Mik

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amaks
I've been primarily concerned if they store data encrypted at rest, with my
own key.

~~~
mikmak
yes every bit is encrypted with AES-256-CBC, we provide the encryption key
which you must keep to restore

Mik

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breakingcups
Has anyone tried this yet? It seems more than 50% cheaper than Backblaze B2
with a very similar setup.

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edouardb
Try it, it's free for the moment :)

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pbhjpbhj
You have to open an account with verified bank details first though, right?

