Re: TarSnap usecases

[Mark Drovdahl <markd@drovdahl.com>]

One use case I've considered is: how will my wife access my tarsnap
archives should something happen to me? For better, or for worse, a
simple, cross platform GUI could make tarsnap more accessible to more
end users.

Regards,
Mark Drovdahl

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Robert Clemens
<robert@solidsolutions.net> wrote:
> I think a GUI would be neat. But I think the only thing that would really
> make it useful would be the ability to have it provide a lot of detail about
> the files being backed up and the ability to specify a file version and have
> the gui request the container file from tarsnap and then extract the single
> file to a specified location.
>
> Colin made the CLI to tarsnap quite usable and simple so it'd be hard to
> just make a GUI that made tarsnap more simple.
>
> A GUI for tarsnap would have to really elaborate on the file versions and
> what is inside of each snapshot to really make it worthwhile.
>
> Also of note is that this would primarily be for workstations or windows
> servers and not unix based servers. So functionality would really need to be
> geared towards those applications. I would consider basing your functions
> off of that of BackupExec from Symantec. Options like Exchange archiving and
> SQL backups and details on all backups.
>
> Only feature I'd like tarsnap to add is local data stores for data backup
> and the ability to pull data from those before requesting it from the
> tarsnap server should the file be available locally.
>
> Just my thoughts.
>
> --
> Robert Clemens
>
> Martin Grünbaum wrote:
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm contemplating writing a GUI frontend for TarSnap in Java. However,
>> before pursuing that I'd like to get an idea on a variety of different uses,
>> since I can only speak of my own. If anyone would be so inclined as to share
>> with me (or the rest of us) what you're using TarSnap for, in enough detail
>> that I can draw up proper usecases for it, that would be greatly
>> appreciated!
>>
>> To get the ball rolling, here is what I myself am using TarSnap for at the
>> moment:
>>
>> I back up University school work on a daily basis through a shell script
>> that appropriately names the archive, such that I get archives that look
>> like so:
>>
>> 20091118-200001-daily-diku
>> 20091126-200001-daily-diku
>> 20091110-214801-weekly-diku
>> 20091117-200001-weekly-diku
>> 20091122-200001-daily-diku
>>
>> That is, YEARMMDD-HHMMSS-daily/weekly/monthly-archive_name
>>
>> Similarly, for a workplace I back up their email and calendar folders on
>> 15 different laptops with the same shell script, named in the same way.
>>
>> Options used when creating archives are -H -v --humanize-numbers --lowmem
>> --print-stats for decently readable logged info.
>>
>> Beyond supplying usecases, if you have any thoughts on the general idea of
>> a TarSnap GUI it would be nice to hear so that I can take it into
>> consideration :)
>> Cheers,
>> Martin Grünbaum
>
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