What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

The "truly paranoid" would check backup status email more than once every fortnight. ;)

One of the benefits of a paranoid setup should be not having to constantly check on things.

What happens if I get in an accident and get in a coma for longer than 14 days? What if I get arrested? What if I go on my honeymoon and simply forget about the backup? What if ... truly paranoid people are paranoid about that possibility, too.

I know I am and that this 14 days clause is the only reason why I am not using tarsnap.

There are many types of paranoia. Micro-managing is one. Eg,

> if you believe you must check on every detail, your style is symptomatic of insecurity or paranoia - http://www.adams-hall.com/micwilstrany.html

In any case, my ";)" from before stands.

"What-if"s are fun! (Still operating under the ";)" from earlier.)

What if auto-renew were added, but you're robbed and knocked into a coma for 2 months. In the meanwhile, the credit card company notices the suspicious transactions, can't get a hold of you, and cancels the card. Auto-renew occurs 3 days later, but the card number on file doesn't work. Colin Percival calls your phone number, and gets no answer for a month. Then what?

If you're truly paranoid, you might have to consider that possibility as well.

With every scenario and solution you can come up with which require intervention, I can double down on and think of a worse-case scenario where your solution won't work and you'll lose your data. A possible non-intervention solution could work, which is to front-load the account to the limits of your paranoia.

Or... you could just put 1 year's worth of funds in your tarnsnap account, and check it every season to top it off.

What is google just decided to filter those e-mails into my spam folder and I miss both? That seems like a very possible thing to happen.

What if the payments were taken out of an account automatically and you could load up a reserve with money. This would allow for calculations on your usage:money without it being a major factor on immediate loss of service.

There are two kinds of paranoia here:

1) Paranoid that you will lose your data.

2) Paranoid that your data will fall into the wrong hands.

It seems to me that Tarsnap values preventing #2 over preventing #1.

To follow on your example, what if the authorities who arrested you want to get their mitts on the data in your tarsnap account? Won't you be happy that your data is irrevocably deleted?

Why haven't you white-listed them? The problem with the "delete after 14 days" is that it can be hard to predict on your side how long it will take to exhaust credit. But here what you're asking them is to work around a possible misconfiguration on your side. That's a different class of error.

If tarsnap is really a G2G business, then it makes sense to assume you know how to white-list an email address.

How many other misconfigurations should they deal with? What if the battery is dead on your cell phone when they try to call you after several missed the emails? (Or you're out hiking where there's no reception, or on a cruise, or in another country and didn't want to pay high roaming charges, or ...)