On: Ask HN: What's up with all these services charging...

[jacquesm]

> except it weeds out the people who aren't willing to pay anything at all.

And those with just too much data and too little budget :)

[cperciva → jacquesm]

Yes, but I was comparing against freemium models, and people with lots of data and little money would need to use (and wouldn't be able to afford) the "premium" side of "freemium".

[kareemm → cperciva]

why do you want customers with lots of data and little money?

[cperciva → kareemm]

I don't. Nobody does. My point was that the utility pricing model is no different from the freemium model here, in that both eliminate those customers.

[jacquesm → kareemm]

Well, for some values of 'little', in my case it worked out to about $10K / month iirc :)

[koenigdavidmj → jacquesm]

If you have 20-odd terabytes of data to back up, I am guessing that you probably can afford a tape drive and take your own backups.

[jacquesm → koenigdavidmj]

Yes, I can afford the tape drive. No, that's not a solution for me.

Check out what tarsnap does so you can compare tarsnap with a tapedrive.

[koenigdavidmj → jacquesm]

I know what it does, and you are not going to be getting prices that you can afford from anything backing to S3.

This (S3's storing everything so redundantly) is what I see as the main benefit that tarsnap would get you, since the encryption itself is the easy part---just GPG your dump before writing to tape.

Now, I might be strawmanning you. What does tarsnap get you in particular that tapes do not?

[jimbobimbo → cperciva]

Is this a problem?