<story><title>Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid</title><url>https://www.tarsnap.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I&amp;#x27;m always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there&amp;#x27;s anything anyone here wants to know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caivvoacmh</author><text>Hi cperciva can you please explain the following:&lt;p&gt;1) &amp;quot;Every Tarsnap archive acts like it is completely independent of all other archives&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Lets say I&amp;#x27;m backing up `&amp;#x2F;somedir` that looks like this:&lt;p&gt;# archive1 - initial backup&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ── somedir
      ├── file1.txt
      ├── file2.txt
      └── file3.txt
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
# archive 2 - 2nd backup&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ── somedir
      └── file3.txt (modified)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Are you suggesting that if I delete `archive1` and `rm -rf &amp;#x2F;somedir` that I can restore `&amp;#x2F;somedir` with `archive2` alone?&lt;p&gt;If so, how is that possible?&lt;p&gt;2) Does tarsnap stream the backup data to the tarsnap service or does it create the encrypted archive and &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;only&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; after this upload it?&lt;p&gt;For instance, if I&amp;#x27;ve got 100 GB to backup (first time), do I need 100 GB of free space for tarsnap to work?</text></comment>
<story><title>Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid</title><url>https://www.tarsnap.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Not sure why Tarsnap has bubbled up on HN again, but I&amp;#x27;m always happy to answer questions about Tarsnap if there&amp;#x27;s anything anyone here wants to know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Osmium</author><text>Always wanted to try Tarsnap for personal use, but I can only budget if the cost was comparable to Dropbox&amp;#x2F;Microsoft OneDrive&amp;#x2F;Google Drive&amp;#x2F;iCloud&amp;#x2F;Amazon Drive which are all ~$10&amp;#x2F;TB&amp;#x2F;mo, but instead Tarsnap seems about an order of magnitude more expensive? Or is the product just not aimed at me?&lt;p&gt;I currently use Arq[1] for backups (which has its own encryption[2] with a user choice of cloud backend), but Tarsnap has such a stellar reputation I&amp;#x27;d definitely try it if I could :)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.arqbackup.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.arqbackup.com&lt;/a&gt;
[2] AES-256 with PKCS5_PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA1 for key derivation, implemented by OpenSSL, with an open file format &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.arqbackup.com&amp;#x2F;arq_data_format.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.arqbackup.com&amp;#x2F;arq_data_format.txt&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>