Borg 2.0 - outreach to borg storage providers

[awgcooper]

A few weeks ago I contacted Rsync.net and Hetzner to ask, as a customer, whether they had plans to upgrade to Borg 2.0 when it was released. Rsync.net said their policy was to upgrade only when a product had progressed to a version x.1 release, so I suppose it will be a while before they are ready to go. Hetzner was less specific, only saying that they would make v2.0 available when ready.

In the interests of ensuring Borg 2.0 makes it to cloud platforms sooner rather than later (which I think is desirable, right?), is it worth one or some of the Borg devs doing some outreach? Maybe something along the lines of "we're getting closer to the finishing line, here's a packaged binary of an advanced released candidate, if you're interested in installing it, we interested in testing it". That's one suggestion, although I'm sure there are other ways of making the approach.

I appreciate that from the providers' point of view, this may represent too much effort for something intangible. Still, I thought it would make sense to raise the question.

[cyb3rz3us]

I know this is a little OT but FWIW, after looking at the Borg specific providers, I decided to just go with my own Borg server @ AWS. Far better performance vs, cost as well as Amazon not caring at all what I run. And the gravy - for me at least - is being able to crank up\down the security as I see fit...no sharing, polices, etc. to get in my way.

[awgcooper]

I agree it's great to have full control but at some point it becomes a cost issue, especially when one is getting into the multi-terabyte range for repo sizes. A Hetzner storage box costs €13 / month for 5TB. AWS S3 is ~ €127 / month (calculated here: https://calculator.aws/#/addService) and that's before any download fees if one has to do a restore. There's cheaper storage available from AWS with S3 Glacier but it's impractical for backing up because of the early deletion and download fees.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

As s3 is not supported as a backend atm, it seems to me that a more normal disk has to be used

[ThomasWaldmann]

borg does not support cloud storage (in the usual sense, like S3 & co), so i suggest to change the title to "borg storage providers" (if you meant borgbase, hetzner, rsync.net & co) so it better stays on-topic.

[ThomasWaldmann]

The plan is that borg 2.0 will contain some code needed to read old repos (so that people can use borg transfer to copy archives from old to related new repos) and that this code will be removed in borg 2.1.

So, if some provider is cautious about fresh releases, i'ld recommend:

• taking part in beta/rc testing to help improve release quality
• maybe skip 2.0.0 and 2.0.1(?) but definitely go for some later 2.0.x release for production

[awgcooper]

Who is the right person to raise this topic with the providers? My question is somewhat rhetorical as I'm thinking it is probably you or someone else who's contributed to the new release. However, I appreciate you have more than enough to do already but I'm concerned that if some customer like me gets in touch about this they won't quite have the same credibility :) One other option: I could make the initial approach with an email that I draft and you review. At least that way, I could do some of the upfront 'admin'.

[m3nu]

So difficult to get people to test new releases. Same over at Vorta. While we already have v2 beta4 over at BorgBase, I see only 3 repos using that version. This may be skewed, since one may only want to test for a short while and then remove it, if not used for production. Who knows.. I did mention the beta option in our last monthly newsletter and hoped for some more response.