

Tarsnap news - cperciva
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-01-17-tarsnap-news.html

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m0nty
Just my tuppence worth here: I started using tarsnap a couple of weeks ago and
it's been superb. I needed a way to create encrypted, offsite, incremental
backups and I'm not aware of a service similar to Colin's -- usually you get
to choose two of those options, not all three. Also, customer service has been
excellent after I expressed an interest in using tarsnap under Cygwin: Colin
has responded in a timely and professional manner to my emails, so now I can
also back up my Windows server as well.

It's sometimes unclear what a startup plans to offer to its customers, and how
it plans to make money. In fact, sometimes it's utterly baffling. tarsnap is a
necessary product with affordable pricing, and I wish Colin every success with
it.

~~~
mdasen
You really hit the nail on the head. There's a solid business plan coupled
with the three things backup needs. One thing to add: Tarsnap is even better
than incrementals. It's snapshots that don't take up more space. That means
that you can do things like delete an old archive since the newer ones don't
rely on it for restore. Each archive works like a full backup even though it
doesn't take up the storage space of a full backup!

I'm surprised that VC hasn't been banging down Colin's door. He has a workable
business plan and a product that's wonderful. Tarsnap, in my opinion, should
also have broad appeal to businesses. I know my company does a disk->tape
thing, but often the tapes aren't so reliable, the whole setup is labor
intensive, and it's stored in one location. Businesses are less hesitant to
pay than consumers are and Tarsnap offers a lot of value.

~~~
cperciva
_I'm surprised that VC hasn't been banging down Colin's door._

Probably they either aren't aware of tarsnap or they aren't sufficiently
technically inclined to be able to try using tarsnap for themselves. :-)

That said, I have had some inquiries; but my response so far has always been
that at the moment, for the small amount of money which I could usefully
apply, funding would be more of a distraction than it would be worth.

~~~
artificer
Probably you've heard those words from many others as well, but what about
spending money for annoying, non-hackerish stuff like

* Building a complete, final product with appropriate documentation, feature matrix etc.

* Building a nice and informative web page describing your product, it's features, your offerings, it's advantages/disadvantages etc.

(...or maybe you already have plans for all those after you finish beta-
testing.)

~~~
cperciva
Don't worry, I plan on doing all of that stuff, too. But I don't need people
to beta test a website for months and months -- so making a nice-looking
website isn't a high priority while tarsnap is still in beta testing.

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tptacek
Colin, the SSL comment at the end of this is silly. There's no reasonable
reason not to trust the security of SSL; there was _one_ CA that was
vulnerable to certificate forgery, and only with a couple hundred PS3s running
custom tuned MD5 birthday code designed by Marc Stevens and Arjen Lenstra. And
it isn't vulnerable anymore.

~~~
cperciva
_there was one CA that was vulnerable to certificate forgery_

You only need one.

In any event, my feeling is that a rogue CA (I include a CA which doesn't
perform adequate verification in this category) is the greatest of the three
risks I mentioned.

------
almost
Another happy tarsnap customer here. I've had it backing up all the stuff
which matters to me every day for the past month. It's way simpler than my
previous solution (backing up to S3) and it's much faster. It's also
incredibly cheap (less than a dollar so far, my prepaid $5 should last a while
:p)

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rw
On the "getting started" page, there is a heading called "Register Machines".
The first thing I thought of was
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_machine> . Given your audience, that
choice of words might be confusing :)

~~~
cperciva
I think there's a point where we have to accept that the English language is
heavily overloaded, and trust that our readers will be able to understand our
meaning from the context. :-)

But speaking of theoretical CS concepts: Part of the tarsnap source code
implements a "multitape layer" -- which, in this case, refers to code which
uses block storage to provide multiple simulated tapes -- but I spent a long
time trying to think of a different name for it in order to avoid any
confusion with multitape Turing machines.

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delano
Can you accept Canadian customers yet?

~~~
cperciva
Not yet. I hope to get sales taxes figured out some time in the next few
months.

------
jhancock
I've been using tarsnap for about three weeks. Very happy. Thanks for a great
product!!

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russell
Is windows in your future?

~~~
cperciva
Probably, but not very soon. Unless you consider Cygwin to be Windows, in
which case you can start using tarsnap right now.

