SFTP vs. B2 vs. Wasabi

Getting Help
1

Hi,

I wonder which backend works best or is the most recommended?
I want to backup 2 TB of data and these three are ca. the same price:

  • Hetzner Storage Box BX40, 2 TB for 11,78 €/month. Offers SFTP (and Samba, WEBDAV)
  • Backblaze B2, 2 TB for 10 $/month
  • Wasabi S3, 2 TB for 12 $/month

EDIT: Forget to mention: I have 35 MBit/s upstream only. So storage speed probably is not important.

1 Like
2

When I started using restic, I began with a hetzner storage box. Now I am using wasabi for over two years.

I find wasabi quite faster than a storage box. On the other hand, wasabi has this retention policy, it charges you for deleted bytes for some months. So the advantage of the storage box is that you have a fixed price without surprised. Also, as far as I remember, some storage box products have snapshots which is nice if your repository suffers a ransomware attack.

So in your case, If you don’t expect much data growth, I would go for a storage box. If there is a Chance your data grows a lot, I would consider wasabi since you are more flexible there.

1 Like
3

I have used Hetzner and Wasabi in the past - both have pros and cons.

  • Hetzner automatically creates daily snapshots which is a nice safety net.

  • In my experience the only useable backend with Hetzner is SFTP. restic has issues when using Samba as backend, try to avoid that.

  • Wasabi (and B2) supports policies for file access to create append-only backups.

  • While Wasabi has free egress you should not have more egress (download) than your active storage volume (link to FAQ)

PS: Have you considered Hetzner server auctions to install rest-server?

4

Hetzner server auctions are a nice idea, but for 2 TB storage space (2x 2 TB RAID1) it is starting at 28 €/month, which is much more than the cloud storage solutions. The server auctions are much more interesting for a 4-8 TB storage solution though.

5

Just did a mean test B2 vs. Storagebox SFTP. “Mean” because this test is running on a Hetzner cloud server, so the storagebox probably has an advantage here. This is for another use case…

Backing up 427778 files, 186.138 GiB. After scanning the dir restic gives me those ETAs after running for few minutes:

  • B2: ~6 hours
  • Storagebox SFTP: ~1.5 hours
6

My backups run in the background, so I don’t mind so much how long they take within reason. The incremental daily backups are extremely quick. I use AWS S3 with the IA storage class, but B2 is likely cheaper.

7

I actually wanted to use the Hetzner storagebox, but my problem is: I’m quite hard on the 2 TB limit and next step is a 5 TB box, which of course is much more expensive.
Currently I’m giving Wasabi S3 a try. Seems to be a nice alternative. They really have nice web interface and I can have a 3 TB option. Currently doing an upload with my full 40 MBit/s :sob: :rofl: