What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

Patrick notes in detail that the post is written with Colin's approval. I am not a customer of any of Patrick's services, nor am I a customer of Colin's, although perhaps I should be a customer of both. The most telling part of the post is right here, beginning with a quotation from the Tarsnap FAQ:

" >Q: What happens when my account runs out of money?

" >A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.

"Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails.

"Guess how I found out about this?"

That says it all.

I am a customer of Colin's, though I almost had a very similar scenario happen. Luckily, my understanding of crypto caught it, and Colin is quick to answer emails, so I'm good to go (for the most part...)

Here was my deal: I stupidly told my computer to upgrade libc, and only after apt completely failed and wrecked the machine to the point of `ls` not working did I realize that I had some personal data that wasn't backed up. Of course.

My plan was thus: use an Ubuntu LiveUSB, upload a copy of /home/steve to Tarsnap, then install Ubuntu, and be on my way. As I was compiling Tarsnap, I realized that my mental model of machines on Tarsnap was probably wrong: it's not that I have a Tarsnap account, with access given to a set of keys. It's that each key has its own backup. So what I _almost_ did was upload an encrypted backup of all my stuff, then wipe the drive and the key, never (hopefully!) to see my data again. :(

Even when you're technical and know about this stuff, you can screw it up, because you're still human.