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Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

tarsnap.com

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Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#4

Post by Osmium »

cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Always wanted to try Tarsnap for personal use, but I can only budget if the cost was comparable to Dropbox/Microsoft OneDrive/Google Drive/iCloud/Amazon Drive which are all ~$10/TB/mo, but instead Tarsnap seems about an order of magnitude more expensive? Or is the product just not aimed at me?

I currently use Arq[1] for backups (which has its own encryption[2] with a user choice of cloud backend), but Tarsnap has such a stellar reputation I'd definitely try it if I could :)

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com [2] AES-256 with PKCS5_PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA1 for key derivation, implemented by OpenSSL, with an open file format https://www.arqbackup.com/arq_data_format.txt

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#7

Post by diafygi »

cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Is using spiped viable for redis servers? Can all the servers that need to connect to the redis server all connect via spiped using the same secret key? Or do multiple connections mess things up? How many simultaneous incoming connections can one listener deal with?

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#8

Post by nodesocket »

Colin is probably one of the best minds in encryption that I know of. He wrote Scrypt[1] as well. My gripe has always been that while Tarsnap is a product that is clearly built for developers, it does not have to look and feel like the 90's and use obscure and non-intuitive billing (picodollar). The web interface and landing site need some designer/UX love for sure, but at the same time I think Colin is happy and satisfied with how things are going. Highly recommend Tarsnap.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#9

Post by cperciva »

soneca wrote: post #3
cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

A "truly paranoid" that is not a software developer can use Tarsnap?

I'm not sure what you're asking, but if your question is "can paranoid non-developers use Tarsnap", absolutely. You'll need to have some basic comfort with UNIX, though.

Re: Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

#10

Post by cperciva »

diafygi wrote: post #7
cperciva wrote: post #2

Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I'm always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there's anything anyone here wants to know.

Is using spiped viable for redis servers? Can all the servers that need to connect to the redis server all connect via spiped using the same secret key? Or do multiple connections mess things up? How many simultaneous incoming connections can one listener deal with?

I don't use redis, but I understand that lots of people use spiped with redis, yes. Each connection going through spiped is just another connection; spiped is intended to be a "drop in and change where you point your services at" way to make TCP connections secure.

Re simultaneous connections: The current release is limited to 500, but the next release (a matter of weeks) will be able to handle an arbitrarily large number of connections. That said, it uses select/poll based non-blocking I/O, so performance may suffer if most of your connections are idle. (This hasn't been an issue for any spiped uses I'm aware of.)

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