41–50 of 76 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny story about lynx: We were recently making some fixes to improve the website on mobile devices and the question came up "how should the site behave if the screen is too narrow to keep the navigation on the left side of the site?" My immediate reply: "You see how the site behaves in lynx? It should behave like that."
"We"? Is Tarsnap no longer just you?
Hi Colin, what would you say is the strongest argument in favour of Tarsnap over Arq? (As an aside: I've been following your work for the past four years - as someone who is quite passionate about infosec, I'd like to thank you deeply for your contributions to the community.)
If you're doing backups for your business, I've written on how to properly encrypt backups[1] and how to use Google Compute Engine for backups[2]. I'm working on write-ups for AWS and Azure that should post within the new few weeks. [1] https://summitroute.com/blog/2016/12/25/creating_disaster_re... [2] https://summitroute.com/blog/2016/12/25/using_google_for_bac...
1. You're encrypting backups but not authenticating them; someone with access to your archives could trivially truncate an archive or replace one archive with another, and there's a nontrivial chance that they could splice parts of different archives together.
2. Every archive you're creating is stored as a separate full archive; this will probably limit you to keeping a handful of archives at once. With a more sophisticated archival tool, you could store tens of thousands of backups in the same amount of space.
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 sat…
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 sat…
Not your thing? I've always wondered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter? It doesn't matter right now, but if you're building a company which you hope to scale up, it's good to have costs which won't get too big when said scaling happens -- because when your company explodes overnight, you're going to be too busy keeping everything else running to spend time reworking your backup strategy. (Also: If you don't have backups now because you're "no…
> but if you're building a company which you hope to scale up This is a popular sentiment among engineers at startups and in my opinion founders should work hard to (kindly) beat it out of the team as soon as possible. Basically, you can use that line to justify nearly any engineer hobby. We need microservices! We need message queues! We need master-to-master replicated NoSQL databases spread geographically! We need…
For one service, no. But you can easily have one or two dozen such services, and then it really adds up, particularly with per-user or per-server charges.
I see some comments here from people wondering why anyone would use this or searching for use cases. I'll share mine. I use tarsnap to keep daily backups of a web server with a handful of sites. I send over their content, configuration, and database backups. This isn't $$$-critical stuff so I just make a once-daily database backup and I'm fine with that. Every few months I verify one of the backups to make sure every…
2¢, 3¢, 10¢ per day, does that really matter? We are talking about less than a Starbucks for a full month of backups. Sorry, but developers who literally optimize cents over their time and effort is a pet peeve of mine.
Cannot recommend enough.
Here's my sleep deprived post shortly after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069013