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Hetzner Backup discontinued
We are pleased that you have activated our Backup Service feature on Robot. Unfortunately, we have decided to permanently discontinue this feature on 15 January 2020 since the customer demand for this feature did not meet our expectations.
The discontinuation of our Backup Service feature will happen in two steps. In step 1, on 1 August 2019, customers who deactivate the Backup Service feature will no longer be able to reactivate it.
In step 2, on 15 January 2020, we will permanently discontinue the Backup Service feature and our in-house software Backup Agent. However, with our free SSH Support feature on Robot, you will still be able to use BorgBackup to store encrypted deduplicated backups on your Storage Box or your Backup Account.
This guide will show you how you can switch over from our Backup Service to our SSH Support feature: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/BackupService/en.
If you have any questions, please send us a support ticket via your account on Robot. Our team will be happy to help.
Thank you for your understanding.
Best regards
Hetzner Online GmbH
and now?
Comments
@m4nu to the rescue! Refugee offers! :P
Seriously though, borgbackup + borgbase is awesome
still using rsync !! Am I old school ?
Nothing wrong with being old school.
rdiff-backup (if you care at all about being able to restore to a previous state)
Not a bad choice!
Very difficult to understand how or why Hetzner would discontinue something so basic to their product offering, but we'll roll with it
I hope that it will be useful and interesting to note that rsync.net now has full 'rclone' support built into the platform:
https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/3254
... and of course restic works perfectly as our platform is stock, standard OpenSSH/SFTP.
Happy to answer any questions here ...
@XSLTel : One interesting thing you can do is a "dumb" 1:1 mirror, with rsync, to an rsync.net account and forget all about retention ... the ZFS snapshots that occur on the serverside will handle the retention for you - and much more efficiently than old-school "rsync snapshots" since they are diff'd on a block level, not a file level.
@sanvit : Consider it done - LET + Hetzner refugees will be taken care of.
aren't the backup-spce packages priced exactly the same as the storage boxes? simply order a storage box instead and switch over to using that instead of the backup-space then.
probably Hetzner just wants to remove the need of maintaining two ways of deployment...
In all the years it has been available I have never used it, why would you back up what you have on Hetzner with Hetzner.
as one part of your backup strategy close to local backups might come in handy for fast restore... however I totally agree that this should not be the backup.
It's an option and it's free with most of their offerings so why wouldn't people use it? I do and it works well.
Well
Clearly not many were.
This is fine.
The same grade of ZFS storage is exposed via many user-space interfaces at Hetzner StorageBox/Nextcloud/etc
Thanks for the mention. Here the refugee offering on Twitter:
Someone emailed me the announcement last night. I first thought they discontinue the storage box offering. But it seems to only affect the strange frontend they build around Borg. The one that asks for your repo password straight away. Not a big loss really.
If you have a storage box, you can still use Borg, but have to set it up manually, like on a VPS.
Of course BorgBase.com will give you some extra convenience, monitoring, append-only and isolated repos.
That is a shame - does that include the free like 100GB they provide as well or just paid?
@m4nu you should be more careful with what you write on twitter or elsewhere. it nowhere says that they end their borgbackup offering, nor the storage boxes.
you even link their wiki page where they themselve tell that it's the end for their internal backup-service and that people should switch to using their borgbackup offering.
you should correct that straight away as it's plain wrong information you provide in your initial post.
and you still even link it here, after someone already told you? not nice.
sorry to say, but that's immature and the wrong way to do business.
as you are a business that's breaking competitional law at least in germany and could cost you money very quickly
@Falzo, actually I already rewrote the Tweet before because it wasn't clear from their email. As I said, this is a sub-service of storage boxes. I used it a few years ago. From what I remember activating the service will bring you to a new web interface where you can set up borg repos. This is the thing that gets discontinued.
As I write above, you can still use Borg via SSH and you can still use the storage box, but need to set up the repo manually.
I'll try to rewrite it one more time.. Correct me if I misunderstood the above.
New tweet that is more accurate and only says "borg web interface for storage boxes". Is this accurate?
that probably comes close to it. I agree that the mail could have been more clear and probably only those who directly use this feature, know what is meant.
I first also thought of the backup-space that they offer directly in the control panel for dedis (which essentially is just storage boxes anyway) only to find that they meant something different.
calling it a 'sub-service of storage boxes' probably nails it.
however, esp. if things are that unclear or easy to misinterpret I'd rather be careful with how to market on top of that - just sayin' ;-) ;-)
Totally agree. Don't want to add to all the fake news that's already on Twitter.
rsync is still perfect for mostly-static, already-compressed (or highly random) data. But most data can benefit from advanced, block-level deduplication and compression, and that's what borg does (pretty well). However, it's single-threaded, so in some cases borg's performance isn't good enough.
rsync's --hard-link option works fine for keeping multiple versions using very little space... at least if you aren't backing up something like VM disk images that dedupe extremely well. But borg does dedupe even better, so I really can't think of a reason to use rdiff-backup instead.
At first, I thought they meant they were discontinuing the whole Storage Box service, but yes, it's just the Backup Service feature https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/BackupService/en
simple. you can browse, search and restore files of the latest backup directly and without the need of the backup-tool itself, which can be a great benefit depending on the emergency scenario you are in, while suddenly needing your backups.
with rsync obviously you can do that too, but rdiff-backup holds increments aka a history on top. with borg you get a history but need the tool itself to restore the stuff you need.
so unless you can have rsync + borg-backup (which doubles the amount of space needed, but adds another layer in your backup-strategy), rdiff-backup might be a considerable alternative/middle-ground, which definitely has it's own use cases and pros&cons.
Thanks for the feedback. It's much appreciated. However, the mailing only reached our customers who are currently using our backup service.
well ... now the message has also reached all of us here in the peanut gallery on LET, for butter or for wurst.
This is a common conversation we have with potential customers ... the relative pros and cons of an encrypted backup tool (like duplicity or borg) vs. leaving things unencrypted-at-rest.
Everyone is very excited about pointing borg offsite and having everything perfectly encrypted and I sympathize with that - it's a very complete solution.
But if it's midnight and you're on a newly loaded system and you need that-one-particular-file-but-not-from-last-night-actually-from-three-nights-ago and borg isn't installed and where are they keys, etc. ... boy it's nice to point plain old sftp into a three days ago snapshot and pull over what you need.
@Falzo it's rare to see people discussing rdiff-backup - it's been a long while since I have had anyone ask about it in pre-sales rsync.net discussions. We do maintain it in the rsync.net environment and have since 2006 but I feel like it is falling out of favor - especially since we advise people to just do a "dumb mirror" rsync to us and handle retention with the ZFS snapshots ...