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β€Ί BorgBase World Backup Day: 30% Off for New Users, 10 GB Free Forever πŸ€—
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BorgBase World Backup Day: 30% Off for New Users, 10 GB Free Forever πŸ€—

m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

Time to check on your backups, everyone. Accidents happen πŸ”₯, providers dead-pool πŸ’€. You want to keep your data despite. πŸ˜‡

BorgBase offers simple and secure offsite backups based on Borg Backup:

  • Alerts on missed backups (email, Pushover, webhooks)
  • Append-only mode to protect existing backups
  • Every repository in your account is isolated
  • Compression and deduplication to reduce space usage and transfers
  • Your data is encrypted locally and we never see its contents
  • EU or US storage location

To celebrate World Backup Day and the release of Borg's next major version 1.2.0, we are offering 30% off all standard plans for new users, who never had a paid plan. Just use code WBDX22 during checkout.

Available plans: (prices after discount)

  • Free Plan, 10 GB: free forever
  • Small Plan, 100 GB: $16.8/year
  • Medium Plan, 1 TB: $56/year
  • Large Plan, 2 TB: $105/year

All plans come with a flexible quota, you can use as needed for peak usage. We can also offer custom plans or managed servers for even greater storage needs.

Checkout page (login first)

For existing users: This year's discount is for new users only. We still love you very much and work hard to bring you reliable backups and great tooling around it. In detail:

  • We will double all donations made to the Borg project again in March. Follow us on Twitter for the latest numbers.
  • The new Borg 1.2.0 release is already deployed to all repos and we will soon add server-side compaction to make your backups even faster.
  • We continue to sponsor related projects, like Borgmatic to keep the eco system healthy in the long run.
  • Vorta, our own open source desktop backup client, Vorta already got some major updates, including its Debian package
  • Our Ansible role to quickly set up backups on new servers already supports RHEL9 and Arch Linux.
  • Our docs have loads of great tutorials to improve your backup strategy or install Borg on more exotic platform, like Synology or TrueNAS.

Happy World Backup Day and always encrypt your backups! πŸ˜‰

Β«1

Comments

  • AstroAstro Member

    Is this recurring?

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider
    edited March 2022

    @Astro said: Is this recurring?

    No, for the first invoice only, if you never had a paid account.

  • HomieHomie Member
    edited March 2022

    Pretty underwhelming compared to Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare for free egress. Backblaze bills per GB ($0.005 / month), not per 100GB or TB, also gives 10GB free for life, and works with many backup clients including but not limited to Borg.

    100GB: $6 (Backblaze B2) vs. $16.8 (BorgBase) first year
    1TB: $60 (Backblaze B2) vs. $56 (BorgBase) first year
    2TB: $120 (Backblaze B2) vs. $105 (BorgBase) first year

    But Backblaze has billing per GB, so if you only use 560GB, you aren't paying for 1TB.

    Thanked by 1tmepy
  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    @Homie said: Pretty underwhelming compared to Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare for free egress. Backblaze bills per GB ($0.005 / month), not per 100GB or TB, also gives 10GB free for life, and works with many backup clients including but not limited to Borg.

    Thanks for your research and feedback! Please note that you are comparing two very different products. One is object storage (store and retrieve files using a REST API), the other is hosting of Borg repositories (access an active server-side process over SSH).

    If you need an object storage option, I fully agree that B2 is a decent option and I use it myself including the bandwidth workaround. πŸ˜‰

    Thanked by 1o_be_one
  • chipchip Member

    I use borgbase and love it... my only gripe and not really borgbase's issue is that borg doesn't have a Windows port

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider
    edited March 2022

    @chip said: I use borgbase and love it... my only gripe and not really borgbase's issue is that borg doesn't have a Windows port

    Happy to hear! Yeah, Windows support comes up a lot. There were Windows binaries for a while, but whoever published them stopped. πŸ˜•

  • Have you paid your 100$ @Nekki needs to know for their accounting.

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    @Pilotseye said: Have you paid your 100$ @Nekki needs to know for their accounting.

    A gentlemen doesn't tell. 🎩

    Thanked by 3Nekki Pilotseye Erisa
  • tmepytmepy Member

    @Homie said:
    Pretty underwhelming compared to Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare for free egress. Backblaze bills per GB ($0.005 / month), not per 100GB or TB, also gives 10GB free for life, and works with many backup clients including but not limited to Borg.

    100GB: $6 (Backblaze B2) vs. $16.8 (BorgBase) first year
    1TB: $60 (Backblaze B2) vs. $56 (BorgBase) first year
    2TB: $120 (Backblaze B2) vs. $105 (BorgBase) first year

    But Backblaze has billing per GB, so if you only use 560GB, you aren't paying for 1TB.

    Yo could you PM me? I have some questions about backblaze as I am looking for object storage as well as backup storage. Thanks!

  • tmepytmepy Member

    @m4nu said:

    @Homie said: Pretty underwhelming compared to Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare for free egress. Backblaze bills per GB ($0.005 / month), not per 100GB or TB, also gives 10GB free for life, and works with many backup clients including but not limited to Borg.

    Thanks for your research and feedback! Please note that you are comparing two very different products. One is object storage (store and retrieve files using a REST API), the other is hosting of Borg repositories (access an active server-side process over SSH).

    If you need an object storage option, I fully agree that B2 is a decent option and I use it myself including the bandwidth workaround. πŸ˜‰

    Hi, what do you mean by an active server-side process over SSH?

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    @tmepy said: Hi, what do you mean by an active server-side process over SSH?

    Sure, happy to explain the difference between object storage and Borg:

    First, object storage allows you to store some data together with a name (or key). So e.g. a => 12345 or b => 987654. That's all it does and it does this very well. AWS S3 or Backblaze B2 are examples for object storage.

    When using object storage for backups, more work needs to happen on the client-side. Because object storage doesn't do much except store data that's mapped to a key.

    Borg is a bit different. There is another remote Borg process running server-side, ready to accept commands from the client (via SSH/msgpack). The client still needs to find changed files, compress and encrypt them and then upload them to the server. But after that its work is done and the remote Borg process will deal with the rest: It makes sure all file parts (segments) are stored efficiently on disk, can re-organize them if you longer need some of them (prune) or make sure the backup is complete (check).

    The benefit of this is that much less data needs to be sent between server and client. Because more work is done just by the server. With version 1.2 of Borg we're also launching a new "remote compaction", which allows you to just do all housekeeping tasks server-side when you don't use the repo. So after you mark old archives as "deleted", we will go and remove all file parts you no longer need. Doing this server-side has some advantages:

    1. It saves you time on the client. The client is usually a production server and I want it to spend as little time with backups as possible. I also don't want much network traffic from backups.
    2. You can delay this cleanup operation by weeks or months and just keep old files and archives around. This gives you an additional layer of security and you could restore your files even if a hacker thinks he has deleted your backups. Since the actual deletion isn't done by the client. We often call this "append-only" mode, but "delayed deletion" is more accurate.

    When using object storage for backups, this kind of housekeeping is a really hard problem and can get very slow: Imagine you have millions of files (not uncommon). You encrypt them and group them together for upload (since object storage providers also charge by API calls to prevent you from getting too many files). Then some time passes and you remove some files and add new files. With object storage you can't do this server-side. You need to download the whole chunk, remove old files and re-upload it. A pretty pointless task for your production server to work on.

    This is the main reason why object storage is pretty good for use as an archive (few large files that rarely change) or for CDNs, but less so for operational backups (many files that change over time and limited resources on the client).

    TL;DR: Using object storage for backups is less efficient with many small files and when files change over time. Borg does more work server-side, which reduces the required network traffic and work on the client.

  • M66BM66B Veteran

    @m4nu I did set up a trial backup and I have to say everything works pretty decent.

    Thanked by 1m4nu
  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    (Shameless bump)

  • I'm using borgbase since a year and it's working well and it's pretty reliable. I can definitely recommend it ☺️

    Thanked by 1m4nu
  • M66BM66B Veteran

    @m4nu I like to pay with PayPal manually instead of a subscription, is this possible?

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    @M66B said:
    @m4nu I like to pay with PayPal manually instead of a subscription, is this possible?

    We don’t do any subscriptions or take money automatically, since most plans are paid yearly. So you will definitely don’t get a PayPal subscription, always a one-time payment.

  • M66BM66B Veteran

    "Subscription will be activated after payment confirmation from PayPal. Use EUR or USD."

  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider
    edited March 2022

    Ah, I see, @M66B. The wording could be better there. Clarified this to make sure it doesn't convey a subscription. πŸ˜‡

  • M66BM66B Veteran

    @m4nu paid for a year with PayPal ;-)

    Thanked by 1m4nu
  • I've been a customer of BorgBase, which is also recommended on Borg official website. Honestly a good service with a simple gui helpful to configure our repositories and regions. This is really nice how "free" we are to use our storage quota among both regions.

    I've stopped to use the service as i wanted another, less expensive (even if it's cheap, its never cheap enough when you dont earn money for what you host :p) solution based on S3 storage.

    I'm a bit surprised you don't offer something to your returning users.

  • sonontsesonontse Member
    edited March 2022

    I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    That is the reason why Backblaze is so much more appealing. You get billed for the service you use and not billed for things you are not using. Yes, I understand the differences in technologies but I'm just straight up talking about Borgbase making you commit to a certain amount of storage first.

  • chipchip Member

    @M66B said:
    "Subscription will be activated after payment confirmation from PayPal. Use EUR or USD."

    They don't do PayPal subscriptions they send me an email every month saying my plans expiring and I have to pay to play

    Chip

  • chipchip Member

    @sonontse said:
    I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    That is the reason why Backblaze is so much more appealing. You get billed for the service you use and not billed for things you are not using. Yes, I understand the differences in technologies but I'm just straight up talking about Borgbase making you commit to a certain amount of storage first.

    They do ive paid for 2tb and used over 2tb (I think it was 2.2tb) and just paid for the difference with my next paypal payment

  • @chip said:

    @sonontse said:
    I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    That is the reason why Backblaze is so much more appealing. You get billed for the service you use and not billed for things you are not using. Yes, I understand the differences in technologies but I'm just straight up talking about Borgbase making you commit to a certain amount of storage first.

    They do ive paid for 2tb and used over 2tb (I think it was 2.2tb) and just paid for the difference with my next paypal payment

    That only applies if you have over 2tb of backup. If you fall between Small and Medium or Medium and Large, there is an area where you are paying more per gb to be in the lesser plan than to upgrade up. This is due to the difference in per gb cost in between plans. You either pay more being on a lesser plan or pay too much being on a higher tier plan without having that much storage. It is just a very big headache and designed not to be customer friendly.

    Thanked by 1Erisa
  • TimboJonesTimboJones Member
    edited March 2022

    @sonontse said:

    @chip said:

    @sonontse said:
    I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    That is the reason why Backblaze is so much more appealing. You get billed for the service you use and not billed for things you are not using. Yes, I understand the differences in technologies but I'm just straight up talking about Borgbase making you commit to a certain amount of storage first.

    They do ive paid for 2tb and used over 2tb (I think it was 2.2tb) and just paid for the difference with my next paypal payment

    That only applies if you have over 2tb of backup. If you fall between Small and Medium or Medium and Large, there is an area where you are paying more per gb to be in the lesser plan than to upgrade up. This is due to the difference in per gb cost in between plans. You either pay more being on a lesser plan or pay too much being on a higher tier plan without having that much storage. It is just a very big headache and designed not to be customer friendly.

    Fixed pricing is by far simpler and more predictable (for smaller number of backups) than variable pricing (where data keeps growing/expanding) for this use case. You're falling into the "extremely cheap" customer range. You're not paying enough for it to make much difference or worth implementing. You're also not factoring in the deduplication, which effectively means you can have many more times the amount of data stored in borgbase vs standard storage. So your economics is way off.

    Also, you're arguing about user friendly when you're not using it properly or understand use case. It's exceptionally user friendly, which is why I'm confident the problem is you.

    Thanked by 2m4nu chip
  • m4num4nu Member, Patron Provider

    @o_be_one said: I'm a bit surprised you don't offer something to your returning users.

    Good idea. Noted for next year or the next occasion.

    @sonontse said: I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    If you prefer not to pay anything, you can also help out on a related open source project and get a free contributor plan. That's a great opportunity to learn something, improve the world's shared software stack and see your work used by countless users. This also includes translation- and documentation tasks, so no coding skill required necessarily. See the projects here or here as starting point or PM me for suitable open issues.

    Thanked by 2o_be_one starbuck
  • @TimboJones said:

    @sonontse said:

    @chip said:

    @sonontse said:
    I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    That is the reason why Backblaze is so much more appealing. You get billed for the service you use and not billed for things you are not using. Yes, I understand the differences in technologies but I'm just straight up talking about Borgbase making you commit to a certain amount of storage first.

    They do ive paid for 2tb and used over 2tb (I think it was 2.2tb) and just paid for the difference with my next paypal payment

    That only applies if you have over 2tb of backup. If you fall between Small and Medium or Medium and Large, there is an area where you are paying more per gb to be in the lesser plan than to upgrade up. This is due to the difference in per gb cost in between plans. You either pay more being on a lesser plan or pay too much being on a higher tier plan without having that much storage. It is just a very big headache and designed not to be customer friendly.

    Fixed pricing is by far simpler and more predictable (for smaller number of backups) than variable pricing (where data keeps growing/expanding) for this use case. You're falling into the "extremely cheap" customer range. You're not paying enough for it to make much difference or worth implementing. You're also not factoring in the deduplication, which effectively means you can have many more times the amount of data stored in borgbase vs standard storage. So your economics is way off.

    Also, you're arguing about user friendly when you're not using it properly or understand use case. It's exceptionally user friendly, which is why I'm confident the problem is you.

    Again, if you read my reply, I am not comparing the technologies. I know how borg works as I use it also. I just don't use it with borgbase. My problem borgbase is with the pricing model. It requires commitment and it is not simple or flexible as stated. A simple per gb model would be more enticing for the customer.

  • @m4nu said:

    @o_be_one said: I'm a bit surprised you don't offer something to your returning users.

    Good idea. Noted for next year or the next occasion.

    @sonontse said: I really wish you guys offer flexible per GB pricing instead. It sucks when you are somewhere in between and you have to pay for unused storage, makes it much more expensive and undesirable.

    If you prefer not to pay anything, you can also help out on a related open source project and get a free contributor plan. That's a great opportunity to learn something, improve the world's shared software stack and see your work used by countless users. This also includes translation- and documentation tasks, so no coding skill required necessarily. See the projects here or here as starting point or PM me for suitable open issues.

    Yes, I already use Borg and Borgmatic for my backups. Thank you.

  • @m4nu said: One is object storage (store and retrieve files using a REST API), the other is hosting of Borg repositories (access an active server-side process over SSH).

    There are ways to use Borg with S3, at least as a secondary backup. One example: https://github.com/luispabon/borg-s3-home-backup (this syncs a Borg repo, which may be local, out to an S3 compatible provider).

    There are also ways to mount S3 buckets as filesystems that Borg could use though these options may be much less efficient (and likely more fragile, particularly if Borg assumes it can rely on posix locking semantics), or a block device on which another filesystem can be used (which would remove the potential posix locking limitation though IIRC Amazon explicitly recommend not using S3 buckets that way).

  • M66BM66B Veteran
    edited March 2022

    @m4mu

    "If you exceed your quota during a backup, leftover data will be deleted automatically during the next repo-write operation."

    Is this the same as borg compact as discussed here and will this work in append only mode?

    https://feedback.borgbase.com/posts/66/temporary-full-access-mode-for-pruning

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