> My other concern with this is that if the tarsnap server ever goes away, customers risk losing their data, since the server maintains the mapping of S3 objects to blobs. That's worrying. Assurances are not mechanisms.
Agreed. I use duplicity instead, which is a Free program that is similar to tarsnap. It backs up to S3, but uses many fewer PUTs (since archives are several megabytes).
Anyway, a full backup of my homedir (minus music) costs me about $1.40 a month to store (with incremental backups every night). A small price to pay knowing that if my laptop blows up, I can be right back where I started in just a few hours. (Or if I delete a file accidentally, it is back in seconds.)
I also won't store my backups in anything but my own S3 buckets (they are encrypted, privacy is not the issue). Is duplicity stable in your opinion? I am usually one to use alpha/beta software etc. but this is a long term need. I am a big rdiff-backup fan, this looks like a good alternative to my current strategy.
My current strategy is a little lame but works quite well: rsync daily to my home server and about once or twice a week an EC2 instance is fired up with elastic block store attachment and the home server does rdiff-backup to it.
Agreed. I use duplicity instead, which is a Free program that is similar to tarsnap. It backs up to S3, but uses many fewer PUTs (since archives are several megabytes).
Anyway, a full backup of my homedir (minus music) costs me about $1.40 a month to store (with incremental backups every night). A small price to pay knowing that if my laptop blows up, I can be right back where I started in just a few hours. (Or if I delete a file accidentally, it is back in seconds.)
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/