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What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

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801 points tnorthcutt | 1 comments | 03 Apr 14 16:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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kruipen ◴[03 Apr 14 17:08 UTC] No.7524278[source]▶
What patio11 doesn't get, is that part of the reason why HN crowd considers tarsnap "the best backup software" is exactly because Colin Percival is what patio11 calls "bad at business" (and what I would call "motivated not only by money").

BTW, that is the same reason for the backlash over Oculus acquisition: people are upset that it will no longer be run by "bad at business" engineers like John Carmack, but instead by "very good at business" Mark Zuckerberg.

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tptacek ◴[03 Apr 14 19:08 UTC] No.7525244[source]▶
HN is wrong about why Tarsnap is the best backup software, and that's partly because Colin is falsely modest about what Tarsnap is. Tarsnap is the best backup software because it is the most technically credible secure backup service on the Internet.

One way you can gauge just how wrong HN is about this point is to compare Tarsnap's business to that of any well-known backup provider, virtually all of which could (presuming, perhaps unfairly, that Colin is rational) buy Tarsnap with pocket change.

Backup is a huge business, and enterprise/business backup is an especially lucrative segment of that business. Colin has the most technically credible offering for that segment. But he captures only a tiny fraction of it, and regularly finds himself on HN explaining to HN people why Tarsnap costs so much given how cheap AWS storage is. Q.E.D.

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cpach ◴[03 Apr 14 21:30 UTC] No.7526951[source]▶
It’s kind of amazing that some people here believe its modest price to be Tarsnap’s main value proposition.
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1. patio11 ◴[03 Apr 14 21:41 UTC] No.7527073[source]▶
This sort of misunderstanding is encouraged by using one's limited supply of the customer's time and attention to highlight "picodollars" as opposed to "Considering online backups? You get to choose between a) you can retrieve your backups, b) other people can't retrieve your backups, c) a and b, but only if you won the Putnam."