HACKER Q&A
📣 reyman

Rsync.net Lifetime 1Tb?


Hi,

I recently received a mail from rsync.net for 1tb @500$ lifetime (only by mail)

I'm happy with rsync.net service and my small account, but if i found this offer interesting, 500$ is a lot (for me), even lifetime, especially for long time backup ... 1Tb, even replicated, will probably cost like a usb 4 gb usb today in 2030 no ?

Actually B2 also offer ~70$ by year for 1Tb of storage for example. I use that for my RAW photo backup.

What do you think about that, i'm interested by another point of view. Perhaps rsync.net CEO (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rsync ?) could explain us why this lifetime plan today ? I try to better understand/evaluate the interest of this offer.

Like i read on another reddit post 'A lifetime membership can never be proven, only disproven, and once it’s disproven, there is no-one to complain to.' : https://www.reddit.com/r/storage/comments/sfoqb4/rsyncnet_lifetime_plan_good_option_or_not/

  👤 prirun Accepted Answer ✓
B2 is $5/TB/mo, so that's $60/year. I wrote this little program:

  c = 500
  i = 0
  while c >= 60:
      c -= 60
      c *= 1.07
      i += 1
  print 'broke', i
At a conservative 7% interest, $500 invested would pay for 11 years of B2 service and you'd have $39 left over. For the last 10 years, the S&P 500 has returned 16.29%. Using that number instead, you could pay for B2 service and after 50 years, you'd have $136K in the bank. Or, rsync.net could have it in their bank.

Personally, I'd never do a lifetime anything. I've seen too many things go bust to believe in a lifetime guarantee of any kind. These things aren't guaranteed for your lifetime, they're guaranteed for the company's lifetime.

👤 absence
That's too expensive, there are plenty of cheaper options available out there. They won't offer you a filesystem like rsync.net does, its mainly object storage.

For example you can have 2TB for a fraction of that cost - pcloud for instance.

Strange that they are now offering lifetime accounts, giving their stand on it in the past - https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...