> The fact that there are lots of people who think I'm very wrong in both directions suggests to me that Tarsnap's pricing is about right.
I have no opinion on Tarsnap's pricing but I will say this: there will always be people who think your server/app/whatever should be cheaper, even when it's free (then they'll complain about the support, uptime or whatever).
What's more, the people who aren't willing to pay anything typically make the worst customers. Instead of being grateful for what they're getting, in my experience they tend to consume far more support "bandwidth".
You might be doing yourself a favour by cutting such people off (effectively).
As a large customer considering moving to tarsnap, there is one area in which they have no functional competitors I have been able to find: scriptable (i.e. command line based) remote backup with decent deduplication. All of the cheaper options I've found that have deduplication support are GUI based; we simply have too many VMs, and they change to often, for that to be tenable for us at all.
I'm assuming you mean deduplication among your own data, in which case, wouldn't compression take care of it? I haven't used tarsnap, what's the benefit over duplicity?
EDIT: Oh, you mean deduplication of files between separate backup sets? That is a nice feature, true.
It is, and tarsnap does it really, REALLY well. I'm backing up what is, on disk, umm... (checks emails) about 15GiB, and I'm currently spending about 8 cents a day. Now if he'd just implement de-dupe across machines on a given account... :)
"This simple offering gives you complete control over organization, compression, deduplication, versioning and meta-data. You are NOT locked into a particular application or protocol, and there are no constraints on file sizes, retention, or access."
Which is great if you can find something that will do deduplication for you and encrypt and handle that the disk isn't actually local. I couldn't.
Also, rsync.net is significantly more expensive than tarsnap in my experience.
I have no opinion on Tarsnap's pricing but I will say this: there will always be people who think your server/app/whatever should be cheaper, even when it's free (then they'll complain about the support, uptime or whatever).
What's more, the people who aren't willing to pay anything typically make the worst customers. Instead of being grateful for what they're getting, in my experience they tend to consume far more support "bandwidth".
You might be doing yourself a favour by cutting such people off (effectively).