Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid

This bit: "Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails." is no longer true; you get three emails, and often more if you're a long-time Tarsnap user / I recognize your email address for some reason / you have a history of getting your data almost deleted.

A short time later, Patrick writes "If Colin does, in fact, exercise discretion about shooting backups in the head, that should be post-haste added to the site" -- which is something I considered doing but ended up with a firm "nope, not happening" to, for two reasons:

1. I hate to advertise "discretion" because people get upset if you exercise your discretion in a way which is not in their favour, and

2. I have solid statistical evidence that people respond to incentives. An email which says "Your Tarsnap account will be deleted soon" is far more likely to make people do something than an email which says "Your Tarsnap account needs more money and if you don't pay up soon and don't write back then I'll think about deleting it" (which is actually closer to the truth). I really really don't want to delete someone's data when they still need it -- it has happened a handful of times and I feel awful about it -- and implying the presence of a ruthless cron job is quite an effective mechanism for preventing that.

Later, Patrick writes

Current strap line: Online backups for the truly paranoid

Revised strap line: Online backups for servers of serious professionals

Here, I simply disagree with Patrick; nobody interprets "truly paranoid" as meaning "diagnosed by a psychiatrist as suffering from mental illness". I think this branding has been highly effective.

Tarsnap is for backing up servers, not for backing up personal machines. It is a pure B2B product. We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise, but we’re going to start talking about business, catering to the needs of businesses, and optimizing the pieces of the service “around” the product for the needs of businesses.

I have an unfair advantage over Patrick here: I know Tarsnap's user base. With the exception of Stripe, which started using Tarsnap thanks to Patrick (err, the other Patrick...), every large corporate user of Tarsnap I can think of started using Tarsnap thanks to a sysadmin who had used Tarsnap personally. In economic terms, Tarsnap's "personal" customers provide most of their "lifetime value" as sales channels to their employers.

This is already getting a bit long to be an HN comment, so I'll stop going through point by point. Suffice to say that a number of things Patrick suggests have either happened or are in progress. Customer testimonials? There's now a page full of them (starting with Stripe). Improved getting-started documentation? Done. Advice for dealing with a variety of common scenarios? A whole page of tips. Binary packages for common platforms? Due to be announced in a few days (currently available as "experimental"). A GUI? In progress, hopefully landing soon.

I've used this metaphor before, but I like it so I'm going to use it again. Patrick gives great business advice, but Tarsnap is not just a strategy for me to make money. So I treat his advice like ships treat navigational beacons: Paying close attention to them, and using them to plot a course, but not steering directly towards them.

Or not. It depends on your use-case, but I'm just suggesting you consider that factor too.

There's also the trivial (but often unhelpful) advice of "be closer to the server" -- the problem is one of round trip latencies since the internal design of tar (and thus tarsnap) works on the principle of "read a block; do something with it; repeat". This is what I feel to be the biggest technical pain point in tarsnap, and I know in theory how to fix it, but every time I've started focusing my energy on it other things have come up requiring more urgent attention. :-/