Let Tarsnap Handle Your Backups

Backups are a huge pain. Sure, Amazon has great prices with both S3 and Glacier, but then you have to really manage everything yourself. Create the S3 bucket, create the security groups, install a tool like s3cmd to handle moving the data, etc.

A better solution is to let a little known company Tarsnap handle all of this for you, encrypting the data while they are at it! If you know how to use the tar command, you know how to use Tarsnap.

1. Register the machine to backup
   tarsnap-keygen --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key --user me@example.com --machine mybox

2. Create a backup of /ur/home and /other/stuff
   tarsnap -c -f mybackup /usr/home /other/stuff

3. Restore home directories for two users
   tarsnap -x -f anotherbackup usr/home/auser usr/home/anotheruser

That's great you say. But how do you schedule backups? I mean we aren't going to run this by hand every time a backup is needed.

You could call something like this from a cron job:
tarsnap -c -f mybackup-'date +%Y-%m-%d' /usr/home

But a better way is to use Tarsnapper. It will handle all of that pain for you.

Bottom Line

Use Tarsnap to take the pain away from backups.