

Tarsnap
Work on Tarsnap began in September 2006 when the author, Dr. Colin Percival, decided that he wanted a better online backup service than was presently available. After slightly more than two years of development and private beta testing, Tarsnap officially entered public beta in...
Cost / License
- Free
- Proprietary
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
Features
Properties
- Security-focused
Features
- Encrypted Backup
Tarsnap News & Activities
Recent activities
Tarsnap information
What is Tarsnap?
Work on Tarsnap began in September 2006 when the author, Dr. Colin Percival, decided that he wanted a better online backup service than was presently available. After slightly more than two years of development and private beta testing, Tarsnap officially entered public beta in November 2008, and attained profitability in February 2009. In September 2011, Tarsnap Backup Inc. was incorporated in British Columbia, Canada.
The Tarsnap client code is built around the open source libarchive archive handling library. While the Tarsnap code is not distributed under an open source license, Tarsnap contributes back to the open source community via bug fixes and enhancements to libarchive (40 commits and counting) and by releasing entirely new code where possible (e.g., the scrypt key derivation function and file encryption code).
At the present time, the Tarsnap service is provided using infrastructure from Amazon Web Services.




Comments and Reviews
I really like the sound and look of TarSnap, but the pricing is in "pico dollars per gigabyte-month" (currently twenty-five cents) for storage and transfer. Sounds cheap, but by my calculation that's $250 per terabyte per month for storage, plus the same cost for uploading it.
I have two terabytes of data so assuming a generous 50% compression and de-duplication ratio, that's $500 for the first month, and $250 every month thereafter. Great for a business, not so great for a prosumer.
If price were no option, I'd probably use TarSnap.
I might still use it to back up a few important text files, though, which I'm sure is the actual intended purpose.