Tarsnap Mastery: Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid

by Michael W. Lucas

Tarsnap, the secure online backup service for Unix-like systems, raised the bar for online backups. It’s inexpensive. It’s reliable. And you don’t need to trust the Tarsnap service—they can’t access your backups even if they wanted to.With Tarsnap Mastery you’ll learn install and manage Tarsnap on Linux, Unix, Windows, and OS X* fully exploit features like encryption and deduplication* create and recover archives* customize backups to precisely your requirements* passphrase protect keys* create and manage special-purpose keys* automatically back up and rotate archives* understand and resolve performance issues* quickly restore complete systemsDitch the tape room. Put your backups online, and know that they’re safe.Tarsnap Mastery. Because life doesn’t back itself up.“I learned a lot about Tarsnap while reading this book — things I had forgotten, and things I had never even realized. As befits the author of so many technical books, Michael’s attention to detail is truly outstanding.” -Colin Percival, Tarsnap designer

Genres: Technology

154 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2015

About the author

Michael W. Lucas is the author of fifty-odd critically-acclaimed nonfiction books. As Michael Warren Lucas, he's written several novels.

Reviews

[pluton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm using Tarsnap because of its Trust-No-One architecture (the server only stores my encrypted blobs and can't read the actual data), a must-have property when storing personal data "in the cloud" (aka other peoples' computers), by running the command manually and I wanted to learn more. Most of the book covers Tarsnap itself, which makes sense in a book about it but all that is also available on the official website for free, so the most interesting part is the applied experience: backup automation, rotating backups, key management, tips and tricks — unfortunately there isn't a lot of that. For example, for automation and rotation only a script called ACTS is covered in some details; of course you can always write your own.
Nevertheless it's convenient to have all this information in one place.

[Sean Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is funny, informative, and chalk-full of technical insight. When I picked up the book, I knew that Tarsnap was backup solution that somehow used encryption and de-duplication to allow you to do backups safe and cheap. Now that I'm finished, I feel I know all the philosophical and functional components, and have a good idea on how I'm going to implement my multi-host backup program for the next 10 years.

This book is valuable to anyone who loves elegant, well designed software, irreverent but concise writing, and is not afraid of the command line.