I have been aware of
tarsnap
for a long time, but only recently did I actually
get around to using it
for anything, as a result of my big
personal digital resiliency audit for 2025.
For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is
“online backups for the truly paranoid”, and
tarsnap the command-line program is the client-side
tool you invoke to actually zip up and push your
archives into the vault. Its creator,
Dr. Colin Percival,
is a really smart and interesting dude for a whole
bunch of reasons. I’m led to believe the whole
business is basically a two-man show between him and
his brother these days.
Tarsnap feels… cozy to use.
I know that’s a weird word to pick for something
most people use to back up, like, extreme
cryptocurrency wallet codes and the like, but
every single thing about it just feels well-considered
from both a Unix sysadmin’s usability standpoint
and from a general product standpoint. The client
side CLI tool is based off of how tar itself works.
The prepaid model means that at any point I can
effectively guarantee anonymity by just shredding
up my keyfiles and letting the $15.123412341234123412
or what have you I still have remaining in the account
quietly run out, at which point the digital noise that
corresponds to whatever I have in there will be
unceremoniously deleted. These two things mean I feel
extremely safe just sticking the whole thing into a
one-liner hourly cronjob if need be and let it rip.
People have often complained they don’t have a good sense for the pricing, so I hacked together a little Tarsnap cost estimator here. If you use it solely to back up the few megabytes of “crown jewels” data we all have lying around, don’t be surprised if the calculator tells you your initial $5 or such will last for over 1,000 years. About the only thing I could think I might want more from a service like this is the opportunity to use a hardware key instead of a keyfile - I’m sure Colin has thought about this possibility himself and has good reasons for or against implementing it, however.
Hats off to you, Dr. Percival. This truly is a dream product.