Tarsnap - Online backups for the truly paranoid

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Online backups for the truly paranoid

Tarsnap is a secure, efficient online backup service:

  • Encryption: your data can only be accessed with your personal keys.
  • Source code: the client code is available.
  • Deduplication: only the unique data between your current files and encrypted archives is uploaded.

Tarsnap runs on UNIX-like operating systems (BSD, Linux, MacOS X, Cygwin, etc).

Tarsnap pricing

Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage:

Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data
($0.25 / GB-month)
Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data
($0.25 / GB)

There are no other fees — Tarsnap has no fixed costs or minimum monthly fees.

Why use Tarsnap?

Dataflow chart of a typical backup with Tarsnap

Consider a typical backup scenario:

  • Alice begins a backup, which takes a complete snapshot of her files.
  • Tarsnap automatically finds the unique data within her files.
  • Alice pays less than $5/month.
  • Alice's data is secure.

Latest Tarsnap release

Tarsnap 1.0.37 (March 10, 2016)

Major changes since version 1.0.36:

  • tarsnap-key(gen|mgmt|regen) now accept a --passphrase-time option, which specifies the duration to be spent on computing the derived keys used for encrypting the tarsnap key file.
  • tarsnap now accepts a --keep-going option when deleting or printing statistics about multiple archives.
  • tarsnap-keymgmt now accepts a --print-key-permissions option for listing the permissions contained in a key file.
  • tarsnap --print-stats now accepts a --csv-file option for printing statistics in comma-separated-value format.
  • tarsnap now accepts a --verify-config command which exits silently after checking the configuration file(s) for syntax errors.
  • tarsnap now looks for a server named "v1-0-0-server.tarsnap.com" instead of the historic "betatest-server.tarsnap.com" hostname. This should have no user-visible effect in most configurations.
  • tarsnap now correctly warns if a sparse extract fails due to hardlinks.
  • tarsnap now prints a warning if creating an empty archive.

You can see all of the changes between 1.0.36 and this version in our tarsnap git repository.