[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??

[hiAndrewQuinn]

I appreciate you using the calculator! It's at [1] for anyone who wants to futz around with it.

$3000 per TB-year is accurate to my knowledge, and yes, it is at least one, and probably two, orders of magnitude what you can get with more general purpose systems. Backblaze B2 is $72 per TB-year; AWS Glacier is $12 per TB-year I believe; purchasing two 20 TB Seagate drives for $300 apiece, mirroring them, and replacing them every 3 years gives you about $10 per TB-year (potentially - most of us don't have 20 TB to back up in our personal lives). Those are the best prices I've been able to find with some looking [2].

To me, when I was building out the digital resiliency audit, the pricing and model just seemed to tell me that tarsnap was for very specific kinds of critical data backups, and was not a great fit for general purpose stuff. Like a lot of other people here I also have a general-purpose restic based 3-2-1 backup going for the ~150 GB in /home I back up. [3] My use of tarsnap is partly a cheap hedge for the handful of bytes of data I genuinely cannot afford to lose against issues with restic, Backblaze B2, systemd, etc.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/tarsnap-calculator/

[2]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...

[3]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#general-bac...

[AnonC]

Tarsnap has always been expensive. More than a decade ago (April 2014, to be precise), @patio11 suggested that tarsnap should increase its pricing. [1] Here’s the HN thread on that post. [2]

All the granular calculations (picodollars) on storage used plus time are fine. But tarsnap was always very expensive for larger amounts of data, especially data that cannot be well deduplicated.

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953

[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)