
Tarsnap GUI for the desktop - antonios
http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01123.html
======
gjm11
While we're discussing making Tarsnap more user-friendly:

The single reason (other than, er, fecklessness on my part) why I haven't
tried Tarsnap is that it seems difficult to predict how much using Tarsnap
would actually cost me. I would need to know (1) how much space my data will
take up after compression and deduplication, and (2) how much bandwidth my
incremental backups will need -- again, after compression and deduplication.

Wouldn't It Be Nice If there were a "predict my Tarsnap costs" tool? You
download it and point it at your data. It compresses it and identifies
duplicated blocks, and says "You would initially be storing about 25 GB of
data on the Tarsnap servers, which will cost you about $6.70 per month." It
records a bunch of hashes. Then, a little later, you run it again. It
identifies changed blocks and compresses the differences (or something), and
says "If you do an incremental update like this, you will transfer about 2GB
of data, which will cost you about $0.54." With, each time, a disclaimer:
"This is only a crude estimate and if you think Tarsnap, Inc., will be in any
way bound by it then you're out of your mind."

I'm not sure whether this is a thing that any random third-party person could
write, or whether getting the numbers right would require information about
exactly what happens on the Tarsnap servers that only Colin has. Perhaps the
answer is that doing it _right_ requires secret information, but doing it
_well enough_ (e.g., getting within 20%, 95% of the time) is easy with some
naive algorithm like "divide everything into 4kB blocks, hash them all,
identify duplicates, compress individual unique blocks with gzip; do the same
for incremental updates but ignore blocks whose hash hasn't changed".

I'm curious: is this a factor stopping other people signing up with Tarsnap?
Is it perhaps only a factor for cheapskate individuals like me, and not for
the larger organizations that probably represent most of Tarsnap's profits?

~~~
neilk
The thing that's keeping you from using Tarsnap is its _costs_? The deltas
you're talking about look like they are under $10.

It sounds like you are a programmer. At an hourly rate, it probably cost you
more just to write that comment.

~~~
gjm11
The deltas were completely made up. If I knew they were right, I'd sign right
up today. (I think.) What I don't want to do is guess at the deltas, sign up
for Tarsnap, start up my first backup or my first incremental thereafter, and
find I'm on the hook for hugely more than I originally budgeted.

I think the way it actually works, what would happen is that after my first
backup completes my account would go overdrawn and I would lose access to
Tarsnap. And then I could walk away and all I'd actually lose would be
whatever I'd prepaid. But -- and this is surely irrational, but I bet it isn't
only my brain that works this way -- I would then feel _really bad_ because
(1) I would be failing to pay for something I had bought and (2) I would have
spent money and got nothing in return. Even though (1) Colin surely budgets
for a certain amount of attrition and (2) the sum of money involved needn't be
bigger than $5.

I don't want to do something that seems like it has a substantial chance of
leaving me feeling simultaneously guilty and wasteful.

~~~
neilk
I did the math and I see your point. I'm also a CrashPlan user.

Right now I'm paying CrashPlan about $60/year. My best guess at Tarsnap costs
is about 10x that, $600/year.

Normally I'm a very privacy-conscious person, but that difference does give me
pause. I could probably slim down what I do with Crashplan to only personal
files rather than the whole disk, but why would I want to do that? The whole
point is to "fire and forget", and restore painlessly.

Perhaps Tarsnap makes sense if you're Stripe, with lots of sensitive data to
store, easily partitioned from your other data. But if my calculations are
correct, probably not if you're an average individual.

~~~
gaadd33
Does CrashPlan dedup and compress the data? Also I have to say, tarsnap is so
much more lightweight than CrashPlan. If they came out with a nice command
line client I would have to reconsider them.

------
jasonkester
I can't help but chuckle, seeing the "user friendly GUI" arrive as a wall-of-
text mailing list message linking to a source code repository.

No homepage, No installer, not even a screenshot. "There exists code you can
compile. Someplace. QED."

Congratulations for staying true to form!

~~~
cperciva
The rest will come once this has had more testing. This is a first public beta
and the move of code from private development to public development; it's not
ready yet for people who would be scared off by needing to compile it.

------
4lun
Screenshots here: [https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-
gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screensh...](https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-
gui/wiki/Tarsnap#screenshots)

~~~
Pephers
Thanks for the link. My guess is that this is what most people are after :)

------
Robin_Message
It's worth noting that Colin blesses this as a public beta in a reply –
[http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-
users/msg01124.html](http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01124.html).

But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial
relationship is?

~~~
cperciva
_But I would be interested to know more of what (if any) the commercial
relationship is?_

Tarsnap Backup Inc. funded this development, and is continuing to fund work on
this.

------
jacques_chester
I once asked Colin Percival about doing an OS X front end as a commercial
product, to be sold independently, because tarnsap is awesome and the user
experience isn't.

Nothing came of it because he is sticking to his licensing, which would mean
telling users to first install XCode before installing the GUI. It didn't seem
like that would be a winner, so I moved on to other things.

I greatly admire that he stuck to his position.

~~~
icebraining
Couldn't it be done in the age-old tradition of UNIX/Linux GUI frontends to
command line apps? It seems like your installer (or the GUI app itself, on
first run) could do all the work of downloading the Tarsnap source, compiling
it and then simply launch the CLI program to execute the actions.

It'd take some dev work to set it all up, but could be transparent for the
user.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
On OS X that requires downloading a 2 GB package (Xcode) first to install the
compiler and such. Users would rightly think that's overkill for a backup
tool.

~~~
icebraining
Didn't that change a few years ago when they released the Command Line Tools
for Xcode?

~~~
sigjuice
Yes. Also, installing the command line tools on a pristine system is easy and
does not require downloading Xcode. Typing cc in Terminal will pop up a dialog
box that will offer to install the CLT.

------
icebraining
Text-wrapped version:

    
    
      I bring fresh news from the Tarsnap pit.
      
      I have been working hard for the last 6 months on a desktop application
      frontend for the awesome Tarsnap service. Most of you are using Tarsnap as
      it was designed, from the command line, usually on the server side and in
      scripts, however some people, like me, feel the need to benefit from the same
      Tarsnap juice from the comfort of the desktop too, with ease, for common tasks
      and swift backups. Another important aspect is that it is so easy to create
      complex and custom backup schemes using the tarsnap command line utilities,
      that are adhering to the Unix philosophy and thus can easily be used like an
      API, that I genuinely found an opportunity for creating a backup application
      that I would be the first user of and would put my lack of patience, trust
      and overall pessimism regarding existing solutions at rest.
      
      This is where I introduce Tarsnap for the desktop, a cross-platform,
      open source (BSD 2 clause) modern desktop application acting as a wrapper
      around the Tarsnap command line utilities, written in C++ and using the
      Qt 5 framework. You need to install the command line Tarsnap client before
      you can use the application. Given that Tarsnap doesn't provide any binary
      redistributables for the CLI utilities on any platform at the moment,
      there's none for this desktop app either. This might be subject to change
      in the future.
      
      The project page and code is hosted at your favorite host, Github:
      https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
      
      To get started all you have to do is: $git clone
      https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui.git &amp;&amp; cd tarsnap-gui $git
      checkout v0.5 $less README
      
      The application currently has 3 main usage patterns:
      
      1. The Backup tab allows you to quickly backup files and directories in a
      single shot fashion; 2. The Archives tab lists all of the archives that have
      been created using the current machine key. You can inspect, restore and
      delete archives from this view; 3. The Jobs tab. A job is a predefined set
      of directories and files, as well as backup preferences, that you know are
      going to be backed up regularly; These are persistent (in a local Sqlite DB)
      and you can attend to them whenever you wish afterwards;
      
      The other tabs are Settings and Help, which hopefully are self explanatory. See
      the distribution files README, CHANGELOG and COPYING for information on
      respective matters.
      
      The current version is 0.5 and is considered beta until otherwise
      announced. There are rough edges around the corners and lots more ground to
      cover when it comes to functionality and Tarsnap options breadth and depth
      coverage. All development will now take place in the open, thus I'd like to
      start the conversation here and encourage contribution and review on GitHub.
      
      Read this Wiki page and the announcement summary on my
      blog for more details and some beautiful screenshots:
      https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap
      http://shinnok.com/rants/2015/06/11/tarsnap-frontend-released/
      
      To conclude, if you're a lazy desktop user like me, you're a perfect fit,
      be an early adopter and start using it now so we can get it further. :-)
      I do advise you to create a new key for this desktop session, it's generally
      best practice and a safe-guard given that the application is still in beta.
      
      Cheers, Shinnok

~~~
maxerickson
Here's a bookmarklet for adding wrap to pre elements, useful for readers of
mailing list archives:

[https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490](https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/ed79ebefd7303d416490)

There's lots of implementations of the idea, I don't remember if I copied it
from somewhere or not.

------
hybridtupel
It's not directly related to the gui but I see the tarsnap service for the
first time. The last release of tarsnap was two years ago. Is it so secure
that there were not even bug fixes necessary since then?

Apart from that the service with the gui looks quite promising to me and is
totally worth a try.

~~~
merijnv
Where are you getting this from? The latest release on the website is from
February 2015, as near as I can tell. Or at least, that's when it was signed.

~~~
cperciva
I re-signed the tarball when the signing key expired.

------
pronoiac
There's a mention of scheduling backups in the Github repo, as an upcoming
feature, but in the meantime, here's my tarsnap-cron:
[https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-
cron](https://github.com/pronoiac/tarsnap-cron)

------
qnm
Looks good. I think it's time to try tarsnap again.

I recall that there was this one GUI tool[1] for OSX but I was never able to
get it to work correctly.

[1] [https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob](https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob)

~~~
cperciva
There have been a few attempts at GUIs over the years. I'm hoping that this
one will turn out well; I think it's already more functional than any of the
others, and it's being actively developed.

------
normaldotcom
Just packaged it up for Arch Linux (user repository):
[http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-
git/](http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tarsnap-gui-git/)

~~~
cperciva
The license is BSD, not GPLv2...

~~~
normaldotcom
Thanks, I'll update it shortly.

------
nailer
FYI front page of tarsnap.com:

> At the present time, Tarsnap does not have a graphical user interface.

Might want to update (and add some screenshots). And maybe make the price
calculator live.

~~~
cperciva
All in due time. This is a first public beta; I'd like it to get some testing
from the community (including feedback on use cases) before I promote it too
much to new users.

------
INTPenis
Did anyone else get a blocked notice in their corporate bluecoat filter?

Bluecoat blocks the strangest things sometimes but this was amusing to me
because I work at a "cloud hosting provider" and essentially tarsnap could be
seen as a competitor to some services that we sell, but we don't focus solely
on *nix systems.

