What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

Interesting article. I'd actually not heard of Tarsnap before, one question (to those who use it), why would a geek use it over:

  tar -cf - / --exclude='/proc/*' --exclude='/dev/*' [..] | \
      xz -z | \
      openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -salt | \
      > /mnt/your/networked/google/drive/backup.$(hostname -a).$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").aes.tar.xz

I spent a while going through https://www.tarsnap.com/ and I didn't find any flexibility tarsnap offers over it. To make it work unattended, it's trivial to generate a unique key per backup for openssl (use a tmpfs) and then gpg encrypt the key and email it to sys admins or whatever mailing list before killing the tmpfs.

I could understand the appeal to less tech savvy users if there were a gui, or it featured cross platform support beyond those supported by tar, <insert compression tool>, openssl/aespipe/gpg/<insert encryption tool>, or the storage was super cheap.

So what's the value proposition here?

No (geek) love for Duplicity around here?

When I moved away from being a Mac only to a Mac & Debian user a while back and consequently looked around for a non platform dependent backup strategy (to replace JungleDisc), I did almost opt for Tarsnap but was ultimately put off by these two show-stoppers:

1: The data is stored on Colin's servers, not mine.

2: Seriously. What does happen if Colin walks under a bus?

In the end I went for Duplicity backing up to my own Amazon S3 storage. No harder than Tarsnap to set up –if you interface with it via Duply, storage costs are miniscule and a corporation the size of Amazon wouldn't fit under a bus!

http://duply.net/