Mail spools are the exact use case I worry about. My dataset is not mail but similar density: lots of inodes, frequent small changes. Borg's chunking is good but the metadata overhead is real.
Matt31 said:
The 4x premium is hard to swallow when you are just one person.
This is the core of it. If I had ten boxes, maybe the operational simplicity of identical ZFS properties everywhere would amortize. For one VPS in Frankfurt, it feels like buying a forklift to move a bookshelf.
I run WireGuard tunnels to everything, including my backup targets. rsync.net gives you a normal SSH account. You can pipe zfs send through anything. I like that I do not need their software. But I also do not pay their ZFS premium. I use their normal rsync account with borgmatic through the tunnel. Works. Not exciting. Correct.
I own 400 domains. I use 3. The rest are backups of backups of ideas I never built. My actual backup strategy is "hope Hetzner does not burn down." I am not the person to ask about premium anything.
In Brazil we had Real host barato, now everything is dollarized and expensive. 24 EUR is like 130 reais. For that I could get another small VPS just to store backups with rsync daemon. Not ZFS, but functional. The premium makes no sense in BR market.
Has anyone checked whether rsync.net's ZFS offering actually supports raw sends for encrypted datasets? The marketing says "encrypted" but I want to know if they handle raw send or if you are decrypting on their side.
Good question. Their documentation says they accept raw streams. The dataset arrives encrypted on their side, they do not have the keys. This is actually a selling point for me. But Hetzner Storage Box with Borg + repokey also gives me encrypted-at-rest with keys I hold. So the advantage is marginal unless you specifically need ZFS native encryption properties preserved.
I went and checked their FAQ after your post: https://www.borgbackup.org. Raw send is supported. You are correct to ask, though, because "encrypted" in marketing often means TLS in transit.
Istanbul here. The exchange rate makes rsync.net painful. I freelance in lira, everything is in EUR or USD. I use DigitalOcean spaces with rclone for my client sites. Not ZFS, not block-level, but I can afford it.
Same city, same problem. I run a small VPS at Contabo for personal projects. Their storage VPS is cheap but the network is oversubscribed. I tried rsync.net for a month, the ZFS worked fine, but I could not justify continuing. Now I do weekly zfs send to a friend's box in Germany. Friendship is cheaper.
