The zfs snapshots that we make of your account are immutable (read only) from the perspective of your credentials.
So even if you publish your rsync.net credentials and Mallory wipes out your entire base account, the snapshots will still be there (until they rotate out, of course).
I have scripts that do both borg and rsync backups; the borg backups are for preservation and the rsync backups are to keep multiple machines at a similar data state. I also am able to do a borg backup of my website by rclone mounting the website file system and then pushing to a borg repo on rsync.net. This has saved my tail more than once. Website backup is a bit slow (compared to local backups) but it works reliably.
I certainly hope rsync.net never shuts down as there is nothing else out there even close to comparable in both quality and value.
Radek (https://www.mydreams.cz)
I'm using btrfs and snapper to take hourly snapshots. The snapborg[0] tool then pushes those snapshots to a borg repo on rsync.net. snapper and snapborg can be configured to keep the number of hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly snapshots you want and can automatically prune them.
I have not deleted any of my daily borg backups for many years, covering my laptop and some servers. Borg has an equivalent `borg serve` feature as detailed in the article.
I use borg mount every other week. After the initial config, you can just type:
$ borg mount :: borg/
Even though I count the rsync.net backup only once in the 3-2-1 backup rule, its geo-distributed under the hood, so there's also that.
I forgot to update the payment credit card once and got a few months of grace with periodic notices, but no service cut and excellent customer support.
I'm also fond of their stance on pretend standards, like PCI compliance: https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
IIRC I created the account for use as a git-annex remote, but I've used it for archival and sshfs, which is very convenient.
We don’t have our own forum so this is as good of a place as any to discuss anything that’s on your mind.
AMA.
I published my scripts[0] and notes[1] about doing append-only backups with Borg on rsync.net since at the time rclone studio wasn't supported. My strategy is to do Restic backups to a backup server at my house and Borg backups to rsync.net as my offsite backup, so the scripts handle both.
The post I linked above also outlines how I handle expiring old backups (requires either manual action with your privileged key, or a suitably isolated host that has the ability to purge the backups automatically.). You really don't want to fill up your disk (or hit your hard quota) with Borg. Recovering -- even deleting existing backups -- requires a bit of extra space unless you want to rm -rf.
0 - https://marcusb.org/hacks/backuptools.html
1 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/07/ransomware-resistant-backu...
A note/question to other macOS users:
I have "Require password after screen saver begins" turned on.
I realized that because of this, when my screensaver is on, ssh keys with passphrases (stored in my Keychain) would not work, which would lead rsync to fail.
I ended up using a dedicated passphrase-less ssh key for rsync. Not ideal.
Are there workarounds to have backups run while my computer is "idle'ing"? Thnaks!
I recommend them to everyone who asks me about backups.
The utter simplicity of just having ssh and zfs as a service is killer! I can connect anything I want to it to back however I like.
And it just works.
keep up the good work!
Does anyone know of an existing service like this? Is it something rsync would consider hosting/providing? Currently to support sending encrypted ZFS snapshots to rsync.net I need to use the freebsd VM option with its own zpool.