hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
thanks to your generous support, we're pretty confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about $26 a month or $312 a year. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)
our expenses are currently:
- $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!)
- $2/mo for weekly backups
- $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.
for a total of at least $26/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.
we currently have, for the month of June:
- $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
- $200 this month in one-time donations
for a total of $270 this month. our total balance now stands at $331.31.
that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point.
this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a lot of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks!
[^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour
For what it's worth, I've had issues with data corruption restoring with Borg. Defeating the purpose as a backup. I've used Restic happily and restores very well.
This underscores why I often advocate for simplicity. It's preferable to use trusted tools, like LUKS for filesystem-level encryption and straightforward solutions like the Ext4 filesystem. This aligns with the mentality of "If it's not broken, don't fix it", which is particularly relevant in a backup context. The fewer modifications you make to the backup software, the greater your confidence that it won't let you down in a critical moment.
Fwiw, I've used restic as well. But there was a discussion a while back about very large backups corrupting. I don't know what the right answer is for large backups where duplication is prohibitively costly, but for personal use I do a restic/borg type chunking repo plus a vanilla rsync to a copy on write filesystem.