|| Phlog 31 - Tarsnap Backup || || || || || ancient Devuan MacBook Air || || Kitchen Table || (notes & adds @Office) Backup/Recovery/Archiving is pretty unsexy until something goes terribly wrong. It's usually the second thing that's uttered after the initial expletive, "Is this backed up?" It's always seemed like there's been a gap between big, robust, Enterprise-y backup/recovery vs. what's available at home for non-eyewatering prices. The idea of getting tape backup as a consumer hasn't been very plausible (discarding those early, beige box 4mm tape drives that one sometimes saw occupying the 5.25 floppy drive slot) and the backup software, licensing and support is generally out of reach. Everyone has a story about a clunky attempt at backup to floppys (or CDs or DVDs, accounting for your age :-) and those probably weren't suitable for longterm backups, honestly. I can remember in high school and college getting space on a shared drive to save and backup documents and it was a warm and fuzzy feeling at first until the realization that you're just as capable of overwriting or writing garbage to a file there as well; unless that drive was backed up. Thankfully, they usually had a tape backup (or lag replicated copy) and you were saved. One of my earliest roles was at a manufacturing co. that had a modest infrastructure full of IBM Big Iron(tm) and Sun to run their various queues and industrial gear. A small part of that role was swapping, cataloging, tracking and managing backups and the various tape formats. Very eye-opening to say the least - previously, the same set of tapes was just used week after week and only sent off-site if someone rememebered. Yikes! 20-some odd years later we have off-site backup/recovery, Cloud archving, VTLs, WORM devices, cheap & deep backup appliances, etc. Still, the options for at home aren't really cheap or truly a 'Backup'. Google Drive, Box.com, Dropbox, etc. are just a drive somewhere and while they have a trash/recycle bin it becomes a bit of an exercise to attempt to create a versioned, searchable backup to those services, privacy concerns notwithstanding. It's doable and there are desktop clients for Windows & OS X but it leaves the Linux and Unix-like users out in the cold. There are the various cloud archiving and storage services, but even after tinkering with AWS, IBM and Oracle Cloud there's A) still lots of configuration overhead and B) they're just not well-suited for home machine backups without some of the aforementioned configuration. I can't recall where I first stumbled upon Tarsnap - possibly while just sifting around for a good *BSD & Linux backup project? It checked the boxes for a good backup solution (at least for my needs): Support for the OS's I needed, actual backup sets, scriptable/scheduling and security - their tagline is "Online backups for the truly paranoid". It's also designed with efficiency in mind with their implementation of deduplication. The pricing is also wonderful compared to some of the other online/Cloud backup services out there. Their description of being "priced as a utility" is a great analogy: You pay for what you use. There's no monthly fee, no reoccuring charges for data that's sitting and hasn't been accessed recently. Definitely a giant advantage over backing up to AWS or another subscription serivce. Security is a very large focus as well for the Tarsnap project. The client is open source as well for those that are curious and want to review. The not-quite-30-days I've been sending data from some OpenBSD and Linux clients have set me back less than $10 USD. Just some back of the napkin math shows that I'll probably end up right around $6 a month, give or take depending how many times and how much I send to Tarsnap. I have zero affiliation at all w/Tarsnap but still wanted to phlog about what a great fit it's been in my home environment. If you have a *nix based server or daily driver you've been struggling to find a good backup/recovery solution for, this is definitely worth setting up and testing. Links and stuff below: Tarsnap: https://www.tarsnap.com/index.html GitHub repository: https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap EuroBSDCon 2013 Presentation: https://www.tarsnap.com/download/EuroBSDCon13.pdf IBM Cloud Backup: https://www.ibm.com/products/backup AWS Backup: https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 Just for fun: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=tape+drive+5.25&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-153677-346401-4&mkcid=2&mkscid=102&keyword=&crlp=632457263893_&MT_ID=&geo_id=&rlsatarget=dsa-1680301660446&adpos=&device=c&mktype=&loc=9020397&poi=&abcId=&cmpgn=18795810190&sitelnk=&adgroupid=145577981400&network=g&matchtype=&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAlsy5BhDeARIsABRc6ZudhSfxQomnHBWB2-dt8l6hP7CBA4El3a5nB6jmjxbO3oQDoMtSeTAaAm2kEALw_wcB