Tarsnap Is Cozy
40 comments
·September 10, 2025avian
privatelypublic
Sounds like it's just a worse Glacier setup then?
Amazon has Pre-Pay in a semi-open beta.
CloudFront has 1TB/month free- knocking a large chunk of a restore's cost. (Note- you should have either encrypted your stuff yourself and/or S3 authorization/access control still works over CF)
At what seems to be <$2/mo per TB ($1/TB glacier Deep archive + 9cent/gb for metadata on S3 frequent access), no other solution comes close. The big issue is the lump cost of a restore. Which, is quickly worn down by being > $5/TiB/mo cheaper than anybody else.
kunley
I found restic is a prety cool alternative. (No hosting though, I am sending restic backups to a private server/vps)
porridgeraisin
+1 for restic
Restic + rclone is a very nice combo. Works really well.
muyuu
yep it's what i'm using right now
restic, and my own computers and storage, and the occasional rented device (VPS or similar, typically)
i find that the hassle of setting up my stuff is still preferable than having to worry about managing bills, subscriptions, and third parties just changing their policies
luizfelberti
I also switched away from Tarsnap because I needed to restore my personal PDF collection of like 20GB once and my throughput was like 100Kb/s, maybe less. It has been a problem for at least a decade, with no fix in sight.
I'm carefully monitoring plakar in this space, wondering if anyone has experience with it and could share?
amar0c
It can be whatever it wants I am not paying $25 to store 100GB. I used to use Tarsnap a decade or so ago but pricing makes no sense at all nowadays.
Looks like much for both Colin and us could be solved moving this away from AWS
placardloop
The pricing isn’t due to AWS. Even if you used standard S3 and paid for data retrieval for your entire backup every single month, tarsnap is over 3x the price of just using S3 yourself. The markup on tarsnap is wild.
Using something like restic or borgbackup+rclone is pretty much the same experience as tarsnap but a fraction of the price.
ghostly_s
Yeah that pricing is crazy for something without any of the security that comes with using a BigCo. I've bounced off it in the past as soon as I got to their cutesy pricing model but I just played with the calculator linked here to model my needs -- three thousand USD a year for 1Tb of cold storage??
manbash
Do they charge for actual bandwidth as well? Seems like it. From tarsnap.com:
> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage: Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month) Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)
muppetman
I used tarsnap for years, but as my data got bigger and I really wanted to have multipe offsite backups with different providers, I moved to restic. I loved tarsnap - it's a great product. But restic feels very similar but you can backup to your local HD, a remote HD, or "the cloud" and everything is the same CLI commands.
ghostly_s
What provider(s) are you using?
muppetman
I use borgbase (they support restic) - backblaze with their s3 backend, and my own servers. So server A will copy to server B and vis-versa every ~10 minutes snapshot for quick/easy restoration should it be necessary, then nightly backups to borgbase/backblaze.
bigstrat2003
I really wanted to like Tarsnap and gave it a good hard look for my backup needs. Ultimately my problem was that there's no way for me to gauge how much the service will cost me. Going just by the amount of data in my home dir, it would be cost prohibitive to upload to Tarsnap. The site does assure me that thanks to compression and deduplication, the actual cost will be far less than I might estimate, which is great! But also, as far as I can tell there's no way to have the client give me an estimate of "here's how much data you actually have once the secret sauce is applied". So while the dedup and compression might make the costs far more reasonable, I won't actually know until I pay to store some data. Which means I might find that suddenly I owe Colin a lot of money if the size savings aren't very big due to my data not being very amenable to those measures. That's not a risk I'm willing to take, so ultimately I pursued other options.
adipid
This sounds cool, but the other comments here are concerning. I've been considring Hetzner's Storage Box, as it's cheap and I could use just about anything to backup my stuff – although I prefer restic.
avian
Storage Box with Borg backup can be setup to work almost identically to tarsnap.
The only real security feature missing is write-only access to the repository (Borg backup in theory supports it, but in practice it's impossible to use it in a way that prevents a compromised host from deleting it's backups - like tarsnap does).
In theory it is less reliable than tarsnap (AWS S3 compared to a single copy on a Hetzner's drive).
Storage Box is significantly cheaper for any kind of real-life backup sizes in my experience.
Borg requires more work to setup and configure compared to tarsnap. There's typically some scripting involved that's unique to your setup and I found that I had more documentation to study before I understood how to use Borg correctly.
A know a few people that have very low opinion of Borg's code quality and stay away from it because of it (I haven't studied it first hand)
rafram
OP's cost estimator tells me it would cost a cool $250 per month to keep a terabyte of data backed up in Tarsnap. The same amount costs me $8.25 per month with Backblaze. That's not very cozy!
hiAndrewQuinn
OP here, thanks for using the cost estimator! [1] I'm glad you got some use out of it.
I use Backblaze B2 myself for most of my general purpose backup needs. It's actually $6/month, I believe.
Tarsnap fills but one niche in my overall system. It's a very important niche for which I haven't found any other providers who do anything similar (keyfiles, prepaid, borderline anonymous etc), but it's not where I store the vast majority of my stuff.
rafram
I just don't really understand what the niche is. If you have a tiny bit of data that you want to keep backed up and rarely access, you can encrypt it with any number of easy command-line or GUI tools and upload it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere else with a free tier. If it's securely encrypted, there's no reason to care that the storage provider knows who you are. Tarsnap definitely has nerd appeal, but I can't think of a real problem that it actually solves.
who-shot-jr
Switched away from Tarsnap to BorgBase - https://www.borgbase.com/
kerblang
gzip + ccrypt -> thumb drive
Also cozy if your data fits. No monthly fee, just the cost of new/recycled thumbies
hiAndrewQuinn
I love thumb drives, but Tarsnap is cheaper than the expected 10 year lifetime of a fresh and well maintained thumb drive for the kind of data I hold in there by about a factor of 20 (50 cents vs $10).
It also doesn't require a UL Class 125 fireproofed safe to survive a house fire, but that's splitting hairs and getting into hobbyist territory.
snowe2010
Does anyone know how it compares to restic or duplicate?
bccdee
I use restic. Restic offers everything advertised on the tarsnap website (deduplicated snapshots, e2e encryption). I pay $6 per terabyte per month using backblaze's cloud object storage. Wasabi offers 1TB at $7/mo. S3 costs $26/mo, but Glacier is only $3.6/mo.
Storing one terabyte of data in tarsnap costs $250 per month.
margalabargala
Basically the same service, but much more expensive.
xnx
50x more expensive than a hard drive feels like a lot.
hiAndrewQuinn
It depends on what you're after and what you're using it for. I broke down the costs I forecast for myself over the next decade at https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-... and found tarsnap is unlikely to cost me more than 50 cents for my usecase. Backblaze B2 will cost me about $70-80 over the next 10 years, but it has many orders of magnitude more data to back up.
The cheapest I can find for a consumer buying e.g. 20TB Seagate hard drives and rotating them every 3 years or so is about $5 per TB-year, without mirroring. So if raw storage cost optimization is what you're after that's what I'd go for to start. Even AWS Glacier doesn't come close to that, although you do get other things with it.
dathinab
it's expensive but it doesn't have a monthly base cost, doesn't require you to run a server etc.
through you want at least one backup of yours to be off site, and your want your backups robust, so comparing hard drive cost seem strange as if you run the backup server yourself you need a decent raid and for the offline backup you need to compare with idk. S3 storage cost or similar
it's still more expensive but if you only need to backup some folders of documents or similar it might anyway be the simpler and cheaper solution
if you want to backup huge photo/video/vm image collections it probably isn't the best choice for you
but if you need to backup you photo
homebrewer
A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap, you can use any of its numerous competitors that are also maintained by professionals, whose whole business is also running a backup service. Say rsync.net or borgbase, which are at least 10× cheaper than tarsnap last time I compared them, and can be used with restic or borg which are much faster at restoring even relatively small amounts data (forget if we're talking terabytes, it's "weeks" vs "your link speed").
I think tarsnap was a good service about 20 years ago when it had little competition, but using it now makes very little sense IMHO. You can donate to its awesome FreeBSD maintainer, or to FreeBSD, directly.
LiamPowell
> Say rsync.net or borgbase
Borgbase had a week long (IIRC) outage due to a failed attempt to add new drives to an array. As far as I know they never published a post-mortem on this and have never discussed how they're going to improve their disaster recovery so it can't happen again. It's difficult to recommend when they could leave you without working backups for an entire week.
pessimizer
> A hard drive under the bed is not the only alternative to tarsnap
Also you can back up to the hard drive under your friend's bed, and they can back up to the hard drive under your bed.
If you're even slightly technical, or have a friend who is, I'd recommend both of you buying the cheapest Kirkwood NASes you can find on ebay, throwing Debian on them, and becoming each other's backup buddies.
lazyant
you are comparing data storage to a backup solution, not the target market
chevalier_1222
why would someone do this instead uploading the encrypted chunks/updates to gdrive or anywhere else?
hiAndrewQuinn
Tarsnap's model is an ideal fit for a very small subset of the data I'm interested in safeguarding for the future. https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/ goes into it in a lot more detail.
Sesse__
If you're interested in safeguarding data for the future, then I don't think the model of “my backup immediately disappears once the account runs out of money” gives me anything resembling a cozy feeling at all.
hiAndrewQuinn
That's actually one of my favorite features. That should never happen under the limited circumstances I use it for. If something goes so wrong that my account actually runs out of money before I notice, then I far prefer the default to be "intruder alert, intruder alert, wipe everything". There's a reason it's marketed as backups for the truly paranoid.
I've been using tarsnap for years and am in the process of migrating away from it.
Things that are not cozy:
1) There's no way to monitor your monthly spend per host/credit left on the account/etc. apart of logging into your account in a browser and manually keeping a spreadsheet. There's no web API to do it. You get an email warning when you have about 7 days of credit left. That's it.
2) Nothing is "a precious few megabytes" anymore. What seems like a negligible monthly spend at first can quickly grow up on you and soon you're spending highly non-trivial amounts. Which you might not notice due to 1) unless you are diligent in your accounting.
3) tarsnap restores are slow. Really really slow. A full restore can take days if you have non-trivial amounts of data (and make sure you have enough credit in your account to pay for that server-to-client bandwidth!) My understanding is that throughput is directly related to your latency to the AWS datacenter where tarsnap is hosted. Outside of north America you can be looking at nearly dial-up speeds even on a gigabit link.
Again, a problem that can surprise you at the most inconvenient time. Incremental backups in a daily cronjob tend to transfer very small amounts of data, so you won't notice the slowness until you try to do a full restore. And you generally don't test that very often because you pay for server-to-client transfers.
There are some workarounds for 3) and there's a FAQ about it, but look at the mailing list and you'll see that it's something that surprises people again and again.